Blogger Organisation: The Best Ways To Juggle Different Categories

A wacky roll of film starts to play, the screen is filled with images all shaded in various colours of bronze and gold. Somewhere in the distance you can hear a deep masculine voice asking, "So ... you run a blog? And it covers more than one topic? Is it beauty and lifestyle? Or books and travel?" Then a dramatic pause, as a blogger in hipster glasses sits in front of a laptop. They hold their head in their hands, looking unsure. "If that is you ... Then stop worrying because we have just what you need!"

Photo by juan pablo rodriguez

The somewhat dramatic intro aside, this month we'll be looking at the topic of organising and creating a schedule to cover the different niches that you have on your blog. While many blogging tips suggest that you find "your" niche, I see little harm in covering more than one topic: say books and travel, nail art and road trips. Why do you have to chose if it's more fun this way?

The reason why someone might suggest you stick to one niche - bleah - is relatively simple because this way your readers always know what you are going to talk about and it's not going to be a weird mix. However, if you manage to balance your niches right, it is going to have the same impact and you don't have to run seven blogs on the side.

The most vital component when it comes to this fragile balance is to not info-dump one niche.

Say No To Info-Dumping

Say you have enough ideas to fill three travel posts, you need to make sure to not post them back to back. While this is going to fill your nearest travel enthusiast with lots of joy, it is going to annoy the person who follows for book reviews.

"But how do I do that?" I hear you ask.

I discovered that there are two ways in which you can achieve a decent and well balanced result:

Option #1 - Schedule Your Ideas 

This sounds quite simple. It comes down to writing down the idea as it floats around in your head. This may be the already mentioned three travel posts, or nine posts for blogger organisation.

If you read and followed an earlier chapter, you already know how to create the perfect blogging schedule, and if not, you can find the answer here:

How To Create A Successful Blogging Schedule

When you have a good overview of what you write and when, you can always schedule it in such a way that two posts of the same topic don't collide.

While this may sound like the perfect solution, it can still happen that either you have far too many posts planned - which sounds like a dream, but it is not - or due to unforeseeable circumstances two topics collide nevertheless.

In that case there is always solution #2:

Option #2 - Designated Days For A Niche 

On floralcars, I always post book and beauty reviews on Tuesday and Thursday respectively. I created this method to keep the steady stream of posts on Wednesday going and avoid posting one book review after another.

Using this method ensures that you never bulk post about one topic and that there is going to be a different post in between.

However, and yes this comes with the bigger however, when you use this method and only rarely post about the topic, it is going to show more than incorporating it with your normal queue of articles. I try to post at least one beauty and book review per month to avoid the image that I have abandoned this category.

What To Do When The Love Runs Out 

When the love for a category runs out or you write too few posts about it - say only twice a year - there are a few option left. If possible, you can broaden it, say you picked "road trips" as a niche, simply extant it to "travel." This also works the other way around, should you notice that all your travel posts are just about road trips, minimize the niche.

While this may sound harsh, I undo categories I haven't used in almost 10 months - goodbye, fitness tag. Simply click through all your categories and check which haven't been used in a while and do the harsh thing.

Then comes the option that a singular post may crop up that fit into a category that you hadn't used in a while and made redundant. For this occasion, there is the infamous "other" tag. It is not listed in your navigation and often contains posts such as blogger awards, Q&As or tag games.

When it comes to writing a "little bit of everything" blog balancing the categories is important. When you have a schedule on which to orientate yourself, you can decide weither to balance them in a regular queue style or have designated days for certain topics.

With these options, you are going to create a perfectly balanced blog that your readers are going to enjoy!