Blog spelled out with childrens blocks

NB: This is the 2nd installment in The Inspired Solo’s Build a Better Business Blog in One Month series. Designed to help solo lawyers and other professionals boost their blog’s performance, the series consists of a daily lecture and task (or tasks) that focus on one “blog improvement project” at a time. Each post in the series is tagged with “[BBBB1]“. You can start the program at any time. Catch up with other BBBB1 posts here.

Day 2 Lecture

Why Your Blog Categories Probably Need Some Work

Over time, it’s easy for a blog’s categories to get … fuzzy, let’s call it. I had that experience recently after the end of our long hiatus at TIS. I cranked the blog back up, installed the new theme, and generally did some spring cleaning to air the place out; let’s face it, the place grew a little musty in our absence. As I reviewed the archived list of posts, it occured to me that what I really needed was a massive category clean-out.

The category sweep was probably one of the biggest tasks in the whole reboot experience. Some of the problems I noted in my own blog:

• Too many categories — over 35
• Categories that overlapped — for example, two different labels for marketing posts, plus an additional one for “Marketing 101″ and another for “Inspired Blogging”
• Gaps in my categories list — there were topics that I wanted to cover here at TIS but had no categories for them
• Way too many generalized posts in the default category — pure laziness on my part

This is not at all uncommon, even with experienced bloggers. We start with the best, most rational and tightly organized of intentions. We carefully devise five or six broad categories, then go to work populating them with diverse posts over the first few weeks. But in a few months, we’ll inevitably think of something else we want to write about — something that fits neither here nor there — and we’ll devise a new category on the fly.

WordPress’s Dashboard (the blogger interface through which you control most of your blog’s administrative functions) makes this all too easy, unfortunately. In version 2.7+, the category widget is right there beside the window where you compose (or paste in) the body of your post. You can add a category right on the page. No thought — or planning — required.

This is not necessarily a good thing. Too many of those spur of the moment posts that prompt new off-the-cuff category creation can lead to a category list that makes, frankly, little to no sense to a new reader.

Your Blog Category List As An Outline Of Your Blog

For you solo lawyers out there, this day’s project might be a bit easier than for other types of solos. Why? Because we’ve all had a common experience that provides a handy reference point for category work: law school outlines.

It might help to think of your category list as just that — a broad-strokes outline of your blog as a whole. That in itself may be a new way of thinking as your blog — as one “book” or one whole entity unto itself, rather than a collection of little pieces. Yet this perspective can help you in a number of ways.

First, it helps you maintain a vision for your blog as you go about the long-term task of building your blog out. This leads to a more cohesive, easily-understood, and “gettable” blog (as in, your readers, thinking on their very first visit, “Oh! I GET it!”). That in turn helps develop your brand as a solo service professional. You’re easily identified by this easily identifiable blog.

Second, it gives an instant structure to all of your administrative and creative work for your blog. You may be tempted to dive into a tangential topic, but a quick gut-check against your category list and your vision of the blog can tell you readily: Is this new idea consistent with your vision? Is it a natural extension of your work to date? Or is it wholly unrelated and so might be better reserved as a guest post on someone else’s blog?

Finally, thinking of your blog as a consistent, unified whole just makes life easier. Aren’t we all in favor of that? We humans don’t always thrive when given more choice. In fact, we usually do better work when given limitations. Just like children thrive on structure and routine, so does your blog. So do you. There’s no angst about whether to take on some new unrelated project for your blog — it doesn’t fit, so delete it from the list. Limitations actually fuel our creativity, rather than stifling it.

Three Approaches To Crafting Your Ideal Blog Category List

Now that we’ve started thinking about the blog as a unified whole, instead of a collection of unrelated essays, it’s time to ensure our blog accurately and adequately reflects our vision of that whole. Whether your blog is centered around one substantive topic (such as “family law” or “consumer bankruptcy”), your practice as a whole, a particular demographic as it relates to your profession, or some mix of the three (or something else entirely) doesn’t really matter. What matters for purposes of this project is: logical structure. There are essentially three main ways to find that structure: the outline, the process, and the taxonomic approaches.

Especially for single-subject blogs (our consumer bankruptcy blogger, for instance, from yesterday’s lecture), law school vets might have an easier time of this task than others. We’re used to taking whole classes — a full semester’s worth of material in a complex subject — and boiling it all down to a several-page outline.

The outline approach, therefore, is built around perceiving your category list as the broad strokes of an outline for a class in your blog’s subject matter. If you think of your blog as the class itself, your categories should be a combination of the top 2 levels of the outline (the Is and IIs, and the As, Bs, and Cs) for that class. Think in terms of how you would present the subject matter if you were teaching it to someone else. What organizational demarcations make sense for someone who’s not familiar with the material as you are?

Another approach that perhaps works better for blogs that are not centered around a single substantive topic is to think of a process that relates to your work. Connected strongly with the concept of the ideal client and the targeted reader, this approach uses a different organizational approach. Instead of substantive subtopics, think of steps on a ladder. How does your ideal client experience this problem or process chronologically? What steps are involved in solving his or her problem? Once you have those steps identified, you can then boil them down into categories.

Finally, the taxonomic approach is sort of a catch-all. Like the sortings of species in a family of biologically-related organisms, the categories in this approach simply strive to make logical groupings out of disparate entities (topics/sub-topics). While you have more freedom with this approach, it’s also the approach that can lend itself most easily to devolving into chaos over time. Spend some time at the outset thinking of your vision of the blog and the variety of topics and subtopics you hope to write about. Begin to brainstorm logical groupings of those subtopics. A mind map is a particularly useful way to go about beginning this kind of category list.

Tips For Creating Dynamic, Descriptive Blog Categories

The final product — your end-result category list — should give a new reader a solid understanding of your blog at a glance. To ensure maximum readability and comprehension, keep in mind the following tips when working on your categories:

• Keep categories short — two to four words at most, usually — and descriptive
• Stay away from cutesy puns and inside jokes — they’re unprofessional and out of place on a blog designed for marketing a professional services business
• Think “consistency” — try to create as much mirroring in your terms as possible so the list seems cohesive
• Hit the main ideas of each category in the name you assign — don’t let the categories devolve into tangents or minor points

Task 1 for Day 2: Refine Your Category List

To no one’s surprise, today’s project is to examine your own category list. Has it devolved into chaos? Is it on its way to chaos? Does it accurately reflect the vision you have for your blog as a whole?

It might be easiest to simply start from scratch, taking the above points into consideration. Subject bloggers can begin to create an outline of their subject, always keeping in mind the TR members and their educational background (you wouldn’t create the same outline for a group of colleagues as you would for low- to middle-class consumer clients, in other words — use the words that communicate best with your targeted readership). Bloggers who take other approaches in their sites can begin to mind-map taxonomic groupings of their subtopics or begin to create a timeline for the key process for which they provide professional assistance to their clients.

Boil down your initial notes into categories, keeping in mind the tips in the last section of the lecture. Load them into your blog, and start to reassign your archived posts into these categories. This could take some time if you’ve been blogging for more than a few months. Strive to complete the process for a few posts each day to avoid burnout.