Blog Your Passion

By: Lorelle VanFossen

May 01 2012

Tags: articles, blog content, blog writing, content, content organization, how to blog, how to write, index words, organization, pages, planning, posts, structure, table of contents, web writing, wordpress, writing

Category: How to Blog

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Before you even install your blog, think about what you are going to put into the blog. We’ve covered selecting the topics you will blog about and narrowing down the specifics. Let’s look at how to organize the content.

A WordPress site comes with two default types of content: posts and Pages. WordPress Pages are so important they gave it a capital “P” just like the “P” in WordPress.

Pages are timeless content, information visitors typically seek like your About and Contact Pages. Most sites require an About Page, Contact Page, and Policy Page. The Policy Page typically contains information on your Copyright license and terms, Comments policy, Privacy policy, and a hold harmless statement for liability. There are many examples on the web for you to use.

Posts are timely content, your content or articles. They include the articles you will write on the topics, announcements, news, tips, techniques, and resources.

Posts are organized in two ways on WordPress: categories and tags. Think of categories as your table of contents and tags as your index words.

Categories should be titled with the words associated with the content within them. They should be specific, encouraging someone to click through and find information on that subject.

Tags can be very specific as they are the site’s index words. They micro-navigation used to locate content specific to a word, phrase, or topic. For instance, if you were blogging about cats, your categories might be Cat Food, Cat Boxes, Cat Training, and Cat Health. Your tags would be litter boxes, leashes, toilet training, Purina, IAMS, Science Diet, shots, vaccines, cancer, etc.

As a general rule, a tag should not be a category until you have a minimum of 10 posts within it, and it is representative of the key topics on your site.

Self-Assignment

As a self-assignment, make a brainstorm list of everything you wish to blog about. Take at least 25 minutes, longer is preferred.

1. From that list, group all the related words together into 5-7 groups.
2. Find the word in each group that most represents the group.
3. With each group title, make a list of at least five articles (title only) you would blog about under that “category.”
4. If you cannot come up with five…? If you come up with 25…?

You’ve just created the first blog post assignments for your site.