In addition to my day job at Vitis PR, I blog as a hobby under a pseudonym. I have have just reorganised the categories on a blog I contribute to, so instead of two rather catch all categories of consumer and small business, now we have seven categories that span from useful, kids and health to news and house & home.
By simply reorganising the categories on the blog, we have seen traffic tripling in a month. Next step is to work on drop down menus for sub-categories, but as the site is a hobby, that can wait.
It has been however satisfying to see traffic grow.
Deciding what category content sits in is a slight challenge, as some content can sit in two categories, but with some strict guidelines, we should be ok.
The news category is useful as we can write about industry news straight from news coverage that we spot or even press releases we receive. However, many of the releases we see are written for the client and not for bloggers, so we have to strip out adjectives and corporate positioning and then write the story.
We write about shopping, so when a store launches a new range or has some significant news, we notice that the shops category does very well, if we write about the news. We find that writing about chains does draw in traffic as their own sites are so large that when consumers are looking for easy to digest information, it's often hard to find.
That's the thing with blogging, for people to come back, if you share your expertise about a topic that you are passionate about and make it easy to find the information, readers will keep coming back.
