**Case Study: Road to Priesthood blog**

In creating Road to Priesthood, I’ve had secondary goals for the site beyond a form of communication with my diocese. Perhaps I might use it to help me write a book. Or perhaps it would help me build connections necessary for my future vocation as a priest. Who knows?

That said if I truly wanted to do so, I couldn’t just create a site without purpose. I could not just write random, off-the-top-of-my-head remarks. To me it would serve no purpose for me or my readers.For me, building a purposeful structure to the site is key.

Blog Structure is the New Disneyland

For bloggers, content is king. But blog structure is the entire kingdom!

I define blog structure as Content + Design = Structure:

Content—This includes articles, tips and tutorials, photos, video, podcasts, etc—anything related to the theme of your blog
Design—This refers to not only how the site looks but how it functions for the user
Structure—Gives the user an idea of what to expect from the blog.

While this is a case study for a Christian-oriented blog, the concepts here are applicable to any blog.

(Also while I’ve learned a lot already, I still consider this blog a work-in-progress. Any bloggers out there that might want to share their wisdom with me, I’d greatly appreciate it. This post is primarily what is working for me so far.)

In part one of a two part series on creating effective blog structure, I will be focusing on creating content.

If Content is King, Be a Kingmaker

While it’s perfectly all right to just write off the top of your head, there’s no guarantee of continuous ideas without planning out what you want to write about. That’s how it was for me when I first tried to figure out blogging.

After much research and trial-and-error, I came up with a seven-step plan in creating consistent and compelling content:

Use Amazon.com for your blog’s categories
Use WordPress.com for your blog’s tags
Choose from a list of blog post types to create content
Create an editorial calendar
Research third-party websites that work with WordPress.com for creating non-written content
Research websites and blogs related to yours for story ideas
Create compelling headlines for your postings

For me, working towards have great blog structure:

helps me to focus what I’m writing about and
helps improve my writing

Let’s me break these steps down to understand the whole process.

Use Amazon.Com for Your Blog’s Categories

Amazon is the biggest bookstore in the world. But did you know that it is also one of the largest research centers in the world? Or in the case of a Christian blogger, a place where you can find the type of Christian topics that people are passionately interested about?

How?

Let’s say you want to write about parenting. Here are the steps to find the categories for your blog:

In the search box, type “parenting” and set the drop-down menu to left of that to “Books”

A list of books will pop up. See the drop-down menu that says “Relevance”? Change that to “Bestselling”

Click the first book from the top where the image of the book is tagged “Look Inside”

Click for the preview of the book and find it’s Table of Contents

Jot down the chapter headings of that book.

Repeat 3 through 6 with the next book.

If you see chapter headings that overlap with one another, that’s fine. If you see a chapter heading that is not important to your blog or you prefer not to write about it, go ahead and delete that from your list. Why write something you’re not interested in, right?

With my own research, I came up with (more or less) the current list of categories found on the sidebar on the homepage. In my case, I started off with a basic list of categories:

Church Ministry and Organization
Church Mission
Faith and Spirituality
Seminary Life
Worship

Because there were other topics I was interested in, I included those as well, intending to present them from a Christian perspective:

Inspiration
Love and Marriage
Politics and Religion

To keep your writing on-topic, never include content that falls outside of your list of categories.

Use WordPress.Com for Your Blog’s Tags

Using a book analogy, if categories could be construed as a “Table of Contents”, tags are a blog’s index. Wikipedia defines an “index” as a “list of words or phrases (‘headings’) and associated pointers (‘locators’) to where useful material relating to that heading can be found in a document.”

The method I used for creating tags was to simply go to WordPress.com’s page of top tags being currently used by WordPress bloggers: http://en.wordpress.com/tags/. Jot down everything on that page that is applicable to your niche.

When I originally started this blog, I thought I could just plug in any keyword as a tag, assuming that Google will pick it up. No one did.

With the top tag’s page, there is an established list of keywords that people are passionately interested in. Once I made the change, my readership immediately picked up.

As with my instructions for choosing categories, go through the list of tags and cross out those that you aren’t interested in or are irrelevant to your blog.

Choose from a List of Blog Post Types to Create Content

Problogger.com posted an article on the 20 most common types of blog posts used by blogs:

Instructional
Informational
Reviews
Lists
Interviews
Case Studies
Profiles
Link Posts
‘Problem’ Posts
Contrasting two options
Rant
Inspirational
Research
Collation Posts
Prediction and Review Posts
Critique Posts
Debate
Hypothetical Posts
Satirical
Memes and Projects

Choose the types appropriate for your site’s theme. Also take into consideration that some of the styles of writing listed are more time-consuming than others.

Research Third-Party Websites That Work with WordPress.com for Creating Non-Written Content

Non-written content can sometimes convey information more effectively than the written word. Media—includes photos, video, podcasts, slideshows and PDFs—can be uploaded into a WordPress.com blog. However you are currently limited to 3GB—not much if you are interested in having a blog full of photos or video.

The preferred method is to embed media from third-party websites that are compatible with WordPress.

I’ve included here links to sites that I use here on Road to Priesthood:

Flikr—excellent free source of Creative Commons photos that I use for all of my posts. Make sure you link and give proper credit to its creator.
SlideShare—excellent for creating free slideshows or interactive media. Users could also download the file from your blog.
YouTube—most popular source for videos. Be careful of using copyrighted material, as YouTube may have it deleted—plus it’s just wrong. And always give credit to its creator and link to the creator’s homepage.
Scribd—excellent way to embed documents like PDFs or MS Word docs into your post. The file enables users to download the document from your site.

Another positive about the above sites is that even though they are free, they don’t throw pop-ups up into your browser.

Create an Editorial Calendar

An idea that I borrowed from blogwriting sites Problogger and Dosh Dosh is the use of an editorial calendar to organize what I will write on any given day. The calendar can be either an online or offline calendar. I happen to use MSN calendar although I’m considering using Google’s.

My variation on the editorial calendar concept combines everything we’ve done so far:

On the first day that you plan on writing in your blog, write down the first category on your list. Go down your list for each consecutive day. Repeat until you reach the end of the month. (You can keep going further. But for this article, we’ll stick to just one month.)
Starting from the beginning again, write down the first type of blog post from your list. Do as instructed in step 1.
Assuming that you aren’t starting fresh with your blog, look at your Blog Stats. On the slowest day of your week, make that a day devoted strictly for administrative work. This would include going through your blog for spelling errors, revising the tags you are using, correcting the HTML, etc. Skip writing in your blog on this day—if it’s your slowest day, it wouldn’t matter.
In writing your post, use the combination of the category and type of blog post for a designated day as your guideline. If you are drawing a blank, go right ahead and change one of the two items—nothing is set in stone here.
Once the post is written and proofread, link the tags on your list that closely match your post.
Can’t write a thing using the parameters you’ve set? Try using non-written content or media.

My method for writing content will not only give you a topic to write about but also “force” you to not write off-topic and just ramble.

Research Websites and Blogs Related to Yours for Story Ideas

The sub-heading above says it all.

The other benefit about doing this step is that it will connect you to fellow blogs or sites that you can network with. Perhaps you may consider doing guest postings for each other’s sites.

Create Compelling Headlines for Your Postings

Headlines are the calling cards for your postings. If it isn’t compelling enough, no matter how great your post is, no one will read it.

One method of writing headlines is what’s called the Cosmo Headline Technique, borrowed from the style of headlines found on a typical Cosmopolitan Magazine. You can often find them being used on sites like Digg all the time.

Examples include:

My 22 Best Design Tips Ever
Realtors Revealed: The Little White Lies We Tell Clients (And How to Stop)
The Secret of Getting Your Home Loan Approved

Copyblogger.com has a whole series on the topic of creating magnetic headlines.

Road to Priesthood

Building a Better Christian Blog: Content is King!