How to publish an article online without a website
Choose a place to publish without your own site, write an article whose opening and cover image work in link previews, and share it on social networks.
You don’t need to build a website to publish an article. A blogging platform, a newsletter tool with a web archive or a profile page that holds articles gives your writing its own web address. Pick one, write one useful article, and share the link where your readers are.
This guide follows Lukas, a made-up community gardener, as he writes about his club’s first seed swap. It doesn’t cover custom domains or building a site yourself.
Choose where to publish
Before you sign up, compare the options below. Your username often becomes part of your address, so choose one you’ll keep. The link-in-bio guide covers how readers can follow you by RSS or email.
| Option | Suits | Check before you start |
|---|---|---|
| Blogging platform | Regular articles in one archive | Address, export, ads and paywalls |
| Newsletter tool with a web archive | Writing you mainly email | A public page per issue, export of posts and subscribers |
| Profile page with articles | Writing beside your social accounts | How readers follow, export, the page address |
Lukas already posts on X (Twitter) and Mastodon, so a profile page beside those accounts suits him. Studio’s public page at reunified.com/@handle works this way: articles appear beside your notes and linked accounts. Wherever you publish, find the export option before you publish your first article.
Plan an article that answers one question
Write down the one question the article answers. For Lukas it’s “How do you run a small seed swap?” Turn it into a plain title: “How to run a small seed swap.” Then list four to six headings a reader would scan for. His five: picking a date and place, asking people to bring seeds, labeling envelopes, running the tables, and what he’d change.
Give each section one concrete example, such as the envelope label: plant, variety and year collected. Stop when the question is answered.
Write an opening that answers the question
The description people see before they open the page often comes from your own text. Google says its snippets are primarily created from the page content itself, and some publishing tools use the first sentences as the link preview’s description. So answer the question in the first two sentences.
Lukas’s opening: “A small seed swap needs a free room, one table per kind of seed and envelopes people can label by hand. Ours took two hours one afternoon, and here’s what we’d keep and change.” Don’t open with a greeting such as “Welcome to my first post” or an image caption: in a preview, they tell the reader nothing.
Add a cover image for link previews
Many networks and chat apps show a shared link as a card with the page’s title and image. Meta’s sharing guide recommends images of at least 1200 × 630 pixels, close to a 1.91:1 shape. Use a wide photo with the subject in the center, so a crop doesn’t cut it off, and keep text off it or to a few words. Lukas uses a wide photo of seed envelopes.
These cards usually come from tags such as og:title and og:image, two of the four required properties in the Open Graph protocol. A hosted platform normally fills them in from your title and cover.
Inside the article, give each picture a description (alt text) where your platform allows it, using the alt-text checklist.
Publish, check and share the article
After you publish, open the article in a private window on your phone to see what readers see. Check every image and link. Paste the address into a draft post or a message to yourself to see the preview card. If the image or title is wrong, the link preview guide shows how to fix it.
Share the link with one useful sentence, not “New post” on its own. Lukas writes: “We ran our first seed swap with a free room and a box of envelopes. Here’s the setup, the labels and what we’d change.” He posts it on X (Twitter) and Mastodon.
Plan one follow-up post for a few days later about a single point, such as the envelope label. The article-to-posts guide covers getting several posts from one piece.
Republish older work and keep articles up to date
Lukas also wrote a piece on saving tomato seeds for the club’s newsletter in April. He asks the club’s permission, then republishes it with a first line: “First published in the Riverside Garden Club newsletter, April 2026.” Many platforms show only the date you publish there, so that line tells readers when it first appeared.
When you fix an error, add a dated note at the end, such as “Corrected on 14 October: we had four tables, not three.” Keep tags consistent: don’t use “seed-swap” on one article and “seed-swapping” on the next. Lukas puts the same two tags on both pieces: seeds and community-garden.
In Studio, you write an article with headings, lists, links and images, add a cover and up to 10 tags, then publish now or schedule it. The cover is cropped to a 1200 × 630 share image. “Download your data” under Data & privacy at reunified.com/profile gives a .zip with each article as a Markdown file. Studio isn’t available yet, but you can join the waitlist.
