This is part 8 of a new series on how to start a business blog, and is aimed at businesses of all sizes. In these articles, I’m going to address business-specific concerns and requirements for business blogging. Previously: How to Start a Business Blog, Part 7
Nearly all blogs have categories, labels, or tags as a means of organizing and classifying blog content. Business blogs should have categories, and at some point, you’ll need to decide what they are. Most business blogs seem to divide their content into the following general categories:
- Company news and announcements
- Tips or information on specific product/service lines, with one category for each particular product or service
- Customer success stories
- Relevant industry news and opinion (for example, a software company that specializes in network security might blog about how a recent botnet acted as an invisible spam network)
A business blog doesn’t need a lot of categories. Even for specific products or services, you only would want categories for the ones that warrant it. When you see what kind of traffic and comment activity your blog gets for certain categories, you will have a greater understanding of how your business is perceived. You can leverage your knowledge of that perception in the market to strengthen and build on your position.
Another reason to keep your initial list of categories small is to give it room to grow over time. Significant events (for good or ill) may occur in the future and might warrant their own categories. New products and services will go online and might need their own categories. You really shouldn’t remove any categories (but if you have to, make sure to have your web people redirect the old addresses to relevant new ones), but it’s very likely you’ll add some new ones down the road.
In How to Start a Business Blog, Part 9, I’ll cover the creation of initial content for a business blog. Subscribe to my RSS feed so you don’t miss it!
4 Comments
It may be worth explaining the difference between tags and categories. I find most blogs have too many categories and I like your list because it keeps it simple. A lot of people are really creating categories and using them as tags.
My guideline is one category per post and the tag all the important nouns or concepts in the post. There is also a big search engine benefit to using tags in this way as WordPress, with an appropriate plugin, will create pages for all of your tags and this will increase the “net” your business casts in Google.
@WordPress Helper,
I did consider whether or not to explain the differences between tags and categories, and decided against it. The reason is because knowing those differences doesn’t provide any additional helpful information for the purpose of this article. Even from the standpoint of technical execution–say, using Ultimate Tag Warrior or just using normal WordPress categories–the differences do not affect the outcome of the goal.
Depending on what plugins/setup you’re using, the big difference between categories and tags is that categories are more likely to have their own pages than tags. In fact, I’ve run across some info lately suggesting that category archive pages be treated and designed like landing pages, which is a most excellent idea as far as SEO goes.
But, SEO isn’t the main purpose behind this. People first, SEO second. Thanks for the thoughtful comment and suggestions!
Hello Michael,
Your blog is grt. offers good tips, which can even be used by bloggers who blog out of a personal preference than for business puspose.. the posts give a methodical description abt how to go abt planning a blog, and i loved goin thru it…
thnks!
Paula, thanks. I’m glad you got a lot out of it. This whole process is what always seems a mystery to business people, so I made a plan that can be followed.