

I suspect some other bloggers have met similar problems, when they’ve either not planned ahead (ask yourself “Will I use this category frequently?” if you add one for a specific post) or where their plans haven’t quite matched up with what really happens.įor example, on The Simple Dollar, Trent has the categories “Décor” and “S&P 500” which only have one post in each. In practice, though, I’ve only written a handful of these. So I had a category called “Resources” which was supposed to hold this sort of posts. With The Office Diet, I knew I wanted to create a few downloadable resources for readers in the first month (January) – such as a food diary template. The mistake which most bloggers make is failing to plan at all – and, if they do plan, failing to adjust that plan to fit reality!

I’m going to go through four big ones – and bring in some examples from other blogs where I think the categories list could have been more effectively planned.Īnd once I’ve shown you some of the mistakes, I’ll explain how you can choose your categories effectively in order to avoid making them. In doing so, I unwittingly made a number of common mistakes.

I thought a good place to start was my first blog, The Office Diet, where I followed a similar process to most bloggers:
#Rapidcart pro seperate pages for categories how to#
One of the biggest puzzles has been how to choose suitable categories – which has led me to think hard about how I use categories as a reader, and how categories are typically used in the blogosphere. I’ve just launched a new blog ( Alpha Student), which has meant a lot of planning, brainstorming and head-scratching. Plans can change over time, but start your journey with a good map. I believe working from a very specific plan helps keep a blog on track and more successful. I made a plan for this blog’s articles and I wanted to keep the focus narrow and the structure clean. Most people add categories on the fly or list everything they want to talk about in their categories and then work to fill them up as they go. The only advice I could find was from Lorelle on WordPress: There’s plenty of blogging advice about how to craft posts, how to gain readers, and how to start your first blog – but surprisingly little has been written about how to choose your categories.
