Blog Exercises: Prepare for Summer

It’s Editorial Calender check-in and check up time. May is the shift from spring to summer. From blossoming flowers to green leafed trees casting shade, the weather is changing, bringing warmer days to the northern hemisphere and colder temperatures down under. For those of us living in the Pacific Northwestern United States, we are experiencing […]

Blog Exercises: How to Tag Posts

Categories are your site’s table of contents. Tags are your index words. While it is simple to explain the two basic organizational and navigation elements of a WordPress site, coming up with tags for each post is a struggle many bloggers battle. Tags represent micro-categorization of your site’s content. It helps the visitor find closely […]

Blog Exercises for February

We’ve completed the second month of Blog Exercises in February. Are you still with me? Here is the list. Blog Exercises: Taking a Risk With What You Blog About Blog Exercises: Honor the Past with Anniversaries and Birthdays Blog Exercises: Your Byline Blog Exercises: Comments and The Blog Bullies Blog Exercises: Backlinks Blog Exercises: Category […]

Blog Exercises: Category Cross-Pollination

In these Blog Exercises, I am faced with a category quandary. For the most part, these are blogging tips, so they should go into my Blogging Tips category as well as Blog Exercises category, right? Maybe right. These Blog Exercises are meant to have some form of order, though they may be done in any […]

Blog Exercises: Category Counting

Think of categories and tags this way: Categories are your site’s table of contents. Tags are your index words. In general, most sites should have 5-12 categories max. Each category should represent a “body of work,” a collection of posts related to a focused topic. When you find a blog with dozens of categories, what […]

Blog Exercises: Curing Uncategorized Fever

We’ve all seen it. I call it Uncategorized Fever. By default, any post not categorized in WordPress is assigned to the Uncategorized category. The Uncategorized category appears in your Categories and Tags list or clouds. In tag clouds, the larger the word, the more posts with that tag. If Uncategorized is clearly visible in these […]

Blog Exercises: The Content Project Form

In these year-long Blog Exercises dealing with editorial or content calendars, we’re working on exploring all the dates you can add to your calendar, including adding seasonal post content and other date-sensitive blog posts and articles. In this exercise, we’re going to create a content project form. The goal of a content project form is […]

Blog Exercise: Category Brainstorming

In the first of my new Blog Exercises, you will begin work on clarifying the purpose and mission of your site. Take a minimum of 25 minutes to list all the words and phrases that describe what you blog about. If you are new to blogging, list all of the words describing what you wish […]