Blogging Triage (or How To Get More With Less)

Tags, Labels, and Categories are everywhere on the web and, for the most part, just add to the bloat of a social web. You’ve no doubt seen the long list of categories or tags in the sidebar of a blog – eyesore! In fact, they do more harm than good for your readers… and even for you.

Luckily, you can return from the land of link-bloat and use your categories and tags in a manner that actually helps your readers, highlights your best work, and possibly even earns you more Google juice.

How You’re Killing Your Readership

When reading on the web the eye looks for clues as to what’s important. That’s why bullet points, whitespace, sub-heads, and blockquotes are so important. The eye elso doesn’t like to have to work for the information (it’s tiring skimming back and forth on a 21 inch monitor).

Here’s the problem: when you throw a list of categories over in your sidebar you create a messy blob of text that requires work to read. You guessed it, folks aren’t going to put in the time to comb through the list… why should they? Obviously, no content in the list was important enough for you to highlight for them.

But wait – there’s a whole other problem!

When presented with too many options (links) folks suffer from paralysis by analysis. It’s a psychological thing where folks are afraid of making a poor choice therefore it’s easier for them to not make any choice at all. (There’s a reason you don’t show someone umpteen homes in a day, right?)

So, yeah, that list of categories in your sidebar you thought would help folks to find content… it ain’t working for ya.

Trim the Blog Fat

Frankly, I was pretty damn tired of getting hit with analysis paralysis everytime I went to publish a blog post. “Does this go under Copywriting or Email Marketing? Probably both… so then what tags should I use?”

Most folks, and by “most” I might just mean Me, have a hard time with using Categories and Tags in ways that make sense (especially when a post can have multiple categories!) It leads to an incredibly bloated archive and linking structure.

It was time to trim the blog fat and here’s the process I followed…

Highlight What Really Matters

You’ll notice in the sidebar over there that, instead of a list of categories, I actually have a list of posts under the headings “Must Reads,” “Internet Marketing,” and “Worth A Look.”

AH! I’m actually highlighting content and not just a list of archive pages! Brilliant, I know, but it took this troglodyte years to figure it out.

The result: Page views per visit have gone up since I made this switch.

So, I’m using categories like drawers in a file cabinet. When I write a post my category options are pretty clear – do I file this topic in “Internet Marketing” or “Worth A Look” (other)? The really good stuff goes in “Must Reads.” No multi-category filing, either. Nope.

The Trouble With Tags

Tags… I hate the way they’re most commonly used – just type in words that come to mind when thinking about this post. A blueprint for link-bloat if ever there was one.

Tagged as: postcards, postcard, postcard copywriting, postcard marketing, marketing with postcards, real estate postcards

While Categories are providing the file drawer system, I use Tags as a reference system to the content of the blog posts. I created a specific list of the tags I’ll use and will only tag a post with this list. Keeps me from having multiple tags that essentially mean the same thing.

• guerrilla marketing
• psychology
• persuasion
• email marketing
• social media
• events
• seo
• blogging
• conversion
• lead generation
• link building
• web design
• keywords
• branding
• tracking
• business
• personal

Again, this makes it easier for me when it comes time to hit publish and it’s a heck of a lot easier for readers to get to the type of content they want most… just click “email marketing” rather than wading through “email, marketing with email, email marketing, etc.”

Connecting It All Together

Looking at the single post pages you’ll notice no links to the category archives, just tag archives.

The reason is pretty simple… the category doesn’t really matter so much but the inter-relatedness of the content listed under the tag does.

Google can follow the Tag and find other blog posts about the same topic without diluting G’s findings with off-topic content. Good for Google, good for readers, good for you.

Get More With Less

The pitfall of categories and tags is they’re easily used as catch-all tools. You muck up your site structure with unnecessary links and disconnected content.

But there’s hope… all it takes is just a little trimming of your Categories and Tags and you can save your blog from bloat – make it much more useful for your visitors.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this…

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