When creating a blog post, you can choose the status that it should be in. Let's go over the available statuses and their meaning:

• Draft: The draft status allows you to work on your blog post, and no one can see it but you. Until you're ready for consumers to read it, keep it at this status.
• Published: When creating a blog post for your website on Insurance Storefronts, this is the status you will use when you're ready for consumers to view your blog post on your website.
• Request IS Publish: If you are creating a blog post to be displayed on Insurance Storefront's public blog and are ready for consumers to view that blog post, this is the status you will choose.
• IS Published: After requesting to be published on Insurance Storefront's public blog, we will review your post. If all is well, we will change the status to IS Published, which allows the blog post to be displayed on the public blog for consumers.

So, to recap the available statuses, the Draft should be used while working on the blog post. If you want the consumers to see it on your website and ready for them to view it, you will choose the Published status. If you want the blog post to appear on the Insurance Storefront's public blog, you will choose the Request IS Publish status. Finally, we will select the IS Published status after reviewing your blog post if your content meets the standards of Insurance Storefronts.

To manage your blog post categories, you will need to visit the Categories page under the Blog menu. This will allow you to add, edit, and delete your blog post categories.

When selecting the IS Publish status, you will notice that your post category field will change. Insurance Storefronts uses its own blog categories for consumers rather than what agents may have. You will need to choose a parent blog category and a sub blog category.

If you want to publish to the Insurance Storefront's public blog, you will need to choose a category that we currently have. However, if you want to post to a category you don't see that we offer, please feel free to reach out and we will add that category for your blog post. 

The featured checkbox is used specifically for posting a blog post to your website. This allows blog posts marked as featured to be listed at the top of your blog post listings so that they gain special attention from consumers.

When you are posting a blog post to the Insurance Storefront's public blog, we do not use the featured field, and it is ignored.