A category is where an article is filed on your site. A topic is what it is about. “Destinations” is a category; “best hotels in the Maldives” is a topic that belongs under it. You name the topics, BlogTend works out the categories — and tells you when a topic has no home on your site rather than guessing.

No. A topic on its own is a perfectly good instruction. The brief underneath is for when you have an opinion — the angle you want, the length, something every article on that topic has to mention. Leave it blank and BlogTend writes the brief itself.

It keeps a visible plan. BlogTend drafts a run of distinct articles from your topics, spreads them across your categories so coverage stays even, and balances how many teach, compare or convert. Each run takes the next one, re-checks it against everything published since, and only then spends a credit. You can read, edit and reorder that plan whenever you like.

That is already the default. Every planned article is checked against what BlogTend wrote for you and against the posts already on your site. Anything too close is skipped and explained, and a run with nothing new to say costs nothing at all.

Start at about once a week — roughly four articles a month — and increase it when you can see the quality is where you want it. Every automation can be paused, and changing the rhythm later takes one click.

Yes, and there are two ways. Keep articles in BlogTend and nothing reaches your site until you send it, or save them to WordPress as drafts and review them there. Either way you get an email when one is ready.

Give the automation art direction — “flat vector illustration, muted earth tones, no photography” — and every image follows it while still being drawn for its own article. Or turn featured images off entirely.

Yes. Each article is written natively in the language you pick, not translated afterwards, and a site running a translation plugin offers its own languages first.