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Get Your Content Organized
This post is Part 7 of my 12 Days of Consistent Content Content Challenge for 2019. Click here to check out Part 6: 4 Reasons Your Business Needs Batch Days
Let’s talk about one of the absolute ground-level fundamentals to online business success.
You need to have categories for your content.
I talk more about this in my free, 5-day email course, Content Explosion, but when it comes to making it the easiest thing even to determine what you’re going to write about, you need to break your content down into categories.
Your categories don’t just dictate what you write about (or rather, help you determine best what to write about) on your blog, but it also allows you to know exactly what to talk about and what to promote on your social media platforms.
And remember, it’s not just about creating content, but promoting content too.
So keep it simple. Take your niche and break it down to between 4-7 categories, and when you’re planning out your content, make sure that it fits into at least one of those categories.
Categorize Your Content: It Means You Know What Your Niche Is
When people are starting their online businesses, I’ve seen very often that people are afraid to niche down, because they’re worried that they’re going to run out of things to talk about.
In fact, it’s just the opposite.
Not only do you know exactly what you’re talking about when you niche down, but you’re consistently talking about exactly what your audience needs to know about.
When you’re not niched down enough, your content tends to be all over the place, and it makes it difficult for your audience to have the idea of what your message is. They don’t know what is that most important lesson that you want them to know.
And when that happens, you’re at risk of alienating the people who are your ideal audience, because they don’t know that you’re what they need in their lives. They don’t know that you’re actually the expert and know what you’re talking about.
Niching down allows you to stand out, and when you do that, you can pick out the core message from your niche, your mission, and turn that core message into your categories.
For more on the importance of niching down, check out this post.
Categorize Your Content: It Keeps You Organized (Especially When You’re Starting Out)
Categorizing your content allows you to stay organized, to an even deeper level than just knowing what your niche is.
It gives you a rhythm that you can get into, and when you’re starting out, that makes being consistent so much easier.
Keep it simple.
Week One, Category One.
Week Two, Category Two.
Week Three, Category Three.
And so on.
Get yourself into a rotation where you know what you want to talk about each week, because you have it all planned out, thanks to your categories.
And if you have closer to 6-7 categories, it means that your months won’t start feeling stale, because each week will be different, and also far enough apart that your audience isn’t going to be as worried about you being in your rhythm as you are.
But even if they were, it doesn’t matter.
Do what works for you. Use a content strategy that makes your content creation easy.
Nothing else matters, and if you think it does, you’re probably overthinking it.
Categorize Your Content: It’ll Make Brainstorming Content Ideas Easier
I touched on this earlier in the post, but this is truly where categories take so much pressure of your content creation.
When you sit down to plan out your content, be it an entire year or half-year or quarter or month, to make sure that you have content that touches on each of your categories, and when you have categories, it’s easy to make sure all your bases are covered.
As I teach in Content Explosion, brainstorming content for one category at a time allows you to create a long list to pick from. And as you move from category to category, you’re able to create content that fits multiple categories, further cementing to yourself and your audience why each category you have chose is critical for success in your chose niche.
Categorize Your Content: It Makes Your Content Easy To Binge
A website that is difficult to navigate is a serious turnoff to your cold audience.
The people who stumble upon your content on Pinterest, in a guest post, in a post you publish to your Facebook page, or through a live you do in a friend’s community, want to easily find the information that they are looking for.
I know that when I find a new blogger or online business owner through one piece of content, if that first post hooks me, I’m going to want to know more about other content on the same topic.
So to have the ability to easily find the category that your content is filed in, along with all the other posts in the same category, is incredibly helpful. The easier your website is to navigate, the more likely I am to stick around longer.
And the same goes for inter-linking (which you can see me do all the time). When you have a post that is related content to another piece of content, you have to make sure your audience knows that there’s more where that came from.
How many categories do you use to organize your content? Join my free Facebook community, Consistent Content Creators, and share your answer!
Ready To Start Your Own Online Business?
Have a lot to talk about, but don’t have the website to guide your readers to? Now is the perfect time to get started.
Now is the perfect time to take my free email course, where I teach you how to plan a year’s worth of blog content in just one day. This training takes away all the mystery behind figuring out what you’re going to write from week to week and helps you plan the ultimate in blogging content that your audience will absolutely love.
Don’t forget to get hosting (plus a free domain) for as little as $3.95/month through Siteground. You can read why I choose Siteground to host my websites in my post, 6 Reasons I Host My Side Hustle On Siteground (And You Should Too).
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