Did you read my 10 Tips to Make Blogging Enjoyable. Traps to Avoid? If not, it’s still there…waiting. Why do I mention it, other than hoping those of you that missed it go and read it? There is actually an 11th Tip. Unfortunately I didn’t think of it in the 11th hour, I thought of it after that. But that just means I get to write another Blogging Tip article.

Plan, Organize, Organize, oh and Organize!

We think we organize, but we don’t. We have some categories we click the little box next to for each post but we begin to write things and come up with random categories. Before we know it we have countless categories or we have posts in an existing handful that don’t make sense.

Organizing from the very beginning of blogging makes for a lot of great benefits.

• Easier Reader Navigation
• Better Reader Enjoyment
• Easier SEO Results
• Less Headache and Mess for You, The Blogger

This isn’t my first go around with an article about organization. My 3 Best Blogging Tips for a Successful Blog  was one year ago discussing menu structures, how to do drop down menus and create real PAGES and fake ‘pages’ as headings for drop down menu sections. Yep, step-by-step.

Now, if you’re new, the Category is basically like a folder you place a post in and you can then actually make a page in your menu using that category. You can look at my menu around my header image to see what I am talking about.

Mine looks simple, right? In reality, mine is a mess. I have over 1300 articles now, posts, poems, tips, videos, and whatever other random things I’ve come up with. I tell you that so you know when I talk about a need to organize I know from experience.

The problem? The mess?

I realized too late my system for organizing was not adequate. Why? There was no system. For someone who spent years organizing and mapping out things for locations around the country, I can’t stand the condition things are in. But the process of correcting all the mess is overwhelming. I’ll do it, slowly, but slowly is the key word.

If you are a veteran blogger, take a handful of minutes a day and do a page of your content in the Dashboard each day. No more than that. If you do more, you get tired of it, disgusted, and it becomes work. Blogging should be an enjoyable part of our lives, even if we do it as a job.

Now, I have great articles, and I’m not tying to be all boastful. People have truly enjoyed some of my work, but people can’t find those articles. I can’t sometimes unless I go into my Dashboard. (Sorry, Dashboard is blog-speak for where all of our tools and useful things are.)

So organization leads to easy Reader Site Navigation.

To organize your content you need to:

• Look at what the post you’re doing is at its general level. Is it a Tip, a Writing Piece, Music. What is it? Now you have your Headings/Page Names.
• What is the post specifically about? Is it a Love Poem, a SciFi story, or a Blogging Tip? Now you have your Categories.
• Now, for Tags, you go into all the wide and varied things people might think of when looking at the post; Poem, Romance, Desire, Paris, Ocean. I only mention Tags because we are talking about naming of things. This has nothing to do with organization so much, but does in a way when people do a search of a word or you use a Tag Cloud. (For WordPress, don’t use more than 13 Tags or your post might not show up in the WordPress Reader.)

There are countless tips out there about how to organize and boost traffic by managing your content. Not long ago I met Janice Wald of MostlyBlogging.com. The topic of blogging seems to be something she is passionate about and seeks out things to know. As I wrote the article I thought it would be great to ask her for some articles she thought might be of use about the subject of blog organization. Here are some related articles from her site you MUST READ:

The first thing you need to read is; How to Build the Perfect Blog Even if You Don’t Know How This will give you a basic checklist to go through to make sure you have prepared a post worth posting and being read. What you post is your reputation, image, brand. You want to get it right from the beginning. Some readers will never come back if you are bad from the beginning.

Perhaps you are wanting to know if you are doing things right. You think you are but how do you find out? Well, teacher Janice has a report card for you to go by. How to Grade Your Blog  (By the way, I got an A.)

What is another form of organization? How do you know for sure you are doing a good job of it? The report card above won’t tell you if you are getting the results from your efforts. And really there are some less technical aspects that you need to look at. How to Get Loyal Visitors to Repeatedly Return to Your Blog Here you will find a real success  story from a real success blogger.

Now, one final thing from Janice I like is, How to Increase Blog Traffic with Content Curation. It’s not about organizing but how to get more out of those old posts you wrote that no one sees these days. No amount of organization will get all of your work seen. But if you know how to spread that content around, you can get results, maybe even better ones at times.

But not all success of a blog has to do with organization or spreading the word. I for one can vouch for that on some level. Sometimes a blog achieves success not by organization but by personality. My friend Hugh Roberts of Hugh’s Views & News focuses more on the personality and feel of blogging, a blog, and the blog life to be successful. Yes he does the organization but he likes to provide tips on a personal level. One popular article to check out  is, Is Your Blog As Friendly As You Think It Is? It is one of his most recent but high on his most popular post list.

From me you can check my Most Popular list at the bottom of the blog, currently. There are two that seem to get attention the most over time, How to Survive the Blog Life. and Blogging Personality: The Key to Success.

BONUS TIP!

While I was writing the above and reading old articles of mine another tip came to mind.

Leave Your Post to Marinate

We write a post and want it out NOW. Big problem with that is the ugly word TYPO. Nothing worse than doing a Writing Tip article and you have typos everywhere.

Let your article sit a few days, a week or more if you can. Then you come back and read it and you see the problems, and read it in the Preview window, like it would be on your blog, NOT in the Post Editor. Post Editor windows allow for easy skipping over words and even sentences. Our eyes are more accustomed to truly reading something on a Blog page as opposed to the Editor page.

(All images created by Ronovan unless otherwise noted.)

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Much Respect-Much Love