Blog post categories let you group your content, for you and for your audience. Learn some tips and tricks to get started with categories.
Blog post categories group your content to help your audience find what they’re looking for. You can display the categories on your blog to guide viewers to the right place for them. You can also keep some categories hidden so you can build out and test smaller categories or deliver content for each segment of your audience.
In this post, you’ll learn how to:
- Decide what categories to use for your blog
- Sort your posts into the right categories
- Creatively display your categories on your website
- Use categories alongside email marketing to help segment your audience and deliver relevant content
- Set up categories in WordPress
Decide What Categories To Use For Your Blog
Take a look at the content you’ve written so far. (Or, if you’re just getting up and running, look at the post ideas you’ve gathered.) There are probably a handful of ways that you could organize your content.
The easiest way to get started is to group content by the subjects you’re drawn to. For example, I created a “content planning” category for this blog because it’s a subject that I know a lot about and can write content for.
When you have a good amount of content in your subject-focused categories, I recommend moving to a more audience-focused approach: group content around what your audience is looking for. This requires knowing your audience, so gather some data or ask them for input.
My audience for this website might want content by type of writing (content planning, editing, grammar, etc.) or by format (blog, video, website copy, etc.). So, I have both approaches available on this website, although I’m still building out the format categories before I put them in the menu. Later, I may find other ways to group content for them as other needs arise, or as I touch on more subjects in this blog.
It’s fine to start your blog post categories around the subjects that you write about. That’s what I did here. But as soon as you can, shift your thinking to what your audience is searching for. And when they start showing up, you can ask them directly.
Sort Your Posts
When you’ve decided on your blog post categories, keep them in mind as you generate ideas and plan your posts. I use a product-management program that lets me add tags to my ideas, so I tag my post ideas with the category or categories that I’ll sort them into.
As you schedule your post ideas, the categories will help you publish varied content. For example, I limit my grammar-focused posts called quick writing tips to once every 4-6 posts. I can also make sure that I cover posts about content planning, blogging, website copy, and other formats with each batch that I write and schedule.
Without categories to guide me, it would take me longer to decide what I’m going to write about and how to keep my blog interesting.
Creatively Display Your Categories
As much as categories help you, the magic comes when you put them in front of your audience.
Proactively lead your audience to the right content instead of dumping them onto a page of all your posts. When you bring them the answer they’re looking for as quickly as possible, they’re more likely to stay or come back when they have another question. Offering meaningful categories shows them that you’re here to help them.
The simplest way to incorporate categories into your website is with a menu. WordPress lets you make a navigation menu, and you can choose the categories that you want to display (and I’ll show you how at the end of this post).
Here’s what I do for my beauty blog Broke for Beauty.
I include some expected pages in the menu like About and Contact, but I’m also using categories to show you what you can drill down into. At the top of the menu bar, Personal and Videos are categories that I’ve assigned to some of my blog posts. Under Blog, I have categories and sub-categories so you can look through my tutorials or find a new concealer from my product reviews.
A more advanced way of displaying categories is to show them on your home page. Instead of asking your audience to dig through your menu, you’re offering up your options for them.
Here’s an example from ProBlogger.
The icons lead viewers to a landing page for each category, but you could simply take them to a list of all your content from that category.
Whatever you choose to do, you don’t need to know a lot of code when you use a platform like WordPress or Squarespace to build your website. You only have to know how you want to organize your content, and how you want to get readers to the right place.
Deliver Relevant Content to Your Audience Segments
Now let’s get back to you. Aside from content planning, blog post categories can help you get to know your audience and offer them content that’s relevant to them. You can do this by segmenting your audience, then creating a category for each segment that lets you deliver highly-relevant content to them.
Segmenting your audience helps you better serve them. For example, I would give very different blogging advice to a newcomer and to a longtime blogger. I’d also give different advice to the blogger who uses videos or a podcast alongside their written content, too. When someone signs up for my email list, I want to know as much about them as soon as I can so I can put them into one of those groups and give them the most value.
Email marketing tools like MailChimp and ConvertKit have segmentation tools ready for you. The hard part is figuring out what to do with those segments. Blog post categories are one way that you can align your content with your audience segments.
Decide which segments are most meaningful to you. It might be beginning, intermediate, and advanced. Or, you need to know if they’re bakers or cooks, video or podcast editors, planners or doers, organization masters or proud members of club “wing it”… You’ll likely segment in multiple ways, but which grouping is most important for you?
I use beginning, intermediate, and advanced categories for this blog (called beginner, grower, and wordsmith). On the blog, I have un-displayed categories for each segment that I assign posts to. So after a new subscriber self-selects a category, I send them to a page of relevant content for them. If you joined my email list a while ago or haven’t joined yet, sign up to see how I do it (you can unsubscribe later).
If you’re just starting out, you’ll want to keep things simple and send your audience to a page with a little welcome text instead. That’s what I did on Empower Writing for a loooong time before I fully utilized categories. But when you have enough content, make the experience personal with targeted content.
You can also use un-displayed categories to send targeted content outside the context of audience segments. For example, you can create a “best of” category so your top posts are always at-the-ready. You can also create categories when you’re working on new subject matter and keep them hidden until you have a good variety of content published.
Note: Keep the category names simple and professional even if you aren’t displaying them—the name might be shown on the post or in the post’s metadata, which anyone can view. Basically, don’t name one of your categories “For Losers” because your audience will see your name-calling.
Set Up Categories in WordPress
Create Categories Under Posts > Categories
Here, you give categories a name, a slug (as in, what it looks like in a link: youblog.com/category-slug), and a description. The description is generally visible only to you, but it may get shown depending on your website’s theme.
You can also assign a parent category. For example, I have a category called Writing Skills, but when I started writing quick writing tips, I created a Quick Writing Tips category with Writing Skills as its parent. I don’t display it anywhere (at the time I’m writing this post), but I might want to send the bunch to my email subscribers or display it later.
Add Categories to a Menu Under Appearance > Menus
In the Edit Menus tab, you can create a menu that displays your pages, categories, specific posts, or custom links. As you add elements, they appear in the Menu Structure, where you can control the order they appear in and the hierarchy of items and sub-items (and sub-sub-items, and so on, if you choose).
You might be wondering why you’d create multiple menus. So far, we’ve been using “menu” to describe a navigation menu. This is the primary way to use menus. But, your theme might support multiple menus, like a sidebar menu or footer menu, in addition to the navigation menu. So, you could have a second menu that lays out all your blog post categories or a menu with your most important posts or pages. This is advanced, so don’t worry about it unless or until you need it.
My first menu for Empower Writing was for the navigation menu. It was a simple menu and it looked like this in the Menu Structure view.
Display Categories on Pages
If you’re interested in displaying your categories visually, create a page on your website or edit your homepage. Place an image or graphic for each category and have it link to your category slug or a dedicated landing page.
The tricky part about displaying categories visually is that you’ll want to test it. Preview your page and change the size of your browser window to mimic different devices. After you publish the page, try opening it on a phone or tablet to make sure that it looks right.
Use Categories to Guide and Serve Your Audience
Blog post categories help you and your audience by organizing your content. You benefit from getting a high-level view of your upcoming content topics, plus you can deliver targeted content to your audience segments. Your audience benefits from seeing what information you offer and finding exactly what they’re looking for with little effort.
If categories have you excited about your content, check out my post How to Make an Editorial Calendar to help you put your categories to use. And if all this segmentation-talk has you thinking about email marketing, you’ll want to see The 2 Types of Emails You Should Know How to Write.