How do I create blog categories?

Categories are simply the large ideas that you cover in your blog. Usually these are found in a list on the sidebar of the blog for your readers (like mine) to find easily. Categories are extremely important for a lot of reasons, but mostly for organization and search engine optimization. Categories make it easy for your readers to read more posts in certain topics – and tells search engines the topics that are important to your blog.

This post is going to cover the thought process behind how you create categories in general, then I will show a quick tutorial on the two ways you can create (and edit them) in wordpress.

Creation of blog categories should be one of the first things you do when you start deciding on the content. You can change or add more later on, but you need to at least get started. Categories will help you in creating your first few posts, and will give you a strong backbone for your site. They will help you to come up with content when you are struggling and will help you to define your blog and its readers.

The easiest way to start creating these categories is to think about what you want your site to cover, and start jotting town topics. If you think you can write 30 posts about a topic, it would probably make a good category. If you think you can write only a couple posts, then we can use it as a tag later on. Once you’ve written down all the topics you think you want to cover, then go back and group them together. For example, I write about twitter, facebook, linkedin and foursquare, but they are all under the category “Social Media”. Once you’ve started grouping your categories, you should have between 5-15. Less than that, and you are not dividing your topics out enough. More than that and you are getting too specific, leave the ‘specifics’ for tags.

If you are having trouble creating your categories, you can also think about it from your readers perspective – what would they want to click on? What categories would they want to read? What can they expect from you? Many times thinking from a different perspective will give you a chance to come up with better categories. Once you have created your 5-15 categories for your blog, you are going to add them into wordpress so you can start using them. Luckily, wordpress makes them very easy to create and very easy to change.

To create a category in wordpress:

1. Login to your wordpress account
2. Click on “posts”
3. Click on “categories”
4. Type in the name you want for the category (don’t worry about the slug)
5. Add a description of the category if you want (some themes will display this)
6. Click “add category”

Once you have added your categories, they will be available to check off when you are writing a new post. I recommend never selecting more than 2 categories per blog post.

Now, if you want to change a category, you simply go back into the categories menu (step 1-3), then

1. Click on the category you want to change
2. Type the new name/edited name for the category
3. Change the slug to match (make sure to keep the – mark between each word)
4. Click “update category”
5. This will update all the posts in that category

Finally, now that all your categories are created and imputed into wordpress, you need to start writing. This is where creating a blog calendar can come in handy. Start with your first category and work your way through, coming up with at least 5 blog posts for each, then place them into the calendar. If you are writing 4 times a week, have 10 categories and 5 blog posts for each category (in the beginning),  you will have 3 ½ months worth of blog posts ready for you!

Related posts:

1. How to create a blog calendar with categories
2. What category do you fit into?
3. How to create a blog management calendar in 10 minutes