Category Archives: Knowledge Engineering

Creating the Elephant for Others to Eat (One Bite at a Time)

Creating Your Next Big Project (And Staying Sane, and Having a Life, While Doing So)

There’s no question. Writing a book – should you ever do this – will take a big hunka outta your life.

When you write a book, you're creating the elephant - others will eat it!

When you write a book, you’re creating the elephant – others will eat it!

This is why many people balk.

During book-writing, you are switching gears from immediate-income-producing actions (coaching, working with clients of any sort, speaking, etc.) to the relative isolation of being tight-focused on your book production.

Nothing will make that really easy.

There are some things that you can do, though, that will make it bearable.

This is why I’m spending so much time writing to you about your writing your blog.

Creating the Elephant for Others to Absorb (One Little Bit at a Time)

Your book will be the product that others will eat: they will consume, they will digest your book. This means that other people will decide that what you have to offer is so good that they will take the time and energy to intake your book (or your video series, your TED podcasts, your whatever).

Before your elephant of ideas can inspire your tribe, you need to feed it carefully over time.

Before your elephant of ideas can inspire your tribe, you need to feed your elephant carefully over time.

So let’s change our analogy. (Out of respect for elephants, and for people.)

People will not actually eat your elephant.

However, over time, they will absorb your elephant’s wisdom.

(There now, that’s a much cooler analogy, isn’t it?)

But before they can do that, you need to create the elephant.

That’s why I recommend blogging your way to your next book.

This Week’s Power Tip: Intralink to Pull Your Ideas Together (And Guide Your People to Connected Thoughts)

Here’s an illustration from my own work.

Two years ago, I published my second book. This publication came twenty years after publishing my first. Instead of continuing in the direction of the technical material of the first, I struck out in an entirely different direction.

Your Next Creative Endeavor Requires Incubation, Rough Creation, and Refinement

My second book was Unveiling: The Inner Journey. (And of course, it is available from Amazon, trade paper or Kindle.)

Of the twenty years that it took to create the next book, there were three major stages. If you take on a similar task, you’ll experience the same:

  • Incubation – Letting the essence of your next creation emerge from your subconscious; realizing that you really are called to do the next big thing,
  • Roughing It Out – Doing the research, creating first rough drafts, building and reworking the core organization – and (if needed) gaining new skills or finding a new way to write, talk, or communicate with others, and then
  • Refinement – Moving from raw and rough to refined, polished, ready for publication – a stage that takes more time, energy, perseverance, and dedication than we ever want to contemplate.

Here’s a brief outline of my own timetable:

Incubation: It took me four years to catch my breath, and realize that I had a new book emerging inside me. Four years before I even realized that I wanted to write this new book.

Initial Creation: Then, it took me fourteen years to get a very raw rough draft into shape. (We’ll discuss that some other time.)

Refinement: After that, it took me 2 1/2 years to go from rough to polished to published. This was 2 1/2 years from the time that I said to myself, sitting down with all my assembled rough, “I can get this book out. There’s enough here. I’m ready.”

Even When You’re Putting Final Touches on Things, New Insights Keep Coming

Now, even though I had my rough, and was going into full-fledged edit-and-revise mode – I still kept getting new insights. (This is why blogging will come in handy for you.) Because I was focused on just getting a single product out the door, these new insights kept working their way into my book. (That’s why it took 2 1/2 years to get from rough to product, instead of my originally-projected two-to-three months.)

Making the Transition: Putting Insights into Blogs First, then Assembly into Book Later

During my revise-and-edit stage, one of the insights that I had dealt with archetypes.

I got enough material together, and organized well-enough, to get some really good new stuff into Unveiling.

However, the insights didn’t stop.

So, I began capturing them in my blog.

Regular Blogging Helps You Bring Your Ideas to Maturity

One of the most challenging concepts that I evolved had to do with the notion of a Hierophant. A Hierophant, as I found, is a transformational guide. He or she is more than a teacher. A teacher conveys known material, and measures success by the student’s absorption of this material.

Mr. Miyagi, from the Karate Kid, is a Hierophant.

Mr. Miyagi, from the Karate Kid, is a Hierophant.

A Hierophant, in contrast, deals with transforming the student – bringing that student from one state to another.

Example Hierophants include Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi (from Star Wars) and Mr. Miyagi (from the Karate Kid).

Over time, and in about a half-dozen blogs, I fleshed out the Hierophant concept.

Today’s Secret Weapon: Use Intralinking to Connect Your Dots

It took me months to develop enough to be clear and coherent on one new topic: the Hierophant archetype.

In a recent blog, I introduced a new archetype (Hathor, the goddess of love, sensuality, pleasure and romance). However, I brought in the Hierophant archetype in support of this new one.

At the end of the blog, I intralinked to (created links to my previous blog posts) all my previous Hierophant blogs.

Below, I show you how this looked. (The material below is taken from The Magical Turning Point – And What It Means to You (from the regular blog for Unveiling: The Inner Journey.)


Related Posts: HierophantHathor’s Protector


You can see from the above example (six intralinks or links to other blog posts, taken from a different blog) that I culled out six different blogposts on the Hierophant concept. They range in posting date from last week (the most recent) to about this time, two years ago. (They’re listed chronologically; most recent first.)

That’s two years of developing a single concept over time.

You can see the evolution of thought.

The first blog post is the one at the bottom of the listing – The Hero’s Quest and the Hierophant – Part 1. It reads almost as a teaser; I don’t really divulge anything about the Hierophant concept itself. However, I do set a lot of context – and this is important when introducing a new idea. This was approximately two years ago today; September 22nd, 2011. (Today is September 25, 2013).

A week later, in the next blogpost (Who – and What – Is a Hierophant?), I introduced a first definition – a first pulling out of the Hierophant concept in a useful way. If you read this one, you’ll see that I was still sort of groping towards definition-by-examples.

In the next two blogposts (Are Hierophants Really That Important? (McDonald’s Thinks So!) and The Hierophant as Guru/Guide (also deals with Hierophant/Hathor Connection)), you’ll see that I was getting clearer – the whole Hierophant notion took on more crispness, as I found more examples through reading books and talking with people.

These early blogs were a lot like my approach to writing my first book, when I wrote a set of “annotated bibliography” columns for a highly specialized computer science journal. They were expostulation. I was developing and framing a new idea, and using the blog to flesh it out for myself. Readers benefited – but at this stage, I was still really writing more for myself than for them.

Then, I began to look at the connection between the Hierophant and other archetypes. That started a whole exploration. Once again, I was back to early-stage expostulating. (For this, see two blogs – Hathor or Hierophant – Who’s On Top? and a blog that followed shortly therafter, Our Hierophant: Mentor, Protector, and Guide for Our Love-Goddess Hathor.) These were written a little over two years ago; March of 2012.

By now, I was getting some solid content – material that could be used to generate a rough and raw draft for a new book. (See my blog in this series from two weeks ago; How to Write Your Book by Writing Your Blog.)

Finally, I began to get some real crispness – not only about the Hierophant notion, but also how this archetype “played with others.” (Specifically, how this archetype interacted with the Hathor-goddess archetype; see The Magical Turning Point and What It Means for You.)

In this last blog, you’ll see that my concepts are clearer – they are more well-defined, their relations with others are clearer. My writing style is less going through my personal journey, and more authoritative.

In short, it took a two-year timeframe to clearly bring out and define one concept.

Yes, there are other concepts and works that I’ve brought out in the same timeframe.

What you’re seeing here, though, is the time that it takes to bring your ideas to maturity.

Translating: From My Experience to Your Writing (and Your Idea-Generation)

Your first blogs on a subject will be exploratory. You may just be sensing that something is ready to emerge, and setting context. Think of yourself as an artist, working with oil paints. Your first step will be rough pen-and-pencil or charcoal drafts, or quick sketches. Then, you’ll prep the canvas.

Then, your next few blogs on that subject will give it tentative rough shape. In “artist’s terms,” you’re blocking out the main figures.

After that, your work focuses on connecting your concepts to one another. How do they support? How do they interconnect? How do they, taken together, build a larger whole?

If you were an artist, this would be the time in which you’d work on connecting visual flow; making sure that colors, patterns, or motifs in one area connect to another.

Finally, you come to the finishing work.

As a writer, though, what you’ve brought forth in your blogs is simply the core element of your ideas and concepts. Taking them into book form, or making them ready for broader dissemination, is an entirely new stage.

The point is: by using your blog, you’ve generated, fleshed out, and developed your new and significant intellectual contributions. You know what you know.

This is a good place.


To your health, wealth, and well-being –

Alianna

Position Yourself for the Long-Term: Fine-Tuning Your Blog Categories

Establish Yourself as the Pre-Eminent Authority – Use Well-Crafted Categories to Make Your Blog Ultra-Searchable

Why Are We Doing This? (Long-Term Peace-of-Mind and Prosperity)

This is the second blog on the subject of carefully crafting blog categories and tags. (Third, actually.)

Position yourself for the long term.

Position yourself for the long term.

There’s no rah-rah with this. The subject matter is rather dry, and the work involved – in doing this right – is a fair chunk of time.

So why invest the effort, you may ask?

It’s all in how you want to position yourself for the future.

There are lots of coaches, counselors, and marketing gurus out there – and for the moment, I’m going to divide these coaches into roughly two camps. There are the rah-rah folks. They do give great advice; don’t get me wrong here. But one blog post could be about the power of focus. Another about clearly setting goals. Any one is as good as the next, and you are probably not too likely to go digging through their archives. If you get and read any of their posts in a given week, great. If not – there will be another, just as good, next week.

These are all good folks; they play a good role.

But I’m trusting – for purposes of our work together today – that you’d rather be in the other camp. This is the camp of the knowledge experts.

Remember, we’re talking about establishing you as King of the Hill in your particular area of expertise. This whole blog series (and Mourning Dove Press itself) is dedicated being a Kingmaker; to helping you get to the top of your game.

Our focus is strategic.

One of our primary goals is to help you develop that strong, secure knowledge base that will firmly establish you as a leader in your field.

This means that the content that you produce will be valuable. You’re writing – as I am right now – the equivalent of college lesson plans. People will come back to you again and again, because they’ll regard you as the authoritative source. And when they have a question about a topic, they’ll search first within your blog series – because they trust your content.

Imagine that.

Imagine that when people have a question in their minds – about something for which they know that you’re the expert – they go first to your blog, and check on your categories and tags. They read your blogs first. THEN – maybe – they do the Google search.

That would be pretty amazing, right?

For this to take place, your blog has to be very content-searchable.

Three Primary Tactics for Increasing Blog Topic Findability

There are three primary tactics that will make what you write more findable by others:

  1. Categories and subcategories – Logical, hierarchical organization of major topics and themes,
  2. Tag Cloud – Swirly, overall-impression, gestalt insight into people, places, things, and events that keep showing up in your blogs, together with topical threads that are like supporting actors, and
  3. Direct internal links (intralinks) to related blogs – You purposefully insert links – both within the blog post text and at the bottom of the blog – inviting the reader to follow a line of thought to other blog posts that you’ve pre-selected for them.

In this blog post, we’re focusing on the first issue – working carefully, diligently, and meticulously with categories and sub-categories. This will be your foremost and primary strategy to make what you write findable – for years to come – by people who will visit your blog.

A Case Study – Categories for a Hundred-Posts Blog

We’re using another blog as a Case Study, to illustrate the process of category conversion and refinement.

The blog associated with Unveiling: The Inner Journey is the Case Study material for this lesson on blog categories and subcategories.

The blog associated with Unveiling: The Inner Journey is the Case Study material for this lesson on blog categories and subcategories.

The starting situation resulted from importing a Google Blogger blog series into WordPress. This blog series is an ongoing outreach based on a book (Unveiling: The Inner Journey) published in 2011. The blog – and the rest of the book’s web material – are now all at The Unveiling Journey.

The material used for today’s blog post lesson is taken from yesterday’s work on the other blog; that posting is When Your Inner Green Man Breaks from Cover.

If you are looking at that particular blog post some time substantially after this post is being written (on Wednesday, Sept. 4th, 2013), then you could see a real difference in the categories and tags on the blog versus those that are shown here as screen shots.

The reason?

Blog categories and sub-categories are something that I (as blog author) can change over time; I can add new categories, move categories around (make them subs or parents), even rename them. This can make the actual category names – and the organization of sub-categories – change over time.

Also, as I associate more blog posts with certain categories (this is the time-consuming part), you’ll see more posts after each category listed in the Categories sidebar widget.

Finally, as I add more tags and refine the existing ones, the nature of the Tag Cloud will change.

Thus, today’s lesson is a snapshot in time – you can go to The Unveiling Journey and see the ongoing blog, but expect a few differences.

Today’s Lesson: Starting Sub-Category Creation and Refinement

This blog post will review the work done in the previous post, and take the next steps:

  1. Create useful sub-categories,
  2. Do a first pass on category consolidation, and create new parent categories as needed – so that certain existing categories can become sub-categories under a broader topic, and
  3. Attach new category (and sometimes sub-category) associations for each blog post – a time-consuming task that was started for this illustration, but which will take weeks – maybe months – to complete.

Starting Position: Categories Reduced in Number, but Still a “Flat Hierarchy”

In the previous blog post, Make It Easy for Others, we started the (rather arduous) process of category refinement.

Initially, I’d imported a series of blog posts from Google Blogger. There were 94 blog posts, and a total of 135 categories – because the import mechanism made every Blogger “label” into a “category.”

Categories in transition

Categories in transition: the set of categories from the previous figure has been cut down by 2/3, resulting in a smaller, more manageable set.

Using the WordPress Categories to Tags Converter plug-in, I quickly moved 90 of those so-called “categories” to “tags.” (You can see a portion of the resulting new categories listing on the right; this figure was also shown in the previous blog post.)

This left me with 45 categories; still way too many.

In addition, while I intrinsically understood that there was a logical hierarchy in my categories, they were not yet evident in the category listing. This was something I’d have to create.

The next tasks were three-fold:

  1. Create appropriate sub-categories, and put them under the right parent-categories,
  2. Make sure each blog has both the right parent categories and sub-categories – this requires detailed checking, because often it will be the new parent category that has to be noted for each blog, and
  3. Combine redundant categories, eliminate unnecessary categories – a first pass at what will be a fairly time-consuming process.

This blog post concentrates mostly on Steps (1) and (2).

Step 1: Creating Sub-Categories

I created two major new categories, and changed a number of existing categories into sub-categories, under one or another of these two new major categories. The following figures show each.

The first major new category was “Archetype.” This was a simple decision; I knew that the blog content was about several different archetypes, and this was one of the most searchable topics.

Step 1A: Be Smart about Category Names

Hint: Choose category names that will show up at the top of the category listings – especially for high-value categories (those that you intend to be most searched). I made sure that the category label was Archetype, not Archetypes – this ensured that it was first in alphabetical order.

Also, I discovered that WordPress 2012 Theme allows us to show hierarchies with categories.

Step 1B: Show Category Hierarchies in the Category Widget – Make It Easy for Readers to Discern Sub-Categories Under Main Category Headings

The figure below shows how to cause the WordPress 2012 theme to show category hierarchies. This walk-through is for the case where you have a single sidebar, where you host all your various widgets for your blog.

First, while in the blog editor, select Appearance from the left-hand column. Under Appearance, select Widgets. This will bring up a screen of widget options. (You can see a partial screenshot of this in the figure below.) You can drag-and-drop widgets into the right hand sidebar; that will make them show up in the sidebar in blog posts and pages.

The Categories widget is already (typically) included in your sidebar’s standard settings. Click on Main Sidebar to see the options for your main pages.

You can make category hierarchies appear by selecting 'Show hierarchy' in the Categories tab in your sidebar; use Appearance => Widgets to find this.

You can make category hierarchies appear by selecting ‘Show hierarchy’ in the Categories tab in your sidebar; use Appearance => Widgets to find this; click on the Main Sidebar option on the RH Sidebar.

Click on the Categories widget to see your selection options, as shown in the figure above.

Select (check) the Show hierarchy option under the Category widget in the sidebar listing.

Save the result. (Save button at lower right; see figure above.)

Step 1C: Start Creating Sub-Categories

The first category/sub-category step was obvious. I knew that many blog posts were about one or another of the various Core Power Archetypes discussed in the blog series; these were archetypes such as Amazon, Magician, Hierophant. It was important that people be able to see all the major archetypes at a glance.

One already-existing category was Archetype. (How convenient!)

First set of sub-categories: Various specific archetypes are made sub-category to the new Archetype parent-level category.

First set of sub-categories: Various specific archetypes are made sub-category to the new Archetype parent-level category.

I decided to make this the new parent for all the specific archetypes. Using the Categories Editor, I identified each of my existing archetypes (Amazon, etc.) as being a “sub” to the new “parent.” In this way, I transitioned twelve categories from being independent parent-level categories to subs under the main Archetype parent.

Since my goal is to reduce the number of parent-level categories to no more than seven (if possible), this was a pretty good first step.

As a side-benefit, since Archetype was a pre-existing category, and the blogs that dealt with any specific archetype (Amazon, Magician, etc.) were already pre-labeled with Archetype as well as the specific (and now sub) archetype, I didn’t have to associate the new Archetype parent category with the various blog posts. You can see that Archetype, as a parent category, has 31 blogs associated with it. Each specific archetype has a fewer number of associated posts; this makes sense. The parent category should always include each of the posts that are assigned to a sub-category.

Step 1C Continued: Make More Parent/Sub-Category Groupings

The first parent/sub-category group was obvious; I knew what I’d do before I started.

Once this first step was done, I took a look at the remaining categories. There were several that related to archetypes – but to sets of archetypes, or to interactions between them, or to other factors involving one or more of the different archetypes identified in the previous category. An example was Core Power Archetypes, which had 17 associated posts.

Thus, a new parent was in order. I created Archetypes-Overview, and made several of the existing categories to be subs to this new parent. You can see this in the figure below.

This figure is based on a screenshot taken while in the Categories Editor for the blog; the previous figures were taken from the “front view,” the blog as it appears when a reader normally accesses it.

This figure shows the category name, and the sub-categories under it – together with the SLUG (the label used for the category by WordPress), and the number of posts that are assigned to that category or sub-category.

Refined Categories and Sub-Categories: Collect Related Topics

Refined Categories and Sub-Categories: collect related topics

Some order is beginning to appear: five pre-existing categories have now been made subs to the new Archetype-Overview parent category. However, because this is a new parent, it didn’t have any subs associated with it.

I began reading through the blogs – specifically, I clicked on the right-most Number for each of the sub-categories; that brought me to a listing of the blogs for that particular sub. Then, I read each blog. I associated the new parent Archetype-Overview with it, and also checked to make sure that other related categories – or sub-categories – were also associated. The figure above shows the result after I’d associated just two blogs with the new parent.

I also created a new sub-category; Archetypes-Masculine & Feminine. You can see that I’ve assigned one blog to it in this figure.

Step 2: Annotating Blog Posts with Right Categories & Sub-Categories

The figure below shows the result after I’d read five more blogs.

The number of blogs associated with the parent Archetype-Overview is now seven. While doing this, I realized that some of these blog posts needed to associate with other sub-categories as well; you can see that (in comparison with the last figure in the previous section), the number of Archetypes-Masculine & Feminine has risen from 1 to 6. (Not surprising; this was a new sub-category.)

Blog Posts are being added to the new parent category(ies) to which they now belong.

Blog Posts are being added to the new parent category(ies) to which they now belong.

Process Summary

You can see, from the figure on the right, that I’m making some progress – the number of blogs identified with the Archetype-Overview category is steadily increasing.

To do this, I look at each and every blog that has one of the sub-categories for Archetype-Overview attached to it. Does it have the parent category listed as well?

Of course it doesn’t, because I just created Archetype-Overview as a new parent, and made all the related categories be subs to that parent. That means that every blog carrying one of the sub-categories has to be manually associated to the parent as well.

Do This Yourself, or Hire It Out?

Admittedly, what I’m showing here is a time-consuming and tedious task.

You could possibly write out a detailed “Process Description” for this step, and have an administrative assistant do this task for you.

Right now, though, there’s some benefit in doing this myself. I’m looking over all my material – roughly grouped by topic (using the new sub-categories as a topical guide). It’s giving me an overview of what I have; what I’ve written when, and how my thinking has evolved.

I see some blogs that actually need to be moved out of this particular blog series and into another one. I see which blogs are most essential; they capture my best thinking on a topic.

You are the owner of your own blog content. If you’re conducting a major blog review-and-revision, then reading through your own material is a good step. You can note which blogs contain your most significant information. (You can also install a plug-in to track which are most popular over time; but since you can direct people’s attention, I wouldn’t rely on that exclusively.)

You can see where you began a topical thread, and might want to schedule it in for your Editorial Calendar (assuming that you have one; if not, this is a good time to create such a calendar – more on that in a different blog).

In short, doing this yourself, hiring someone to do it for you, or splitting the workload is a very personal decision. It has a lot to do with what kinds of content you have, and how carefully you want to personally control how your content is labeled and made findable to others.

Step 3: Blog Intra-Linking

We’ve done a lot in this blog, and so we’ll close with just one very small step that you can take – if you plan to be very diligent about directing your reader’s attention.

I’d written – at the beginning of this blog – that this was second in a series.

I was wrong. This is actually the third blog post in a series on categories, sub-categories, and tags. This particular post is by far the most technical and detailed. However, the two preceding posts give valuable context and motivation. They also discuss the role of the Tag Cloud, which I’ve not mentioned at all in this post.

Use Intra-Linking to Direct Readers to Related Posts

How to get readers to check out your related blogs? Simple. Point them right to it. I’m going to do this below. You’ll see my signature, and then – a Related Posts section.

Try this yourself.

It’s just one more thing; it takes additional time and energy, but it’s sort of like tucking in the threads after doing needlework – it gives your blog a finished sense. It also lets people know that you’re dealing with a theme; they will respect you as creating a body of work – not a simple one-off piece.

I’m going to put the Related Posts here – and some day in the future, I’ll go to the blogs identified in this particular Related Posts – and update them with their own Relateds.

Time-consuming, yes. But it’s the detail work that counts.


To your own success –

Alianna


Related Posts

Make It Easy for Others (So They Come to You More Often)

The Power of Categories – The Best Way to Increase Your Blog’s Searchability

Are the people who are coming to your blog simply getting lost in the woods?

Are the people who are coming to your blog simply getting lost in the woods?

Have you ever had the experience of people coming to your blog, and then leaving after reading just one post?

Is there a chance that even though you’ve written extensively on a topic, the right audience is not learning that you are the world’s most authoritative expert?

Are the people who read your blog simply getting lost in the woods – without a clear sense of direction?

This may have to do with the backbone that you’ve set up for your blog series: the way in which you use categories and tags.

Blog Categories and Tags: The Backbone Structure for Your Blog Series

In the last blogpost, Dominate the Blogosphere: Use Categories and Tags to Establish Authority, I introduced a new topic with you: How you can make your blog more useful – and more findable/searchable – and more interesting – when you are smart about using blog categories and tags.

A blog without categories and tags is chaotic

A blog without categories and tags is chaotic; it’s like trying to find a book when they’re all in a jumbled pile.

Very simply put: If you don’t make smart use of categories and tags, your blog is in chaos. There may be “hidden gems,” but no one can find them.

The “old saw” amongst bloggers is: Content is King, and Relevance is Queen.

I’ll add to that by saying: Findability is the Wizard.

 

 

Using categories and tags introduces structure and order into your blog; it makes your blog content findable.

Using categories and tags introduces structure and order into your blog; it makes your blog content findable.

When you do some simple and straightforward things that make your blogs findable searchable, then you become the Great Seer: you discover the mysteries of the universe and then help others use these insights in a practical and helpful manner.

They way in which you do this is to use categories and tags in a smart, well-structured manner.

Blog Categories in Transition: Before and After Pictures

Blog categories - partial listing - taken from recently imported Google Blogger blog series. There are over 100 categories for this blog series, drawn from Blogger labels.

Blog categories – partial listing – taken from recently imported Google Blogger blog series. There are over 100 categories for this blog series, drawn from Blogger labels.

In the previous blog post, Dominate the Blogosphere, I showed a picture of a blog series that I’d just imported into a new WordPress site from its original home in Google Blogger. An extract from that image is to the right. This is how the categories in this blog looked at the beginning of today’s work.

In this blog series (the one whose categories are on the right), I write a lot about archetypes. However, looking at the categories – as shown in the listing on the right – it would be hard for a first-time reader to figure out that archetypes were a persistent and dominant theme.

The “archetypes” in this blog series (shown on the right) are also a rather complex theme – there are many sub-topics under these archetypes. Many of them are topics for multiple blogs; I want the blog series to be easily searchable for them.

As I re-organize this blog’s categories, one step will be to use both parent and child categories.

Before I can do that, though, I need to clean the clutter. There are about 135 “categories” in this listing. These are really the old “labels” from the Google Blogger – and so are not really categories at all.

Before I can design my new category sets, I need to clean out all those little topics that I will probably never mention again. Also, names of people, places, and things are not – and never will be – “categories.” Categories are broad topics, and proper nouns (the names of anything) are specifics.

Category or Tag? A Quick Rule-of-Thumb

A quick rule of thumb helps us with our first-pass decisions:

  • Categories are broad – general-purpose topics; things that comprise overarching “themes,” and
  • Tags are for specifics – names of people, places, and things, as well as for details and things mentioned-in-passing.

Step 1 – Cleaning Out the Clutter

Re-building the categories a lot like cleaning out a closet or a garage. The first step is to clean out the clutter.
In the case of the blog series illustrated to the right, this means moving a lot of things from categories to tags. Specifically, these will include:

  1. All book titles,
  2. All names for persons and organizations, and
  3. All names of things and events.

To do this, I’ve used a “category-to-tag” tool available in the Import section of WordPress. I didn’t know about this tool the first time that I did a Google Blogger-to-WordPress Blog several months ago, and this chore took hours. (Maybe even days.)

Just now – by going to the Import section under the “Tools” Menu, I found the Category-to-Tag plugin link; installed the plugin, and used it right away.

The result? I had started with about 135 “categories.” (These were the original labels that I used in the Google Blogger.) Within a few minutes, I moved 90 of those “categories” over into being “tags.”

Whew! What a difference. I’m now down to “only” 45 categories; still way too many. But this – at least – is manageable. Over the next week, I’ll be going through and thinking about what goes where. What is a “parent,” and what is a “child.” How to organize and name these things so that they’re findable – both by myself and others.

Here’s the result of this first pass.

Step 1, Part 1: The First Pass in Cleaning Out the Categories

Categories in transition

Categories in transition: the set of categories from the previous figure has been cut down by 2/3, resulting in a smaller, more manageable set.

An extract from the newly-revised categories is (once again) on the right.

You can immediately see several key differences:

  1. The book titles, personal names, and names of things and events have all been moved out,
  2. The remaining categories are all “topical” in nature – not all of them will survive as categories, but now they’re easier to consider.

The number of times that a category has been used (the number in parenthesis to the right of each category) is a good indicator for future decision-making: Is this a one-time thing, or will I be writing about it a lot in the future?

Just glancing at the list brings up a small conundrum – and an example of the kind of problem that we have to solve when designing categories and sub-categories (parent and child categories). I’ll walk you through how I’m solving this in the next blogpost.

Step 1, Part 2: Moving Those Excess Categories into a Tag Cloud

The Tag Cloud for the Unveiling blog site now contains the 90 categories that have been re-assigned as tags.

The Tag Cloud for the Unveiling blog site now contains the 90 categories that have been re-assigned as tags.

For now, though, one other figure is helpful. We finally have a Tag Cloud, which I’ve labeled “Hot Topics,” available right under the category listing. I show an extract of this to the left.

Just because something is not a “general” search topic – either a parent or a child category – does not mean that it’s not useful.

In fact, by moving all those excess labels into a Tag Cloud, we have an entirely different way of peering into a blog’s content.

Categories and Tags: Left-Brain and Right-Brain Ways of Peering Into Blog Content

It’s that whole “left-brain/right-brain” notion once again.

Blog categories serve your left brain; blog tags serve your right brain.

The keft-brain/right-brain distinction applied to blogging: blog categories serve your left brain; blog tags serve your right brain.

  • Categories are a “left-brain” type of organization – they’re hierarchically organized (parent and child), and they hold the major themes that you decide – upfront – that will be important in your blog.
  • Tags are a “right-brain” type of organization – the various specifics that come up as you write towards your general themes.

I particularly like blog tags because they give you the “Aha!” moments – as in, I didn’t realize that I was writing about that topic, or mentioning that book, quite so often.

Tags a good way for you (and others) to see what you’re about; tags are the little things that consistently work their way into your thoughts and your writing.

Step 2: Designing the Parent and Child Categories (A Thought-Exercise)

The “parent” and “child” distinction does show up in the category listings. However, it’s smart to design how and where they show up – so you can guide your reader’s attention. This means that you have to design the parent and child categories yourself, and then use some smart linguistic tricks to give your readers a clue.

It’s worth taking a pen and pad of paper, and noodling this around for a while.

What We’ll Do in the Next Blog Post

If you have a Google Blogger account, and are transitioning to a WordPress-based blog-plus-web combination, you’ll be doing an exercise much like I’m doing now. This is the same exercise that I did several months ago, when I migrated my first Blogger account over to WordPress, and then took on a client, for whom I’ve been moving a Xanga-based blog to WordPress. In each case, categories have needed careful and thoughtful attention – not just to their organization, but to their names.

In the next blog post, I’ll take you “behind the scenes” – I’ll take you through my thought-process as I re-organize this blog’s categories, and build a new tag set as well. At the end, you’ll see how easy the new categories will make it to find what’s needed.

Finding Our Way Out of the Forest

Creating good blog categories and tags is like giving your readers a clear path through the forest; they can navigate to what really interests them.

Creating good blog categories and tags is like giving your readers a clear path through the forest; they can navigate to what really interests them.

Categories are like well-marked trails and pathways – they help us to navigate our way through the woods!

Until next time –

To your own health, wealth, and wisdom –

Alianna

 


P.S. Do you want to follow my process as it evolves? The blog series that I’m using for this exercise is for my book, Unveiling: The Inner Journey. The book was published about two years ago, and I developed the blog series before publication – so there are now over 100 blog posts, most developing the thoughts that I originally expressed in the book. Have a look at The Unveiling Journey, which is the new home for both the Unveiling blog and its associated website; both still in progress.

Revisit that blog every week or so – not just to see the new blog content, but to observe how the blog category-and-tag reorganization project is coming along.

It’s a lot like checking out how your neighbors are remodeling their old Victorian home – always interesting to look into someone else’s renovation project!


P.P.S. Don’t have a book, but think you might want to?

Start getting your content onto paper (actually, into digital files) by blogging.

Can you see how I’m doing that with the Unveiling blogs? Have a look at that blog series to see how I’m developing new insights about psychological archetypes. Once I have sufficient material, I’ll cull them into a manuscript, and edit and revise – and there will be a new book!

Or, just stay closer to home. Look through this blog series. Do you see the theme on Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, applied to internet marketing? That’s another book-in-the-making. Do you see that this blog post, and the previous, address how to use categories and tags to give structure to a blog series? Another book. Maybe a short one, maybe a chapter in a longer one, but this is more unique content.

Do what I’m doing. Use your blogs to get your content onto paper (into a file). This is useful because it helps you to start writing for others, not just yourself. Then, putting the material into a book becomes a much more manageable task.

Best wishes and good luck! – Alianna

Dominate the Blogosphere: Use Categories and Tags to Establish Authority

Getting Respect: Using Your Blog to Establish Your Expertise

If you’re like me, you spend hours every week on your blogs.

Influence - that's why we write blogs!

Influence – that’s why we write blogs!

In fact, you may know that your blogs are the heart and soul of your outreach. This means that one of your top goals is to make your blogs among the most attractive, most well-read, and most authoritative in your field. You “feed your flock” through your blogs; presenting your finest wisdom, and carefully cultivating your ideas over time.

But are all the right people finding you?

Have you set up your blog so that someone who is searching on a topic will find you? Do you have confidence that someone searching on your area of expertise will select your blog as one of the resources that they’ll check out first?

If you’re like most people (and like me – up to a year ago), your honest answer would be, “I’m not sure.”

Become Known as the Leading Expert in Your Field by Making Your Blog Findable, Searchable, Linkable, and Valuable – Smart Ways to Use Blog Tags and Categories

A year ago, I had several blogs, and several websites. They had grown organically over time; from simple structures into unorganized chaos.

I realized that the best of my material was “lost in the noise” – noise of my own making!

I had to take a step back – a very big step.

I made the tough business decision to pull way back, disassemble what I had built, and re-assemble – this time with a clean, clear, solid structure and foundation that would make my most important material stand out, make the supporting material clearly in support role, and everything easily findable to a casual reader.

It was like renovating an old Victorian home; one that had grown haphazardly over time.

The result?

My blogs (and there are still several, including this one) are now well-structured; well-organized. The material is “findable.”

More than “findable,” if someone is searching for a topic in my blog, they can now easily get all of the relevant blogs, and from there, be gently and quietly led to other related posts.

Instead of presenting people with an impenetrable, overgrown forest, I take them gently by the hand, guiding them on well-defined paths, and pointing out the interesting sights and vistas.

A huge difference, an immense amount of hard work, and a battle well-fought.

But did I say that I’d transitioned all my blogs?

Ahem. A slight overstatement.

I’m still in the middle.

Blog “Makeover”

Since we all love “before and after” makeover stories, I’m going to take you “behind the scenes” into two blogs; one near the end of its transition, and one at the beginning.

I’m going to open up my playbook – one built not only in the practical “hard knocks” school of blogging, but also on decades of research into how our human minds store and organize knowledge, and on the secrets behind some of the top algorithms (computer programs) that are actually useful to individual bloggers today.

No fancy software needed. This is mostly pen and paper, and potentially some Google Analytics.

The best part? You can use these “secrets” to transform your own blog-world.

It will take time – lots of time. This is not an overnight effort, although you can start in one day and make considerable progress by nightfall.

A Tale of Two Blogs

To illustrate the transition, I’ll share with you a tale of two blogs: one that has undergone the transition, and one that has not yet gone from “chaos” to “order.”

First, the “chaotic blog.”

Chaotic Blog: Way Too Many Categories

A blog with too many categories; hard to find topics of interest.

A blog with too many categories; hard to find topics of interest.

The figure above is a screenshot taken August 14, 2013 of the Home Page from www.theunveilingjourney.com.

Note the listing of categories on the right. Only a partial listing is viewable in this screenshot; you’re seeing categories from A-D. Obviously, many more would be visible if you could scroll down the page.

How easy would it be to find something in this blog series? Pretty tough, right?

The reason is that the Category list puts all the levels of detail at the same level of searchability. In this short section, you see book titles (at the top of the list, inside double quotes), the names of several people (both real and fictional), and some categories that might be “broad topics.” (Archetypes and archetype dominance are both possibilities, at first glance.)

Looking at this list, it’s nearly impossible to determine what this blog is really about. Is it about books? After all, several book titles are given, along with the topical category “book reviews.” There are some authors mentioned, such as Christine Feehan and several others.

Or is it about movies? (There’s mention of Clarice Starling.) There are historical figures: Aspasia, Beethoven. There are currently-living figures; Dingwall Fleary is a well-known local orchestral conductor.

Or is it about topics such as “archetypes,” “archetype dominance,” and “core power archetypes”?

From the categories list – as it stands right now – there is no way to tell.

That means that someone finding this blog as a result of a random search would not know which other topics were dominant, or what the blog focus and direction was.

Even though there are over 100 blog posts in this series, the random categorization makes this series much too like an overstuffed closet.

To find out how to do better – to create categories that let the reader know what is topically dominant, and help them find what they want, let’s examine the figure in the section below.

Well-Ordered Blog: Limited, Well-Chosen Categories

Below, we see a screenshot from a blog that is much more ordered. Whether using Google or some other search engine to find a topic here, or visually scanning this blog for topics, it is much easier to find material by topics.

Blog with well-organized, two-tiered categories - less than two dozen categories help users find relevant material 'at a glance.'

Blog with well-organized, two-tiered categories – less than two dozen categories help users find relevant material ‘at a glance.’

The blog shown in the screen capture above has about two dozen categories. Not only is the number of categories significantly reduced, but as you inspect the category listings, it is clear that there is a two-tier category structure.

WordPress (which is the framework for both of these blogs) lets you identify parent and child (or sub) categories. However, that doesn’t influence how the categories show up in the category list!

You have to be smarter; you have to be more clever than WordPress.

You can see how this is done in the category listing above.

How to Be Smart When You Name Your Categories: A Lesson from the Playbook

A “Top-Tier” category is A Resource. In fact, it is such an important category that instead of labeling it the more obvious Resources, I (being the blog author) made it A Resource instead. That put it at the top of the reading sequence.

The reason for this? I (as author) am seeking to be known as a top Resource repository. I have several sub-categories underneath it. It’s important enough to me – and (I suspect) important enough to readers – to make it the most “front and center” category for this blog.

Underneath it are the various kinds of resources. As with all categories (regardless of level), they’re listed in alphabetical order. So to keep them visually-associated with A Resource, I named them so that they would naturally fall next in line. The names for these blog sub-categories are A Resource Article-Link, A Resource Book, etc. Pretty obvious.

Clearly, one of the important topics in this blog series is Resources. Someone who is searching for resources in this area-of-interest could find blogposts devoted to different kinds of resources; books, articles (with good links), DVDs, etc. This is a blog organization that now makes sense.

So what happened to all of the other terms? The “Christine Feehans” of this blog world?

They’re still there – but they’ve been moved to a realm of much lower visibility.

Instead of being blog categories, they are now blog tags – a much less dramatic notation.

Categories are a way of saying, “This blog is about [this category topic].” Tags are a way of adding little notations, as in, “Oh yes, we also mention such-and-such in passing.”

Categories group and identify major themes. Tags identify nice-to-knows.

With a simple widget, you can easily create a Tag Cloud.

Playbook Tip #2: Use Tag Clouds to Provide a Secondary “Swirl of Interest” About Blog Topics

The figure below shows a second screenshot from the same blog – and same blog post – as the one used above to illustrate the “well-ordered blog.”

A Tag Cloud (here renamed 'Hot Topics') gathers up all the 'little things' that you say in passing.

A Tag Cloud (here renamed ‘Hot Topics’) gathers up all the ‘little things’ that you say in passing.

Tag Clouds tell the reader about the totality of your blog in a much more “swirly” sort of way. If the Categories are Left-brain, then the Tag Cloud is right-brain. The left-brain Categories are carefully chosen, well-ordered and structured, and have names precisely devised to make them readable in a certain order. In contrast, the right-brain Tag Cloud, an amorphous swirl of topics and names, gives your reader a “gestalt overview” – a gut sense – of what the whole blog series is about.

As an example: the Category Set for this blog series makes a big deal about providing access to resources; to the extent of making A Resource the first category. In contrast, when we look at the Tag Cloud, we’ll find that a specific book (my own, of course) is dominant: Unveiling: The Inner Journey. This book is not listed as a category, because there are other books mentioned throughout the series as well. But the overall emphasis becomes clear when we look at the Tag Cloud.

If you look near the bottom of the previous figure, showing Categories, you’ll see a category near the bottom: Teachers, Healers, Coaches, and Guides. That’s a fine general category.

If you look at the Tag Cloud in the figure just above, you’ll see a couple of names pop out. Anahid Sofian is one (see the big bold letters). Eva Cernik (slightly smaller letters) is another. You’ll also note that the phrase Master Teacher shows up fairly well. Clearly, this blog series has a lot to say about Master Teachers – and (for those in the know), Anahid Sofian is one of the most respected (as well as being one of my own Master Teachers), and she shows up strongly. Eva Cernik, a protégé of Mdm. Sofian and a Master Teacher in her own right (as well as being another of my own Master Teachers) shows up well – although less strongly than the person whom we would both regard as one of our primary teachers.

So what do we get from studying this example?

A quick recap:

Smart Use of Blog Categories

Overall, use categories to establish broad, general themes – to identify your blog’s topical focus:

  1. Limit the number of categories as much as possible; some blog strategists suggest that 7 – 10 should be the max,
  2. Create sub-categories as appropriate; again, try to consolidate and limit the number,
  3. Carefully refine category wording, to put the most important categories at the top of the list, and carefully strategize how to name sub-categories, so they appear near their “parent” category.

Smart Use of Tags

Use tags to identify specifics, and use a Tag Cloud to present an “swirly-eyeful” of your blog’s overall content.

  1. Use tags for people, organizations, places, events, and things,
  2. Use tags also to fill out phrases or terms that are vital to some of your main themes, and
  3. Trust that as you write on important topics over time, and categorize/tag your blog entries faithfully, the dominant tags (topical themes) will rise in visibility.

Taken together, tags and categories help you reach your reader, and communicate the overall blog content while still delivering specific blogs in response to the reader’s search.


Want the full Playbook?

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I’ll be divulging the full Playbook in a series of emails.

This is pretty important stuff, so I’d like to share this with you via email, rather than just posting it on the blog. I’ve got some pretty awesome material coming up – based on years of formal research as a scientist in knowledge discovery, followed by the more reality-grounded “school of hard knocks” in learning to do effective blogging – and then making these blogs findable.

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To your own success –

Alianna

"Knowledge Management" – Key Element for Start-Up Businesses

Knowledge Management – the “Middle Road” for Large and Small Businesses

If you’re a small business entrepreneur (like me), or managing a role in a large organization, you probably wake up every morning with a single, compelling question: “What’s the best use of my time today?” (And best use of time for the week, month, season ahead, etc.) For all of us, our time is the most valuable, and completely unrenewable resource.

So over the past three months – with a product launch on the horizon (we launched in late July; first book published by Mourning Dove Press, my new publishing company), my focus was – of all things – on databases. Particularly, on cleaning up my databases, transitioning to ACT! as the “main” data repository (instead of having duplicate contact cards in Outlook, for different taxonomy areas), and totally rethinking, rebuilding, and overall retooling our taxonomies.

>Everything that I learned about taxonomies, knowledge management, and data organization while at EagleForce, and then later at Viziant, is becoming real and important in the most meaningful way.

And by “meaningful,” I mean: This is where I’m spending my “time dollar.” Over the past three months, I and my associates have spent more time on the database than on ANY OTHER ACTIVITY – and there’s more to be done. (And there will ALWAYS be more to be done.)

We’ve put more time into the database than into the website, or even into our social media and public presentations. And we’ve done more head-scratching about how to organize our people-information than we’ve done about designing our website.

This is a really important point, because after teaching at both Marymount and George Mason University’s Applied Information Technology programs over the past two years, where the focus for each course was essentially on “business process transformation,” the one thing that we did not address was data management. That was always sort of a “sidebar.” As in, “let’s put in a user login system.”

That’s right. In teaching over nine different courses, at three major universities (and I’ll throw in the course I taught on Knowledge Discovery at Georgetown many years ago into this mix), not once did I encounter the practical and very real-world importance of really focusing on and managing the corporate taxonomy and databases.

We worked on taxonomy-development and knowledge population for the Air Force, and for a number of smaller accounts while at EagleForce. Again, the overwhelming time-intensity of the task hasn’t struck me until now – managing a much smaller, structured-data, information set.

Whenever I go back to teaching, and from now on, whenever I talk with teachers – especially in the business, IT, marketing, or related areas – I will in the future focus on the crucial role of getting the corporate taxonomies, or “world view” right. And putting people and other entities into the right taxonomies. And finding the right tools to manage the data, and to also integrate with the “communications” tools.

This is an important topic, and I’ll be returning to it as time goes on.

Note: This post has been ported in from its original home in the Alianna J. Maren blogger account (now defunct). Written originally on Sept. 1, 2011, ported on Feb. 14, 2014.