Part 1 of 2
Which blog or blogs do you follow either via regular visits or email subscriptions?
When you leave out your family’s or your friends’ blogs which you follow out of sheer curiosity or loyalty, you’d find that the blogs you frequent have one thing in common – organization. Today, let’s talk about organization on a macro level, that is, how you organize your collection of blog posts.
Why Organize?
Blogging 101 teaches you a basic rule: as you go about building a readership, it is important to clearly define your niche – your subject area of expertise. That doesn’t mean however, you are barred from writing about things outside of your self-defined scope. It is inappropriate however, for you to assume your readers adore you like Edward Cullen fans adore Robert Pattinson; some would love your SEO tricks and tips but hate your fashion sense, others get hooked to your travel tips but not to your political opinions. How then should you address this seemingly conflicting need to rant about anything and everything versus the need to keep it sane for your readers’ sake? Yep, that’s right – organize your posts.
In this two-part series, you’ll learn three tips to organize your posts.
Because WordPress is the most popular blogging platform (or so says I), we’ll explore its various organizing features. Where relevant, I’d point out features similarly available in other blogging platforms.
Tip#1: Use Categories
At BlogicallyDotCom, you’d find a categories list at the bottom of each page. Here, it is strategically placed as one of several footer items (Placement of widgets and such is a separate subject under Design which I shall write about on my upcoming blog, Sentrepreneur.com. I’ll let you know when it’s launching.) How do you use Categories in your own blog?
Categories are blogger-defined broad subject areas of classification. In defining your categories list, begin with your niche and think about the subject areas under that niche. Using your school courses for example, Maths can be your niche; its categories could be Algebra, Trigonometry, Calculus and so on. Or as in the case of BlogicallyDotCom, its niche is logical blogging; its categories include Blog Promotion, Blogging Tips, Writing, Making Money Online, etc.
Sub-categories
Use sub-categories as necessary. A social networking blog may have a category called ‘Relationships’. That’s too broad a classification, isn’t it? If you need more specific classifications under one category, please do so. Under Relationships, you may define, Family & Friends, Work, Church – each labeling the kind of relationships you forge with people in different social settings or organizations.
The Catch-All Category
Every blog has one, that is, every well-organized blog has one. Of course, you’d see variations. WordPress’ default category Uncategorized, is a catch-all; although most bloggers would rename that into Random Ramblings, Everything Else or other similar titles.
As the name suggests, a catch-all category is just that – anything that doesn’t fit into any of the categories you have previously defined goes to this category. This is where you put that off-tangent rant about Paris Hilton’s hair in a blog whose niche is SEO.
Before I move on to the next organizing feature though, let me just leave you with a tricky tip: Categories should be broad enough for more than one post to fit in, but specific enough to clearly identify the subject of each post filed under it. Three categories might be too few; 30 might be overdoing it. Ten to a dozen categories would be reasonable.
That’s it for today. In the next installment, we’ll discuss the next two tips.
Read Part 2 here.
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