Postcards from the Funny Farm

If you’re like me, you love the mall and its food court. There are 10-15 choices on what to eat every time you go there. “What the heck do I get?” is the question I always ask myself: Kun Pao Chicken? Pizza at SBarro? McDonalds? A sub? With the shining neon signs and the wonderful aromas all mixed around me, I have really hard time making a choice.

Blogging is often the same way for me.

With so many items begging for my attention, what should I write on? I have literally sat for 20-30 minutes before in front of my laptop screen before unable to decide what was worth writing about. So how do I handle this? Simple … I limit my choices. I have gone through after 400 posts and analyzed the tags and categories I assigned the most. Then, I’ve made those into my categories and resolved to blog within those most popular, and obviously the ones I like to write the most, posts. Then, for myself not for my readers, I developed and wrote down 4 kinds of posts that I write on this blog. They are:

1. Journal entries,
2. PayPerPost (or blogging for hire),
3. Howto and Reviews, and
4. short “Tumblelog” styled posts or “asides.

Now, I don’t get as overwhelmed. I ask myself if I have done too much of one or the other and it makes it easy for me to limit my choices in what to write on. This frees me up to focus completely on blogging quality posts. If you watch kids learning and playing you will see the same thing in both instances: they are focused on one thing at a time. Note the picture of my daughter learning and playing below. But we aren’t kids anymore. We can’t blog it all. As bloggers we must be disciplined and choose to have only one item in front of us at a time. All other things are a distraction to good blogging.

How do you discipline yourself to write good blog posts?

This is a continuation of my prior article on categories. It seems I’ve gathered more information on tags and I feel it would be helpful to my readers’ seo if I shared it. We are moving toward a tagging net generation more and more it seems. Wordpress now has internal tagging and I read about it being on other platforms. So what is the difference between tags and categries? The simple answer is: tags are a lot of work!

As a Problogger article points out: Categories are linear filing of your blog posts and tags are “granular.” This means your posts have better seo if you category and tag them as opposed to just categorizing them.

If you look at human communication from a distance you hear dissonant terms pop up within any given conversation. Someone may be talking about transportation and throw in Osama bin Laden as a related anecdote. Someone searching for a post on him might not reach that article in a transportation category unless it was tagged. I hope that made sense.

Since Wordpress 2.3 came out I have started the often tedious process of tagging all my old posts (well, the most popular ones anyway). The simple tagging plugin as well as the advanced tagging plugin are a big help for this since they generate clickable suggestions. From what I can gather, Google will crawl up to 50 tags without flagging. This means you shouldn’t worry about having too many tags. I would be concerned #1 in the tags’ relevance to the content. After that I would look for the most common tags both internally and externally as suggested by the plugins. Do you spend time tagging your posts?