Keep Your Category List Small

September 28th, 2007

One of the most tempting things for a new blogger to do is immediately create a bunch of categories for their future posts. They think that users will be impressed when they see a large amount of categories.

The only problem is is that there are no articles in all but one or two of these categories. And that is not impressive.

Why is this bad practice?

1. You are misleading the user – when they view a category with no articles on it, they will become frustrated. Blogging is all about building a relationship with your user base, and getting them frustrated is not the way to do it.
2. You’re linking to empty pages. You would not link to a blank, white page on your site, so why would you link to a page that had no content in it? It’s the same principle – it does the user no good.
3. You’re losing the chance to turn that visitor into a repeat reader. If a user views a category that has a nice list of articles in it, they are likely to visit multiple times to read all of them. However, if they go to a category with no articles in it, why would they want to come back? You can’t expect them to go through every category looking for the articles. Make it easy for them.

What Should You Do?

1. Start small. Create a couple of categories and write a couple of articles for each of them.
2. Don’t add a new category until you already have a few posts to put in it.
3. Structure your categories intelligently. Make sure that each of them is clear and concise, and don’t overlap with each other. You want the user to know exactly what type of articles he or she will be seeing when they view a certain category. You don’t want them to have to guess which category an article would be in because the categories overlap.

Remember, quality over quantity!

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