Publishing calendar articles to your blog

The content calendar writes an article on the day it is due and sends it where you publish. If you host your blog here, that is one of the places it can send it, and it is the only one that needs no setting up.

Connecting it

It connects itself. The moment your blog goes live, it appears on Where it publishes as Rankbench Blog, with no address to paste and no key to generate. Until then it is not offered, because a blog that is not live yet has nowhere for a reader to see what arrives.

It starts out publishing articles live. To have them arrive as drafts instead, press Edit on it and choose Draft under Publish as. Drafts are the safe first setting: you read a few, decide you trust it, then change your mind either way.

If you removed it from that screen, choose Add a connection, then Rankbench, and press Connect your blog.

When you already publish somewhere else

Adding a blog never takes your calendar away from where it already publishes. If scheduled articles go to WordPress today, they keep going to WordPress after your blog goes live.

When a website has more than one place to publish, Scheduled articles publish to at the top of Where it publishes says which one the calendar uses. Change it there when you want scheduled articles on your blog instead. You can still send any article anywhere by hand.

Starting your blog from the calendar

When articles are written and have nowhere to go, the top of the calendar offers Publish on a free blog. One press makes your blog with your website's name, an address taken from your domain and the Editorial look, takes it live and connects it. Written articles that are past their day go out one a day from tomorrow, oldest first, and the rest go out on their planned dates. The calendar then says where your blog is and when the first article goes out. Change its look, name or address any time; nothing about the press is final.

If you would rather choose those yourself first, the setup offers Start from the content calendar when you have drafted articles waiting. Choose it and they arrive in Posts as drafts, over the minute after your blog goes live, for you to read and publish.

What arrives

A post, with its title, body, excerpt and cover picture. The cover lands in your media library like any other upload.

Its address is the article's own slug, so the address is decided by the article rather than by the order things happened in.

Its status is whatever you chose for the connection. A draft arrives in Posts as a draft, and nothing unpublished ever goes live on its own.

Where it is edited

Once an article is published to the blog, the blog is where it is edited. The calendar's own editor locks and says so, with a link to open it here and a link to view it live.

This is the one lock in the calendar that no amount of waiting changes, which is why it outranks the others: the article is no longer a draft the calendar owns, it is a published post with an address and readers.

When you have already edited the post

This is the part worth understanding, because it is where a lesser system loses somebody's work.

The calendar can send an updated version of an article it has already published: a rewrite triggered by an audit finding, or a new pass at the same keyword.

If nobody has touched the post since the last time it synced, the post is updated in place. That is the ordinary case and it needs nothing from you.

If somebody has edited the post here, the new version is not applied. It is filed as a suggestion and the post is left exactly as you left it. The editor shows a banner and the two versions line by line, folded so that four hundred unchanged lines are not in the way, and you keep yours or take theirs.

The sender sees it too. The calendar's editor says an updated version from there is waiting on the blog, because the person who sent it is the one person who would otherwise never learn that their suggestion is unresolved.

Sending one by hand

You do not have to wait for the schedule. Open any article in the calendar, and in its Publish box choose your blog under Send it to, then Draft or Publish immediately under As, and press Publish. It follows the same rules as the scheduled path.

What the blog gives back

This is the part that only works because the blog is hosted here.

A post published here is known immediately rather than after a crawl, so the calendar can link to it from the next article it writes on the day it goes out.

The audit sees it as one of your pages, and a finding on it links straight to the field in the editor that fixes it. See your blog in the site audit.