Jimmy Z

I’m working on improving my blog and becoming more focused. I figure that the best place to start is by fixing my categories. Michael Martin published an article titled Using Categories and Tags Effectively on your Blog for ProBlogger this last week. It suggests limiting the number of categories and placing a post in a single category. It then recommends using ‘tags’ as a supplement for more detailed categorization.

If you take a look at my old category list, it just goes and goes. The picture shown here doesn’t even reach the bottom. I guess I have been using my categories as tags, as they used to be considered interchangeable. Recently, WordPress has decided that ‘tags’ and ‘categories’ are actually different things and they’ve added native tagging to the latest release (version 2.3). I’m anxiously waiting for this release to make it to my Fantastico application manager so that I can upgrade.

Before deciding to just chop away at my categories list, I decided to check my Google Analytics to see which categories are effective and which aren’t. I found some surprising results which I will list here.

I ran reports for the most viewed categories and time spent at category pages. I then compared that with the number of posts that I’ve listed under each category. Here are some of best and worst of the results:

Most Viewed

• cakephp
• ruby-on-rails
• ajax
• soap
• flash
• web-services

Least Viewed

• technology
• spam-fighting
• soa
• school
• internet-explorer

Most Time

• google
• ajax
• apriux
• web-design
• ruby
• internet-marketing
• blogging

Least Time

• web
• spam-fighting
• soa
• school
• project-management
• mysql
• yahoo

Most Posts

• technology - 71
• business - 43
• life - 34
• web 2.0 - 32
• php - 30
• ideas - 18
• google - 19

Conclusions

Here are some of the conclusions that I’ve drawn from my research. First of all, notice that ‘technology’ has by far the most number of posts, yet it is a definite loser category in that it is the top ‘least viewed’ category and is in the bottom half of time spent list. A category like ‘technology’ is just too broad and blasé. Most of my top posted categories fall in the lower tier of views.

Niche categories like ‘ruby-on-rails’ and ‘cakephp’ fell in the top viewed of categories. These categories didn’t have the most time spent though. I guess the interestingness of the actual posts needs to be improved.

The time spent report is probably the most helpful. It helps me identify categories that people have actually found interesting enough to read through. The categories might need some better naming to increase views, but the content in the categories must be interesting.

Learning From the Professionals

Two of my favorite professional blogs are ProBlogger and Freelance Switch. How do they do their categories?

From Freelance Switch

From ProBlogger

One thing that stands out for me is that many of these categories label a particular series of posts. For example, Freelance Switch has The Lighter Side and The Business of Freelancing. ProBlogger has 31 Days to Building a Better Blog. I could see myself following one of those categories closely. With these types of categories, I know what to expect in future posts and look forward to new posts in the series.

Another observation is that categories that seem to offer me something valuable catch my attention more. Some of the categories that caught my interest the most were Finding Work, Freelancing Essentials, The Perils of Project Management, and The Working Day from Freelance Switch, and Blogging Tools and Services, Case Studies, and Other Income Streams from ProBlogger. These categories seem to contain something that I could take away to benefit my life.

Action Items

What do I do from here? I need to do some housecleaning and wipe out my ineffective categories. I need to come up with better naming of my categories. I need to come up with some categories that I think I could consistently blog for that will offer my readers value.

We’ll see how I do. Let me know what you think.

[Update: I’ve posted result stats to show how this has affected my blog.]

Tagged with: blogging

Help!

My blogging has really slowed down these last months and I think I’m experiencing some kind of writer’s block. I’m writing this post to hopefully get some feedback from you all out there.

I think my blog is going through a mid-life crisis of sorts. I’ve been reading a lot of really good stuff at ProBlogger, which has helped me identify some areas of improvement. I think my problem is that I’m not sure which direction I want to take my blog.

What is my theme?

You may have noticed that my blog has no tagline or defined theme. I’ve intentionally left that blank because I haven’t identified a theme yet.

If you look at my categories in the sidebar, you’ll see that the list is really long. I’ve been using categories as a sort of tagging mechanism, but I’ve found that ‘categories’ aren’t quite the same as ‘tags.’ [tags, by the way have been added to the latest version of WordPress]. A recent article on ProBlogger on effective categories and tagging suggests that you keep your category list short, and you file your posts into only one category per post. You then supplement that with more detailed tagging. This will probably be one of my first changes to my blog. Hopefully that exercise will help me stay more focused as a blogger, and to identify a theme.

Who is my audience?

I’m having a hard time identifying my audience. I think the reason I’m having a hard time doing this is because it has changed several times in the last couple of years. Here’s a short history of my blog.

I started blogging a few months before I was hired at Provo Labs. Provo Labs is a web incubator which at the time that I was there was trying to launch several web start-ups simultaneously. The environment was alive with entrepreneurial spirit. We were given 20% of our time to work on our own ideas and we were encouraged to blog. Planet Provo Labs was born, which was an aggregate of all Provo Labs employee blogs. The ‘planet’ became my audience as I blogged to share ideas and thoughts with others within the company and others who were intrigued by the mystery of what was going on inside Provo Labs.

We experienced a Black Friday where almost the entire Provo Labs team was laid off and Paul had to take the company in a new direction, focusing solely on World Vital Records. Most of us stuck together and formed 42Co, working to build TagJungle. Most of our blogs were still on Planet Provo Labs, and I felt my audience was mostly the same. During that time, I made a few affiliate posts about Host Monster, which I honestly like and use, but I feel that may have turned off some of my audience.

During my last semester of school, I was required to blog for 2 of my classes: Information Architecture, and Web Analytics. I enjoyed blogging about both topics, but I felt I may have alienated some of the less-geeky readers as I dug into specifics of SOAP in PHP, XML-RPC, and so forth.

I am now a partner in Apriux, a web development/consulting company. I have found it harder to blog about work because most of our projects are under strict NDAs. Also, many of you who have started your own businesses will attest to the fact that things get really, really busy. So, my blog has pretty much been dead during this growing time, and now I feel like I’ve lost touch with my audience.

So, my goals for the next week or two is to identify who I want my audience to be (and who my current audience is), choose an appropriate blog theme, and begin improving my blog.

What would you like to see?

Feedburner tells me that I have 54 subscribers, so if any of you have made it to this point, please comment on what types of postings you have found most interesting in the past. Also, feel free to give me as much constructive criticism that you’d like. I really would like to make my blog better.