Great Blog Content Needs Strategic and Focused Categories
Too many categories results in a disorganized blog.
[This is part of the Developing Great Blog Content Series. Check out the other posts!]
One of the best things that you can do for your content before you even begin to write spend some time building some strategy around your categories.
You see, great blogs and great blog content have focused (and organized) categories!
Now, I’ve already spoken a few times on categories so you’ll want to review these posts as well:
- The reason I use categories and not tags.
- Two WordPress Plugins to help with category-related SEO and use in the backend.
- Just start writing! Categories come later. Although, I’m going to provide an alternative approach to this strategy via this post in just a moment.
- Blog categories focus your content. You already knew that but I’m going to expand this idea in just a second, especially with the previous blog post about Focus.
And after reading this pre-material I’d love to give you even more meat to how to develop some strategy for your great content that has already been written or that will be written! Ready?
Your Blog-Ready Categories Should Reflect Your Focus:
If you have not yet read my blog post on Passion, Expertise, and Unique Value then you must stop right now and go read it right now!
Then, you should read this follow-up post and outline your core passions, expertise, and value. Do your categories that exist currently today adequately (and accurately) reflect this list? If not then something’s missing (or wrong)!
The point here is that your categories (the ones that you’ve vetted as “blog ready”) should entirely reflect your area of passion, expertise, and unique value propositions. If they do not then you already are diluted in your attempts to focus your content and are experiencing content creep!
In addition you’ll find that it’ll be harder to sustain a rich content experience consistently without drilling down into these very particular categories!
5 is like the perfect 'Boy Band' number - it works for blogs too!
Start with 5-8 Categories:
A question that I get a lot goes something like this:
How many categories should I have on my blog to maintain my focus?
Where I’ve landed is between 5 and 8 categories. Why? Here are a few thoughts that should convince you thoroughly:
- Momentum – Most of the blogs that I’ve created and coached to success had a very small amount of categories, especially in the beginning. A fine-tuned focus, especially at launch, helps create the momentum forward to gain enough steam to grow at a worthwhile pace.
- Sustainability – The more scattered and un-focused your categories are the harder it’ll be to sustain a pace that creates amazing content. You might think that having a broad swath of categories gives you the “flexibility” to blog about anything you’d like thus giving you an infinite amount of things to write about, and you can do this if you’d like! But, if you want your blog to grow to a place where monetization is a possibility then you have to focus.
- Interest – To go along with #2 you may simply drop out of the race altogether at some point without a focused set of categories. What was once a killer idea has now been diluted with pictures of your kids at the mall – and that’s not going to grow a blog! Your interest, a long with your readers, will be at risk.
- SEO – The more concentrated your efforts in a smaller set of content the deeper and larger potential to get ranked higher on search engine returns. If you blog about everything then your ranking will be mediocre across the board. But, if you blog day-in and day-out about gluten-free cooking then you can bet that you’ll find a faster foothold in search engines than just cooking in general! Although nothing is completely guaranteed the chances go up considerably.
- Content Creation – With a smaller set of blog categories you can actually create content more effectively and efficiently. Why? Because these categories reflect your passion, expertise, and unique values! They don’t reflect passing fancies or whimsical interests!
- Mental Curation – I could probably spend a blog post on this all by itself but what you’ll begin to do automatically when you think about your content and your blog is that you’ll auto-curate your posts – that is, you’ll discover that you’ll pass up topics that are interesting simply because they do not fit in one of your 5 to 8 categories. As you begin to develop this skill you’ll find that you’re simply developing a curation model to filter out blog material that simply doesn’t have a home on your blog. Efficiency and effectiveness just went through the roof!
- Marketability – Ultimately a focused blog has a easier chance of being monetized and has a bigger chance of making some significant capital. There are a lot of reasons for this but one of the biggest is simply from potential advertising partners who will want a focused content strategy for their advertisements. Just think about it for a second: Why would a advertiser who’s selling gluten-free recipes spend money on a blog that sometimes blogs about gluten-free cooking? They would instead head to a blog that is dedicated to covering the topic for a higher rate of return on their investment! Duh!
- Profitability – One thing that you may consider at some point is selling your blog to another owner or even to a larger business. The historical fact is that a property that is someone’s name (like John Smith) is much less attractive for purchase than a topical-based blog – even more so for a very focused topical-based blog. Your blog’s value in the marketplace is higher due to your consistent and focused categorization of content. Do it for you and your future!
- Deeper Brand – The more focused your categories the deeper your content focus, the more attractive the blog becomes in its entirety, which results in a more effective development of your blog’s brand. As a result, becoming more marketable, more profitable, and more memorable, not only in your reader’s minds but also the search engines “mind”, becomes the result.
- Growth – Eventually as you grow you’ll be able to expand your categories into other sectors as you gain interest, traffic, and perhaps more time as you become more profitable (so you can leave your cube farm!). It’s much easier to grow and add categories than it is to reduce. Start small and grow from there! No need to waste time refactoring later down the line which could cause tons of problems with traffic, broken links, etc.
Of course, you are free to do whatever you’d like and go category crazy but my general suggestion, especially for a new blogger, is to focus!
Too Many Already?
Many of you are probably wishing you had read this advice months (0r years) ago when you had first started. Well, there’s still hope for you, especially if you’re using a WordPress-powered blog!
Here are some tips to begin to trim down your number of categories so your blog becomes more focused and effective:
- Most importantly look at your list of passion, value, and expertise and make note of any blog categories that don’t seem to adequately express them. Perhaps these types of posts need to make a swift exit from your blog?
- Take a look at the number of blog posts in some of your categories. If some of the categories have only 1 or 2 posts in them then it’s probably a very unused category and isn’t worth a dedicated category.
- Look for patterns in your categories. Is there any overlap? Is there an opportunity to combine categories into a more appropriate parent category?
- What categories are easy to identify as extraneous and unnecessary? Mark them down for deletion.
- Are your category names too long? I suggest that categories, if you can help it, just be one word long. If you can’t simplify it to that level then perhaps you’ve gotten the categorization wrong.
The point is to be exceptionally harsh on your categorization for the sake of your blog’s sustained growth!
Now, if you’re using WordPress then you can safely delete categories wholesale and have them land in the “Uncategorized” bucket:
Delete them and they goto 'Uncategorized'!
From here you can simply head to the ‘Uncategorized’ bucket in your post section and then change them to a new category.
It might take some time but it’s well worth your effort in the long-run!
You can do 'Quick Edit' on the posts!
After you fix all of your categories then you’ll feel much better, trust me!
I Can’t Get to 8 Categories! Help!
There are some of you that are going to significantly struggle with re-categorizing your blog posts and getting down to that very small and focused amount. Here are some thoughts and possibilities of why you’re struggling so much:
- You might simply be struggling with this idea of refocusing and refactoring your blog. You’ve hit an emotional wall with your blog that can’t be (currently) overcome. This is fine. Give it a break! There’s no pressure here!
- You’ve have too many posts among too many focused categories already. Perhaps you’re ready to “split” your blog and perhaps start another one? For some this is a more attractive option as they’ve realized that they have 2 blogs here instead of just one. This can be a very exciting potential and perhaps something I’ll speak on more since I’ve done it before.
- You’re lazy and don’t feel like doing it. That’s fine and certainly very justifiable (kind of). Too bad.
One category per post...
Finally, you honestly might just not want to do it. That’s fine too! There are enough successful blogs out there that do not have focused categorization.
In fact, there are some blogs (and some blog experts) that don’t use categories at all!
You can do whatever you’d like at the end of the day since it’s your blog!
One Final Tip: Pick One Category Per Post!
Almost forgot but this is a critical suggestion and challenge for you and your blog posts: Try to choose only 1 category per post. This will help not only in your focus but also in SEO results and your reader’s experience.
Trust me on this. There are definitely times to break this rule but more often than not I strongly suggest sticking to using one category per post.
Whew. It could be a full week for you as your re-focus your blog via your categories. Are you up for the challenge? How many categories do you have right now? How much work needs to be done?
Love to hear it in the comments!
[This is part of the Developing Great Blog Content Series. Check out the other posts!]
7 categories. Only had 31 posts so it didn’t take long at all. See if you have any other suggestions? I might need to limit them all to one per post.
how is “media” different than photography? just wondering. and isn’t “life” … everything?
I recently went through my list and got down to 5 main categories with 14 categories total. After reading this and working through the last couple of posts on content, I think I can funnel down to between 5 & 8 total.
It shouldn’t take a lot of extra work, just determining if the posts fit into another category (I’ve had the same blog since 2007) or if they’ll need to be uncategorized.
Thanks for the guidelines!
wow… an entire category dedicated to chickens!
Well, eventually I’m hoping to change it to Livestock, but we still live inside the city limits and can’t keep goats, sheep, geese etc. yet.
Just part of the long-term dream, that’s mostly still dream. Trying to set my blog up to travel with me towards that long-term dream.
This series has been so helpful in so many ways, I’ve got like 8 pages in my notebook of outlines and notes. I’m feeling so organized and aware and pointed in a direction. Thanks!
that’s awesome! take a picture of it.. i’d love to see all those notes!
I started just writing, and applied categories as I went. As the number of posts increased I was able to purge a few here and there. After 110 posts, I still had 22 categories, with a fair bit of overlap. Thanks to your timely nudge here, John, I’ve narrowed it down to 7. Thanks! This will definitely make the writing process easier and more focused.
Now the question…what should I do with my old posts that don’t really fit into the whittled-down list of categories? Should I delete them for the sake of consistency?
Whoa. Nice job!
No, I’d keep them and try to find a place for them. Some people have a “Misc.” category. Remember, you don’t have to “show” the categories that aren’t very well used.
Sounds good to me. Thanks again, John!
sure thing larry!
What about “parent” categories, or “sub-categories”?
Good or bad idea?
I have this question too.
When I started my discipleship blog, I set up a bunch of categories as a form of outline of specific discipleship areas I would cover. I’m not sure all of them have a post yet, but they will.
My next sin is that many posts fall into different categories.
I see your point and I’m pretty sure I agree with it. I’m just not sure how to re-think it. Should I form the outline through a second menu (with sub-menus)?
Golly…
mapping it out REALLY helps.
that’s fine, but you’re going to want to make sure that you have indexing priority on them so that you don’t have duplicate content.
i use subcategories on my other blogs just fine.
By the way,
I had an established author (Frank Viola) tell me today that he likes the look of my blog.
What theme am I using? Standard Theme!
Oh yeah.
i’m working with frank right now on a slight redesign.
Awesome post! I have actually been wondering about this on my site…I have been using tags, but not for any categorizational stuff. Just for the search engines.
For my categories, I’m not sure if I have them as great as they could be. It would be cool if you could check out my site and let me know if they work???
did you see my post on tags vs categories?
http://tentblogger.com/tags-categories/
Thanks! That really helped answer my questions…NO MORE TAGS!
Great post! I just went through and cleaned up my categories. I was thinking about this before reading your post. It was easy to narrow my categories (one with 2 sub categories). I got down to 6 categories. When I started blogging I didn’t understand the difference between categories and tags.
I’ve decided to give up on tags and stick with categories. I also appreciate the advice on limiting each post to 1 category. That too was easy to clean up. It took about an hour for it all.
great job!
not too bad of an investment… right?
Thank you for this information. I have three topics that I write about and sometimes I feel like that is too much. But given that the skate and snowboard industry does not have constant updates like a management or personal branding focus might, I didn’t want to freeze when writing content. I will refer back to this post often! Thanks again!
stallar,
awesome!
also… do you have a gravatar? http://tentblogger.com/gravatar/
I currently have 5 categories but feel I could potentially broaden a couple. This has really helped me create consistent content. I agree with all your points John! Great stuff.
sure thing david…!
John, when I switched from WP.com to self-hosted .org, my category slugs (e.g. goinswriter.com/motivation) received a number on the end of them (e.g. goinswriter.com/motivation1).
When I tried to change them back, they wouldn’t update. I thought that I must have had duplicate categories, but I couldn’t find anything via WP admin.
Do you know why it’s doing this?
My quick-fix solution was to change to more descriptive categories (e.g. goinswriter.com/words-of-motivation), but I’d really prefer to switch back to one-word categories, as you suggest.
Any thoughts or recommendations?
I had something similar happen last night. In my case, it was because I had tags with the same names as some of my category slugs. When I deleted the tags, I could get rid of the numbers.
interesting. i’ll try deleting the tags.
yes, try deleting the tags or merging them to categories!
I use blogger. They have “labels.” I was using them for a short time until I read your blog about not using tags. But now I am reading that labels are the same as categories. I am confused (what else is new?). Do you know if labels in blogger is the same as tags or categories? Thanks for your time.
not sure… they might act the same.
Barb,
I use blogger as well. “Labels” are the same as WP’s “tags”, but you can use them like categories. You just have to enter the name of the category as a label. Of course then you need to set up a link list somewhere that will link to all of your posts with that label (category).
thanks tim!
Glad I read this post before starting my blog. I have 6 categories and I plan on sticking with it. I did a mind-map for each category. Tons of things to write about.
that is fantastic! let me see the mind map!
ok
How do I get a screen shot over to you?
take a picture and upload it to somewhere…!
Here you go. http://www.mediafire.com/i/?qpxgp4ib3c0piy1. I have one category opened up. Other categories on the right. Each area can be opened to even more areas as ideas flow.
Heres the app I use…http://www.thebrain.com/ Pretty beefy. The core edition is free. Of course there are tons of mind-mapping tools out there.
wow. i love this! that is pretty darn neat! mind if i share this?
Not at all.
Great thoughts John, I’m down to 5 categories now. I read in a comment above where you said “isn’t life everything?” I went through and noticed I had one post that was dedicated only to the category “life”. I’ve since trashed life and will focus on my other categories. Thanks for this post.
sure thing joseph…!
Interesting content John. I have been blogging off and on and I am trying to keep my blog down to 3 topics. Sometimes it is hard, but it is great advice to have some structure as you blog.
sure thing zack!
hey, do you have a gravatar? http://tentblogger.com/gravatar/
I’ve been feeling like the lady in your image, and not just with categories! LOL!
This is a really great (and beneficial!) series. And the timing is great! Thanks!
great! glad it could help!
Just implemented this, got it down to 8 categories that I have expertise and academic training. Thinking about making a brief landing page that explains what falls under each category and why I write about it.
Also, I do a lot of book reviews, should it be its own category? That would give me 9. Your thoughts?
sure, why not?
Hi John,
I’ve been wondering about me categories for a while with my seven-month old blog (birthday today – yay!)
At the moment, I’m releasing the full text of my published Christian book as sequential excerpts in each post. I’ve used a main category (title of book) and sub-categories for each of the 14 chapters.
This seems to be a lot, no? Do you know a way I could organize the posts so that each of the ~10 posts per chapter can be seen easily? Later, I intend to write more unique content in each category page and have “Read Book” in the tool bar.
Thanks for any tips you can give.
-Neil
releasing a book in digital form takes a bit of effort and thought… because it’s not really like a sequential listing of reverse-chronological blog posts.
what about the use of a page as a “home base”?
Appreciate the thoughts John.
I have a plug-in that has arranged the posts into chronological order (eg all the posts relating to Bible verses on Creation {Chapter 2 of my book}: http://www.lookingtowardshome.com/category/letters-from-home/creation/ ). This means that the posts have a logical order.
If I use category = book title and subcategories = chapters
then the main category also contains all the posts found in the subcategories (unless there is a way to change this?). Also, when I finish my book, these categories will be static, unless I write more posts that aren’t in the original book…in which case the title-chapters style of subcategories won’t be of much value either.
You’ve cut through a lot of pfaff with your suggestion: I *could* just use a page as the homebase… Readers could navigate from there.
final thought/ question: When I update the category URL or delete it, is it possible to 301-redirect to a different/new place? (I already have some backlinks to my categories pages)
yes. you can do that with this:
http://tentblogger.com/broken-links/
THIS has been a tough one even with my very small site. My main areas of passion and expertise (I haven’t quite yet figured out the unique value, other than the fact that it’s my own perspective)
are Addiction & Recovery and my spiritual path, but as I’m sure you can see, even just those two could have myriad sub-categories. Any thoughts on this John?
sub-cats work well if you’re organized… otherwise… stay away!
Arrrgghhh! You’re so right. Lots of Categories (taggy lookin’ things) are ugly! Got mine to eight.
You’re very organised, I aspire to that! Thanks, my blog ‘feels’ tidier, now I gotta get to and start on the house…
haha! i wasn’t always like this… it took years of practice!
Great Post. I had 16 categories. I am now down to 7.
I have many tags I wish to delete. How do I delete a tag? There is an option for adding one, but not taking one away.
I am working on designating only one category per post, I found that I often had 4 or 5 categories listed for a post.
When I started my blog, I thought the more the better, and just named categories and tags willy-nilly. I now realize that my focus was diluted.
Thank You so much for the suggestions.
sure thing!