My March Be a Better Blogger Goals

Posted 3 March, 2015 in Features / 13 Comments

Hey everyone! As you (hopefully) know, this month’s Be a Better Blogger challenge is about organizing your post categories.

I need to do this so badly! Here’s what mine look like now:

book_bumblings_categories_-_before

Lots of categories. WAY to many categories. I’ve already decided what my categories are going to be, I just need to make the changes.

My Goals

New categories:

  • Announcements
  • Be a Better Blogger
  • Blog Tours (excerpts, release day blitzes, etc.)
  • Blogging Tips
  • BookBlogWriMo
  • Features (Read This Round Up, memes, interviews, author spotlights, etc.)
  • Reviews
  • Weekly Write-Ups

That will take me from 18 to 8, which is pretty good. I wish I could get it down to like 5 categories, but I have a lot of recurring features that I think deserve their own category.

My Progress

I’m using the bulk post editor, so things are going quickly. For all of the categories I’m getting rid of, I’m replacing the category with a tag. So far, it looks like that will make sense for every category. So when I delete the “Cover Reveals” category, I added a “cover reveal” tag. I then deleted the category and set up the old category URL to redirect to the new tag URL, in case there are any links pointing to the old URL out there.

  • 3/11 – I added all “Cover Reveals” posts to the “Blog Tours” category, replacing it with a tag. (category changed on 6 posts)
  • 3/11 – I did the same thing to the “Excerpts” category. (category changed on 19 posts)
  • 3/11 – I deleted the “Extras” category. Since these were all already tagged “excerpt,” “cover reveal,” etc., I just redirected the old URL to the “Blog Tours” category. (category changed on 24 posts)
  • 3/12 – I deleted, tagged, and redirected the “Guest Post” category. (category changed on 1 post)
  • 3/12 – I deleted, tagged, and redirected the “Interviews” category. (category changed on 3 posts)
  • 3/12 – I deleted the “Memes” category. (category changed on 0 posts)
  • 3/12 – I deleted, tagged, and redirected the “Read This Round Up” category. (category changed on 11 posts)
  • 3/24 – I deleted, tagged, and redirected the “Releases” category to merge with the “Blog Tours” category. (category changed on 36 posts)
  • 3/24 – I deleted, tagged, and redirected the “Sales” category to merge with the “Announcements” category. (category changed on 5 posts)
  • 3/24 – I recategorized everything stuck in the “Uncategorized” bin. (category changed on 11 posts)

Total posts changed: 116. Not too shabby!

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13 Responses to “My March Be a Better Blogger Goals”

  1. Ashley

    I think you’ve done a great job of narrowing down your categories. I wonder if you could even merge Be a Better Blogger into Blogging Tips? Of course, it’s up to you, and you know your posts better than I do. But Be a Better Blogger is all about Blogging Tips, yes? And you could have a dedicated tag for Be a Better Blogger so that you’d still have that archive.

    That’s kind of what I did with my old Bitchin’ Book Blog feature. It was all about offering blogging tips and advice. I eventually merged everything into tone category called Blogging. I created a tag for Bitchin’ Book Blog.

    I deleted most of my categories back in September. It felt SO GOOD! I went from like 35 categories (yikes!!!) to 11. I still have one category for TV that I wish I could get rid of (only 2 posts) but I’m not sure where I’d put it, haha.

    One thing you might want to consider as well (I’m not sure if you factored this in) is redirecting your old/deleted category archives to the new ones. So, for example, when I deleted my Bitchin’ Book Blog category, I set up a redirect so anyone who visited that archive would be taken to the new tag archive instead. This is useful if you think anyone may have linked to your category archives.

    Reply
    • Book Bumblings

      I thought about that. I ended up keeping it on its own because those posts are for a monthly challenge that has its own newsletter. It would take more changes in my MailChimp setups to merge it, and I’m not quite sure how I would go about it. I decided to keep it on its own for now, but if I get to the point where MailChimp updates its autocampaigns, or I trust myself to send the newsletters manually, I might combine them. For now, I don’t trust myself enough. 🙂

      I plan on turning all of the categories I’m getting rid of into tags, so I’m going to redirect the URLs to those. I hadn’t thought of that until you published your post about redoing your categories!

      Reply
  2. Rose

    So far I don’t have too many categories and I have been deleting when I realize I probably won’t have a lot of posts for that category anyways. I am trying to figure out how to make it just 4 categories but I doubt that will happen. HA! Anyways, thank you for the reminder!

    Reply
  4. Tiffany

    How do you keep track of your categories like that? Is it something that WordPress allows you to do? (I use Blogger, but have heard so much lately about switching to WordPress and buying my own domain). I just spent so much on a blog design that probably won’t switch over well, though…ah, the choices!

    Reply

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