Choose 3 to 7 Posting Categories to More Effectively Focus Your Writing

(Reading time: 4 – 7 minutes)

Don’t do what I did: I made a serious mistake on my first blog with respect to WordPress categories. I created too many. Then I compounded that mistake by listing most posts under multiple categories

This happened because I started writing before tagging was integrated into WordPress. Tagging used to be a plugin. So I didn’t use it.

Now, I recommend limiting categories to 3-7 topics to keep your writing tightly focused. Tags can be used to show key ideas covered in each post or page. A further benefit is that you can set up categories to display as part of the URL, which has SEO advantages. (Which is where I have a problem with too many categories: changing now is going to hammer my search results.)

Woops. I just published this post accidently… but I haven’t finished writing it…

…excuse me for a moment. I need fortification. Time to make some tea and fire up some music. I have a conference call coming up in an hour, and I better finish article this before the conference call starts…

Ok, the tea is on… bad europop (Atomium 3003) is banging away on iTunes… let’s get back to WordPress categories.

How to create categories

Creating categories isn’t too difficult, provided you have a good idea of what you want to write about. If you’re not really sure about what you want to write about… you might want to consider your overall motivation… but it’s just fine to feel compelled to write at any cost! (Dr Wordpress himself started like this. Write, just write anything, write all the time, figure it out later.)

If you’re like most people (most of us are… like most people), you have a pretty good general notion of what you want to write about, but you’re a little fuzzy on the details.

This is good.

Here’s how to create a set of categories, while at the same time brainstorming for a bunch of articles you want to write anyway:

This should take, realistically, at least a couple of hours.

Write them out by hand on index cards.* Then put all the cards away and go dig in your garden, hang out with your spouse, watch a movie, whatever. Come back to them the next day. Sort the cards into 5 to 7 stacks, 10 at the most. If you have a few cards in stacks of one, save those too. Those can be articles you write as a guest posted on someone else’s blog. Or on a new blog covering a different subject.

Now, name each stack with a word, or at most two words. I’m using two words on this blog, with category names that describe the activities you take after reading posts.

And as I write… I can see I need to change some category names… since I want YOU to read each post and take action, the category names should be action-oriented. “Getting Started” and “Building Traffic” are good, “Social Media,” not so much. This bears some thought. Check back later.

Your category names should indicate your desire for your reader. If you provide information benefitting your reader, create informative category name. If taking action benefits your reader, create category names inspiring action.

This might be more difficult than you think at first. It does bear some time in thought. Your readers will do what you ask… as long as they understand exactly how what you’re asking them to do benefits them!

Adding tags to articles

This isn’t a post on tagging, but tags are so easy, they don’t need a whole post to themselves. Tags are most often used in two ways:

1. As reader-visible keywords extracted directly from the article. For example, this article has the tags “Categories” and “Tags” associated with it. So nicely self-referential, no?
2. As words not in the article which provide intellectual or emotional context to the article. Consider an article, say, “Women Has Octuplets.” I would tag this with “Octuplets” to be sure, but I might also tag it with “WTF?” (you can look it up).

After tagging a few articles, take a look at the share of each tag. Tags shared by large numbers of articles will be displayed in large type. For example, my largest tag [03/12/2009] is “Plugins,” because I just started tagging articles, and I wrote and edited several articles on plugins recently. But plugins aren’t the major subject of this blog… Do your tags show you’re writing about what you think you’re writing about?

*Really. Index cards. I’m dead serious. I’m doing this exercise with 500 cards on a related project (drop me a note if you’re curious), and it works gold. It’s something you can do right now, by yourself, it doesn’t cost any money, and you WILL benefit from it more than you know!

Tagged as: Categories, Tags