How to Get More Local News on White Lake-Highland Patch

It’s easy – we promise – to post your group’s news on Patch an reach an audience of your neighbors.

Once the post is live, I can then easily go in on my end of the Patch system and bump it to our home page, which will also get it out to our social media followers. It may also land it in our daily newsletter.

One login works for all Patch sites nationwide. Also, for best results, use the latest version of Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer as your browser. Internet Explorer 10 and earlier may have compatibility problems.

Here’s what you’ll need to do:

1) Sign in to your free account at Patch — http://contribute.patch.com

• If you don’t already have a Patch account set up, then click on the option to Sign Up on the upper right side of the page, below the fields used to Sign In.

• It may take a day or two for your initial account set-up— our awesome team of engineers just need to get you all plugged in— but you’ll then be able to get posting throughout Patch for good!

2) You are now brought to the My Contributions page. On this page, you will see all of your previous posts in the “back end” of our system. To see the posts on the Patch site itself, you can click on your profile page — just click the byline on one of your posts and direct readers to do the same.

3) To start a new post, click “+ Create Article” in the upper right corner of the page.

• Your topic is Bulletin Board or Classifieds.

• Your community is in the right corner of the page. You will need to start typing the name of your community and it will appear. Click it when it appears to “assign it.”

4) Enter your headline, article text (including a summary) and add a photo.

5) Click “Publish Immediately” and the “Green Arrow” button (if your button is orange, you will need to make sure you have filled in all the required fields!)

Your article is automatically approved and will be posted on the site! Be patient, you may not see your article at once. Do not publish more than once, or you will see it appear many times.

6) Tell all your friends to check out your post on Patch.

Writing Tips: Don’t use all caps - Readers just won’t click on posts that are written in all capital letters. Do capitalize the first letter of each word in the headline only. Also remember, you are sharing the News categories with editors. Publish once a day, please!

Thank you for reading and wanting to be a part of our online Patch community. We believe that we are successful because of our readers and we could not do it without your support and use of the site!