Digging In the Dashboard: Three Features to Discover

Features abound in the WordPress.com dashboard. When you first got started at WordPress.com, you likely identified a handful of tools that you used every time you posted and then ignored the rest.

But after you’ve been blogging for awhile, you might discover some parts of the dashboard you’ve ignored have just the features you need! Here are three awesome features in Posts → Add New that you might have overlooked:

Request Feedback

Do you have a post or page lingering in draft stage that you aren’t quite sure about publishing?

Maybe you’ve been sitting on the hilarious story of what happened to you at senior prom, but you’re just not sure if it’s too embarrassing to post. Or maybe you interviewed a blogger you admire, but you want to be sure they’re happy with what you’ve written before you publish it.

In these cases, you can use the Request Feedback feature to email your draft to a trusted friend or family member for their second opinion, or to anyone who might want to look over the post before it goes live. They don’t even need to have a WordPress.com account.

To do this, find the Writing Helper module below the editor on the Add New Post screen:

If you don’t see the Writing Helper, you might need to enable it in your Screen Options. You’ll see your Screen Options tab in the upper-right corner of your Add New Post screen:

Just make sure “Writing Helper” is checked:

Click on the Request Feedback side of the Writing Helper:

Add the email or emails of your helpful reviewers, and click the “Customize the message” link to edit the form email content. Click “Send Requests” and you’re done! 

When your mom replies with her feedback, you’ll receive a notification email, and the feedback itself will appear right there in the “Request Feedback” module. Any feedback you gather is neatly displayed there below your post, so you can make those changes (or ignore them).

When you publish your post, everyone you requested feedback from will get an email so they can check it out!

Copy a Post/Page

Copy a Post is Request Feedback’s next-door neighbor in the Writing Helper. Say you have a certain format that you always use for your book reviews — maybe you use some HTML in the Text Editor to make the font for the title and author green and extra large. Or maybe you use the same group of 10 specific tags with every book review, and you don’t want to enter them every time.

Copy a Post to the rescue!

When you click Copy a Post, you’ll get a list of all of your posts. You can also search for a particular post by title.

Find the post you want to copy and click “Copy.” That exact post will be copied into your new post editor, with all of its categories and tags. You can just edit it from there, preserving any formatting or other time-consuming text you’d already entered and want to reuse.

With all the time you’ve saved, you can write another post!

Location (Geotagging)

You might already add a location to your Facebook posts or tweets, but did you know you can do the same thing for your WordPress.com posts?

Geotagging helps build your traffic and allows people searching for information about a specific location to better find your posts on that topic.

To use geotagging, find the “Location” module on your Add New Post screen (again, if you don’t see it anywhere, you might need to enable it in Screen Options). Click “Turn on Location Tagging” and enter the location you want to use.

Geotagging is different from regular tags, because geotags don’t show up on your blog. But although you can’t see the geotags, Google and other search engines can. This is an extra prompt to Google to index those posts according to their location, so that if you write a series of posts about Morocco, people searching for Morocco are more likely to find them.

Plus, very soon you’ll be able to search posts by location in the WordPress.com Reader.

There are a number of fun new toys in your dashboard — if you haven’t tried these out, give ’em a whirl!

You might also enjoy these related posts:

• Quick and Easy Customization: Get the Most Out of Widgets
• Widget Visibility and You
• Enhance Your Site with Post Formats

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