Welcome to Week Six: Tags and Categories with Lorelle VanFossen

In this week’s session, we’re going to talk about blog categories and tags.

As you go through the exercises listed below, use the following three step filter:

Your tags and categories must:

1. Group related content into “bodies of work”
2. Provide navigation to related content
3. Send a clear message about your blog’s content

As recommended in the tags and categories class notes, take each task one at a time before reading the next one.

• TASK 1: Make a list of all the words that describe your blog subject. List a minimum of 25 words or phrases.
• TASK 2: Cull down the list of descriptive words and phrases to 5-10 “groups” representing the words on the list.
• TASK 3: Edit your blog category list to represent the post content within each category.
• TASK 4: Edit your blog category list to represent keywords and search terms best representative of the post content within each category.
• TASK 6: Write FIVE blog post titles/ideas under each category.
• TASK 7: Re-examine your brainstorm list. These are now your post tags, the descriptive words that described the meta data of your post content. They are your blog keywords.
• TASK 8: List the tag words for the featured blog post content in the class document.
• TASK 9: Share the lessons learned about rethinking your blog categories here, on the boards, and/or on your blog and link us.
• Optional: Upload and share your Wordle image.

For more specifics, see the class notes.

Remember, a tag can be any link:

<a href="http://example.com/" rel="tag">Example</a>

Tags are the link text (anchor text):

<a title="Example of Example" href="http://example.com/" rel="tag">Example</a>

I’ve scattered some tag links throughout this blog post. Look at the page source code to see how many you can find.

Open for Discussion

I get a lot of questions about tags and categories. They are an often misunderstood bloggy beast. To start us off, here are two of the most common questions I am asked about tags and categories.

What’s the difference in WordPress between a tag and a category?

WordPress only supported categories for a long time, long before other blogging platforms offered them. When Technorati started their blog post taxonomy (tags) directory, tags for labeling content by micro data categorization came into popularity. By adding rel="tag" to any link, that link text became a tag.

WordPress Themes added the rel="tag" to categories soon afterwards, but resisted the notion of adding tags. Tagging post content is not as easy as it may seem. Tags are designed to not only categorize content, they must be searchable and able to be accessed in a variety of ways, such as related content (synonyms).

When tags were finally introduced to WordPress by popular demand, WordPress kept categories as tags and tags were tags, all identified by the rel="tag" as tags, since it didn’t matter to Technorati if the keyword was a tag or category – any link with that relevance attribute was a “tag.” WordPress users were very confused.

In general, WordPress creates a “search results” page listing the posts in chronological order when the user clicks upon a tag or a category. The page title changes, identifying it as a tag or category pageview, but the results are basically the same. If you are using a WordPress Plugin which displays post content using tags, such as related content, related post titles can be displayed on the post itself (usually in the post meta data area with the date and other information), or on the sidebar. Tag clouds are show on Pages or often found in the sidebar, header, or even the footer.

I use WordPress.com and do not want my tags to link to everyone’s content. How do I change that?

As a fellow blogger on WordPress.com, I totally sympathize. I’ve nagged the staff for years to permit global (off-site) and local (on-site) tagging options, but so far, the response has been to set all WordPress.com post tags to global only. The theory is that this increases the exposure of your blog content for those who search those tag pages or use those keywords.

Personally, I hate it and rarely use them. This means I have to manually create my own site search tags. I do so at the bottom of most of my blog posts using a JavaScript Browser Bookmarklet described in A Tagging Bookmarklet for WordPress and WordPress.com Users. The JavaScript creates a set of links with tag words that link to a site search of my site.

I recommend that if you are frustrated by the lack of a local tagging option, you join me in passing on your thoughts through the WordPress.com feedback.

Now, it’s your turn. How can I help you learn more about tags and categories and how to categorize and structure your blog post content?

The theme for this year’s SOBCon is “ROI on Relationships” and how it relates to the business blogger.  If you have your MBA, ROI is probably part of your everyday vocabulary. If you are a small business owner, the acronym ROI maybe new to you but the underlying concept of calculating the return on your investment of time, money and resources is not. It is a core business concept and one that helps determine your profitability.

When I talk to someone about starting a blog for their business, the savvy business owner often asks me:

• How much is it going to cost?
• What will it entail?
• How much time will it take?
• How will it impact my bottom line?

The first three questions relate to the investment and the last one relates to the return. All are important and valid questions but when it comes to blogging it can be difficult to quantify the direct impact on your bottom line.

Why?

Sure, you can track the traffic from your blog, you can monitor conversions and you can count the sales from your blog but that is only part of doing business. The strengths of blogging lies in the opportunities to initiate, develop and maintain relationships with your customers. The time and effort that you spend on your blog is rewarded with an informed and engaged customer base.

When evaluating the return on your investment into blogging, be sure to consider the impact of relationships fostered there.

1. The cost of finding a new customer and making a sale  versus making a sale to a return customer
2. Your advertising costs versus word of mouth promotion by your customers, be it via their own blog, the phone or over the garden fence
3. The influence a satisfied and engaged customer has with friends in making purchasing decisions
4. The value your customers attach to being heard and their issues addressed
5. The suggestions and inspirations for your business that come from your customers comments and interactions on your blog
6. The feedback from your customers to help you adjust your inventory and/or services to best meet their needs more efficiently
7. Cost savings in terms of money and reputation when you can quickly address problems with your product or business
8. The intrinsic value to your and your employees in actively engaging a satisfied clientele.

These are just an inkling of the ways that blogging, with a focus on customer relations, can impact your bottom line.

Want to know more about the potential of ROI in relationships for business bloggers? Well, so do I! This post is part of the #blogitearnit promotion at  Terry Starbucker’s site, one of the cofounders of SOBCon. You can join the conversation early and save $200 off your registration for SOBCon 09. Hope to see you there!

The popular and prestigious Bloggers’ Choice Awards are now underway. You can nominate your favorite blogs, vote for the blogs that you like the best and peruse other nominations. Blog awards are given in a large number of categories from best humor blog to best blog design to best travel blog. They even have blog award categories for the Hottest Mommy Blogger and the Blogitizer.  Following the old advantage of there is no such thing as bad publicity, they even have blog categories for the Worst Blog of All Time and the Most Obnoxious Blogger.

So how does it work?

• Go to the Bloggers’ Choice Awards web site to create an account. You need to create an account to nominate and to vote for favorite blogs. The account creation is quick and easy. Reading and figuring out their CAPCHA images is the trickiest part!
• Click the nominate button. This will take you through a brief wizard to fill out details about the blog you want to nominate. You can nominate your own blog or any blog that you think is worthy of recognition. In the nomination process, you can choose up to four blog award categories.
• Once the nomination is complete, it will appear on the home page of the categories it was assigned. Go to those home pages and vote! I am amazed at the thousands of blogs nominated that don’t have a single vote. Voting is easy, just click on the vote button.
• Click on the blog’s link to see its Bloggers’ Choice Award page. It shows who voted for that blog and any comments that they made. This page will list a number of links. If it is your blog, use the claim link to give them a contact email.  There is also a link to add a voting badge. I have two on this blog, for each of the two categories nominated. The badges let people know you are running and makes it easy for them to vote for you.
• Start stumping for votes! Use the Invite Friends link to let your friends now about Bloggers’ Choice Awards. If you are in Blog Catalog, add a voting badge to your profile there. Go to Manage Blogs and there is a section to add in one blog award category badge to your blog profile. Announce it in your social networking groups.  Although you might not end up with an award in a category, you can still get attention and traffic  to your site. Even after the awards are announced, the nominations are kept up and many people use the Bloggers’ Choice Awards site to search for interesting and informative blogs.

If your blog is nominated for an award, let us know about it here. This is another good place to help rally the vote.

Blog naked? I am not talking about you wear or don’t wear while in front of your computer, but how much do you choose to expose of yourself to the world as you blog. On the class message board, several students have been expressing concern about how much of themselves that they want to share with the Internet world and that is important consideration that each blogger needs to weigh. This isn’t just a concern for beginning bloggers but experienced bloggers  as they weigh the pros and cons of sharing themselves online. Sonia Simone at CopyBlogger was inspired by last week’s Biz School for Bloggers to write a great post on this topic, titled Feel Great Naked.  She does a great job of offering hints about protecting yourself and the ones you love while providing a convincing argument about how it is the personal aspects of blogging that engage your reader. She also touches on the use of aliases and gives examples of professionals who have opted to work under a pseudonym.

We have been talking about using an alias on the class message board and I cover it this week’s lesson. You can develop an online persona for a number of reasons. The primary reason is to protect your identity. There are two factors to consider. The first that is if the only thing that you change is your name, what you write about will often give your readers clues about you like the region/city that you live, the composition of your family, your lifestyle, your socioeconomic background etc.  I use one of my aliases “Frumpz” on a review blog. Generally readers won’t know that Bean Fairbanks is Frumpz but after reading the fourth post on Washington wine, Seattle restaurants and/or Seattle events, they probably can figure out that I am in the Seattle area. I am quite comfortable with that level of exposure. The review blog would be meaningless if I chose to hide the locations of the reviews.

The second factor to consider is what will I do if I develop this online persona and I want to do more with it. This something regular authors struggle with when they are known for one style of writing but want to try something very different under a different name.  They may choose this due to a fear of failure or a fear of alienating their current fans. What do you do when that new writing style takes off  and your publisher wants you on tour and your face on the book jacket? Related to this is that blogging is more than just writing posts, it is about gaining authority to attract readership. How will this online persona promote the blog? Will you use this persona to comment on other blogs and build a reputation? I often use another persona online when I am promoting women’s health issues and relationships.  Gender, health, sexuality and relationships can be “hot button” topics. That persona could talk about my experiences as working as a patient model for the medical school. I probably don’t really want potential customers or students to base their decision to hire me on the fact that I use my (naked) body to teach physical exams, I want them to base their hiring decision on my technical and business skills. The persona that I use to develop authority in health promotion is different than the one I use to teach computer and business skills.

Oops! I just put information on an official business blog about something that I said I might not want students to know. In actuality, I thought about the disclosure and I felt OK about it. I made a purposeful choice to disclose that personal information because I decided that served the blog post in two ways. First, it was a real life example of using alternate personas for different aspects of who I am. Notice I did not give you the name of that persona. Truthfully if you REALLY searched for it you might find it but not without some serious work on your part. Secondly, that disclosure demonstrated a conscious choice on my part to share information that gives you more information as a teacher. I don’t just teach online computer classes, I also have taught for years at the medical school and the naturopath university. Maybe, just maybe, that gave me more authority in your eyes and built my reputation in your eyes. I gambled. It might have backfired. You might think that is too weird that your instructor sometimes teaches naked (well I am wearing a hospital gown so I might as well be naked!) or someone that teaches in a medical school is going to be too technical of a teacher for this course or… Your comments to this post will let me know if my gamble paid off.

As Sonia points out, it is the personal information that hooks us. It allows us to connect with the author in a different way and we often care more about what they say. The trick is to do it as a well informed decision versus a slip of the keyboard mid rant. I really stress planning your blog in the first week of class so you can make some of these choices. Sonia stresses the need for planning as well.

Don’t wing it. Sit down and work out, in writing, exactly what you will and won’t talk about. Maybe you’ll talk about old boyfriends but not your current husband, or you’ll say anything about your parents but nothing about your kids. Decide exactly where you draw the line, and live by that.

If you write a post that goes over your particular line, you can edit it and save the personal stuff for your private journal, or sleep on it (at least two nights, ideally) and post it anyway. Either way, you’ll have made a conscious decision.

Sonia says use your personal journal but you can also password protect the post as another option. The other thing that she stresses and with which I agree is that you share only what is yours, and not some one’s elses story.

As covered in the lesson, there is a huge spectrum of private to public online. In the lesson I mentioned some people have lost their jobs due to their blogs. The most famous is Heather (Hamilton) Armstrong whose blogging about being fired made her famous Heather not only blogs “naked”, she runs down the street naked waving a banner saying LOOK AT ME!. She says whatever is on her mind and is not shy about sharing her thoughts and prejudices in colorful language and humor. Her blog Dooce is not for the thin skinned or faint of heart. Sometimes I think it aometimes goes towards Too Much Information (TMI) but it also so popular that she was just on the Today show and her blog supports her entire family so the parents can stay at home with the kids.

Not all successful blogs have a personal element, but many do. This includes business as well as personal blogs. Businesses that can bare their mistakes and show the actions that they have taken to remedy the situation gain trust and customer loyalty.  It will be up to you decide how personal in nature your blog will be overall and on a post by post basis.

Professional bloggers work around the clock to stay on top of their competition. Often the first person to post the scoop is the one that wins. That is the post that makes the top of the list and garners thousands,  sometimes even hundreds of thousands of hits.  This insistent pressure to be the first is taking its toll, particularly on professional bloggers that are paid by the piece. Two professional bloggers have died of heart attacks in the past year, and their fellow bloggers are taking notice. Working from home doesn’t mean low stress. Advertising dollars is often a cut throat business and that is true for blogging for advertising dollars.  According to an article in today’s New York Times, bloggers that work as contractors or employees for media outlets are feeling the crunch as their pay may be based not only the post but on the number of hits that their post generates. Independent bloggers who have created their own media outlets are not immune.

“I haven’t died yet,” said Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog. The site has brought in millions in advertising revenue, but there has been a hefty cost. Mr. Arrington says he has gained 30 pounds in the last three years, developed a severe sleeping disorder and turned his home into an office for him and four employees. “At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen.”

Other professional bloggers complain of sleep deprivation, relationship issues, poor health and weight gain.  Hmm sounds like many a workaholic to me. The key is balance. Like others driven to succeed and to be the best, sacrifices are made. Only the individual can decide when the sacrifices are too great.  For me, with my limited energy and disability, I am delighted when my revenue pays my web hosting bill. If there is enough that month to sample and review another couple of bottles of wine, that is all good too!