Are Blogs Dying? Should You QUIT Blogging?

I had a great conversation with a friend recently on the topic of blogging, and significant changes we've each noticed with our own blogs.

Is it a dying art? Does anyone even read blogs anymore? Should you just quit blogging and focus on other things?

The fact that you're reading this blog post right now... should answer those questions.

There have been a lot of changes lately though, and there are specific things you should be doing now to keep (and grow) your blog's readership if you want to see successful blog growth in 2015 and going forward.

If you're frustrated with your blog, you should definitely read this...

Every major change brings waves of new opportunities!

If you've been online any amount of time at all, you already know that "change" is a constant. The internet is constantly evolving, and those that "ride the wave" and keep up with the changes are the people seeing success online.

Interestingly, with every major change you see people falling away in droves (giving up). That's a good thing! It gets rid of those less serious, those who are not true entrepreneurs, the "spammers" - and it weeds out the "junk" online.

YOU are not one of those people though...

You are serious about your business, serious about serving your market, you're playing the long game. You already know that change simply means... opportunity.

Tawnya and I have both been working online for well over a decade. I'm coming up on my 20th year in business, and I've been blogging for more than 11 years.

Tawnya Sutherland is the market leader in the VA industry. She runs the largest Virtual Assistant Network on the web.

If you're looking to find a great VA, or outsource a few tasks, click here.

Tawnya and I have become GREAT friends over the years. I often refer to her as "my Canadian sister".

We discussed a number of things, including the fact that we see fewer blog comments now, and where we ARE seeing more response and engagement.

Blogs vs Email vs Facebook

As one example, we both notice that we see higher engagement on Facebook and via email than we do on our blogs. Sending the exact same content via email gets replies, when there may be zero (or very little) response on the actual blog post.

You may also notice that people will read your blog post, but comment on Facebook instead of on your blog. This is especially true if they click from your Facebook update to read your post. Often they'll come back to comment on your Facebook update instead of commenting right there on your blog.

Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily...

Before You Make Assumptions, Analyze Your Blog Stats Closely.

Dig in to your site statistics and see what's really going on.

Don't just guess, get the facts. Then USE those facts to dig out opportunities.

I notice a very interesting trend in my own stats...

I have two blogs in completely different niches, and I also manage and market them both very differently. I have ClickNewz (the blog you're reading now) and my low carb blog at TravelingLowCarb.com - where I'm much more active.

TravelingLowCarb.com
Direct address / Bookmark / Link in email: 64.3 %
Links from an Internet Search Engine: 9.5 %
Links from an external page (other web sites): 26 %

* The majority (almost ALL) of the external links bringing in traffic to my low carb blog are from Facebook and Pinterest.

ClickNewz.com
Direct address / Bookmark / Link in email: 82 %
Links from an Internet Search Engine: 7.5 %
Links from an external page (other web sites): 10.3 %

* The majority of the external links bringing in traffic to ClickNewz are from websites that link to my site or to specific blog posts.

You'll notice on both of my blogs, the major search engines account for less than 10% of my traffic. That's quite a turnaround from a few years ago, when search would bring in the majority of your traffic.

Keep in mind that your stats may be a direct reflection of your activity, or lack of, so consider any changes you want to make as you analyze your own site statistics.

Read Internet Marketing Today: 5 SMART Marketing Tactics

For example, if you want more referred traffic you should do more strategic off-site content marketing such as: guest blogging, interviews on blogs and podcasts, link bait type blog posts that get links & mentions, etc.

Want more search traffic? Focus on: image optimization, being mobile friendly, and optimizing ALL of your content for very specific keyword phrases.

Want more blog comments? Ask your readers to leave a comment! Ask them a question, or invite them to share their opinion or experience. If you're not seeing very many comments on your blog, it's either a low traffic issue... or you're not engaging/including your readers well enough in your posts.

Instead of "quitting" certain things, based on "assumptions", consider simple changes YOU can make to get more of whatever it is you want.

Don't Fight The Trends, Though!

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to fight against the trends, or try to force traffic - or force your market to do the opposite of what they prefer.

It's smart to have all of your bases covered, like: image optimization, keyword targeting, and off-site content marketing. But focus on serving your market in the ways they prefer to be served.

If your readers prefer to reply via email, that's a great thing! Respond to them there. The more you engage via email, the more "relevant" you are in their inbox - meaning your emails are less likely to get filtered out, and your response rate (ie conversion) on offers will increase as well.

If your readers prefer Facebook, engage them there! Focus on building out whatever platform is working for you right now, and "engage & convert" right there, instead of trying to drag them away from it with an offer.

11 Smart Blogging Tips You Shouldn't Ignore:

• Your blog, emails & ads MUST be mobile-friendly.
• Use a Blog Broadcast to keep great content in their inbox.
• Be consistent! Stay in front of your readers, and stay relevant.
• Test a variety of post-types (long, short, video, lists, etc).
• Use bold sub-headlines. Cater to your "content scanners"!
• Use more images & illustrations in your content.
• Focus on Image Optimization (file name, title, ALT tag).
• "Stop Blogging, Start Talking."
• Build your audience on a variety of platforms.
• Write shorter posts... with bite-sized actionable tips.
• Use stories. Include some "entertainment value".

If I could sum it up, I would say:

Stop blogging and marketing, and stop trying to get traffic.

Start giving your market exactly what they want. Give them something they can use, brighten their day, be someone they can relate to, share things with them they can put into ACTION. Above all, figure out how you can help your market see RESULTS. That's what keeps people coming back!

You'll find blogging is much more FUN when you stop working so hard at it, and just focus on serving your market. You'll also see better results, when you're helping THEM see better results.

To state the obvious...

The less you blog, the less traffic & engagement you'll see. If you're frustrated with blogging, and you slack off, you're only going to see even more dismal stats.

You have two choices: quit, or DO something proactive about it!

The same goes for Facebook, or any platform where you're not happy with the results lately. I've seen people totally abandon their Facebook Pages out of frustration over dwindling engagement, or delete their Page altogether. Meanwhile, other Pages are thriving. Why is that?! I bet you can guess...

Now that you've read this post, and poked around in your own blog stats a bit, it's time to take action. Take ONE thing you picked up here today, and USE it.

Thoughts? Questions?

Leave a comment & let's discuss it!

Best,

p.s. Need help with your blog or business? I offer hands-on help at an amazingly low rate, and I would love to work with you to take your blog to maximum profit potential!

Social Media Advocacy Is the Future (Just Not the Way I Was Doing It)

I’ve never quite been able to wrap my head around social media advocacy.

It’s scary for me to admit that because I write about social media for a living. I should know these things. I should have everything figured out. And I don’t.

Social media advocacy has eluded me.

Though that hasn’t stopped me from experimenting. I’ve muddled my way through what I believed social media advocacy to mean, and I went so far as to implement advocacy strategies – though not even sure I was doing it right.

And now that I’ve taken a step back and reflected on things, I can see that I’ve had social media advocacy all wrong.

And it’s possible we all have.

What is social media advocacy? A definition

Personally, I have an audience of a couple thousand on Twitter, Facebook, and others.

Combined, my 40+ Buffer teammates and I have an audience of a few hundred thousand!

This is where social media advocacy becomes super powerful.

The way advocacy works is that you can tap your team to help you spread your content on social media. If you’ve got a new announcement or blog post to share, you and your team can all share it and ramp up the spread and reach of the content.

This can happen organically (by building a team that loves sharing and loves your content) or strategically (by notifying the team when you’ve got new stuff).

Jay Baer has a great slidedeck on the specifics:

Businesses have approached this in a couple of cool ways:

1. Employee advocacy – Making it easy for employees to get involved with sharing and promoting
2. Ambassador advocacy – Building a group of supporters who can share with you and for you

Cynthia Pflaum collected a neat group of examples of how this has worked for some leading brands. IBM has 500 thought leaders in its IBM Voices advocacy program. Dell has over 10,000 employees who have gone through an internal social media certification program and are trained to support the company’s objectives in social media.

All this is how I had understood advocacy to work. Sorta. And what I’ve realized is that we’ve all been missing the other half of it.

360° Advocacy and the Future of Social Media Advocacy

I believe the current way we approach social media advocacy is incomplete.

And moreso, were we to explore the full possibilities of advocacy, we’d be blown away by the benefits and the effect.

Currently, social media advocacy is a one-way street: Employees advocating for the company. Yet one thing I believe to be true about social media is that our best experiences are always two-way streets. Social media is a two-sided conversation, give-and-take, push-and-pull.

With the current state of social media advocacy, we are pushing.

What amazing things might happen if we were to pull also?

I see this working itself out in two specific ways, forming an overall notion of what I like to call 360° Advocacy.

Here’s the first way, the crusader model:

• Employees or teams advocating for the company. (<– the current model)
• The company advocating for its employees or team.

And here’s the second, the contributor model:

• The company suggests updates to the employee or team. (<– the current model)
• The employee or team suggests updates to the company.

The crusader model

In the crusader model, you take the idea of amplification, which is perhaps the main key benefit of advocacy, and you turn it around. Not only would an employee, for instance, be excited about helping out the business, the business would be excited about helping out the employee.

Say a teammate published an amazing article; the company could share on Facebook. Say someone wrote an inspiring tweet; the company could retweet.

(It can also be as simple and small as retweeting a teammate who shared something about the business—helping recognize the teammate and also promote the business at the same time.)

The contributor model

In the contributor model, you see the mechanics of advocacy replicated also. Not only does the company push updates out to its employees or team, those same individuals can also be contributors to the company, allowing the company to pull in suggested updates from individuals.

For instance, a business could invite suggestions for new content to its social media queues, or it could encourage a team to curate specific topics and come back with contributions.

With me so far? This all is the what of 360° Advocacy. I feel the why might be even more important.

A business is not one person, it is many

This 360° Advocacy requires a bit of a perspective change. So often we’ve read — and I’ve even written — about the benefits of making your business’s presence on social media as human and personable as possible. It makes sense that you’d want your business to fit in like a friend or family member among a News Feed filled with actual friends and family members.

It makes sense, but could it be wrong?

I believe there’s a lot of value still for businesses to find a voice and tone and create a consistent, dependable presence.

I’ve changed my mind to this:

A business feels personal not when it speaks like a person but when it reflects the persons that make up the business.

In other words, businesses don’t need to try to be something they’re not. Fundamentally, they are not a person, they are not a human being.

What they are is a collection of humans.

The individuals that make up the company are what also make the company unique, approachable, relatable. And for a really long time, the best practice for social media marketing has not been about embracing these awesome people. Wow, what a big miss!

With a full view of social media advocacy, I think it raises the question: What if this changed?

What if we began inviting individuals to contribute to the voice of the brand?

What if our feeds stopped looking like this:

And started looking like this:

I believe it would be a huge shift in an audience’s perception of a business, where a follower or visitor or community member would no longer see the business in that strange uncanny valley between friend and brand but instead to see the business as exactly what it is: a collection of unique individuals seeking a common goal.

Would you feel a closer bond connecting with a brand like that?

I would, absolutely.

360° Advocacy and the embrace of wholeness

Extraordinary things begin to happen when we dare to bring all of who we are to work.

The above quote comes from Frederic Laloux in his book Reinventing Organizations (a hugely impactful book for all of us here on the Buffer team).

What I find particularly exciting about that quote in the context of advocacy is that I believe those same extraordinary things are possible when a company brings the whole of itself to social media.

The idea of wholeness is quite clear to me when looking at the effect on the workplace (bring your whole self to work). It’s a bit of a jump to make into social media, though it’s a jump I’m excited to take.

Consider this quote from the book, for instance:

Wisdom traditions from around the world speak to this from a deeper level: at heart, we are all profoundly interconnected and part of a whole, but it’s a truth we have forgotten. We are born into separation and raised to feel divided from our deeper nature, as well as from the people and life around us. Our deepest calling in life, these traditions tell us, is to reclaim wholeness, within ourselves and in our connection with the outside world.

My view is that the same has occurred in this divide between brands and individuals on social media.

We are all profoundly interconnected—and to a wonderful degree on social media. We are part of a whole, yet it’s often the case that marketing strategy leads to a purposeful separation of parts of this wholeness, done with the best intentions of course but perhaps missing out on this key element.

We long to feel connected. We struggle to connect with brands.

Why? What’s missing?

I’m beginning to think it could be this element of wholeness.

A company is, after all, a collection of individuals, each with his/her own personality. Yet what we’ve essentially done with our marketing is homogenize these personalities into one.

I feel connected to Wistia because I feel connected to their team, seeing their faces and personalities in the videos they create and share. I feel very much less connected to brands when they’re little more than logos and product pictures.

People connect with people. Brands are filled with people. We can build some great momentum by embracing this wholeness and advocacy in even the smallest way.

(Thanks to my teammate Jeffrey for tying this together with this Thomas the Tank Engine clip.)

Does this new kind of advocacy work for huge brands?

The short answer: Probably not, although maybe it should.

Brands spend hundreds of millions of dollars on social media marketing and campaigns, fine-tuning and honing the strategies to every dotted i and crossed t.

Imagine if Coca-Cola, for instance, started retweeting updates from its employees.

That would seem to me as highly aberrant, incredibly quirky, and perhaps even irresponsible. And yet … to a certain degree maybe counterintuitive and quirky is exactly what could endear brands to the people who make up their audience?

It’s difficult to connect on an intimate level with a polished, professional facade.

Perhaps it’d be a bit easier if the facade gave a greater glimpse into its character, personality, and humanity?

Where should you draw the line?

Coca-Cola might not want to go out and share just anything that its team suggests or tweets. And too much variety could even detract from the voice and tone of the company.

There’s likely to be a line between embracing a 3D view of social media advocacy and being strategic with what you share to social media.

And my intuition is that we’re nowhere near the tipping point.

We’ve by and large fallen quite safely onto the highly strategic side.

As with most social media thoughts and recommendations, the best practice is always to test and experiment what works for you. Is there room to include more involvement from your team? Can you humanize your business by including your team as part of who you are?

I’d love to share some ideas on how this could look.

How to get started with 360° Advocacy

There are lots of different ways to take this, and to be honest, it’s quite a bit of an early idea from my side. I’ve yet to explore it fully outside this post, and only in bits and bobs with Buffer. This is how I could see it working. I’d love your thoughts and ideas on other ways, too.

Suggestions – Make it easy to share ideas

We’ve got a neat setup on the Buffer team currently where our co-founder Leo has offered to help surface possible new content that we can share on our personal social media profiles. We do this through Teams, a part of the Buffer for Business plan.

Here’s a bit more about how this looks (with a bonus overview of Groups, which makes team sharing really fast and easy):

With the notion of 360° Advocacy, we could take this to a deeper level. Not only could Leo suggest great articles to my feed, Courtney’s feed, Sandrine’s feed, etc. but also Courtney, Sandrine, and I (plus anyone else!) could suggest great articles that could be shared to the Buffer feed.

With tools like Buffer and others, you can add team members to your social media accounts, and these team members can act as contributors — with the social media manager having the final say on what gets shared, when, and how.

Twitter list – See what your team is sharing

One of my social experiments in the past was retweeting a Buffer teammate once per day from the main Buffer Twitter profile. Sometimes it would be a teammate who had shared a Buffer article or story. Other times it would be a teammate who had an inspiring quite or cool article.

My workflow for this:

1. Build a Twitter list of Buffer teammates (I’m grateful that someone before me had laid the foundation here!)
2. Visit the Twitter list daily to see what’s being shared
3. Click the Buffer button on a tweet to add the retweet to the Buffer queue
4. Drag-and-drop within the queue so that a new retweet is scheduled to go each day

RSS – Find the great stories from your team

It’s possible that a few on your team might have their own blogs and be sharing their own stories and bits of themselves online in cool ways.

We’ve found this to be the case at Buffer. Lots of teammates write blog posts, either on a personal blog or on Medium. We’ll often end up grabbing these to republish on the Open blog as well.

How this might fit with 360° Advocacy is that these pieces of content represent great chances to advocate for your employees or team, to share an extension of your brand by highlighting the amazing people who work for you.

I’ve found a couple neat ways to keep track of this:

1. Send new articles into your team’s chat room (Slack, Hipchat, etc.). We do this via Zapier.

2. Add an RSS feed to Buffer and check it easily from your dashboard. For the Awesome and Business plans, you can add up to 15 RSS feeds per profile and share any new stories to your queue in a single click.

Takeaways

It’s seemed to me that social media advocacy thus far has been heavily focused on helping brands and businesses extend their reach and benefit from the social capital of a big team.

I feel there’s a whole ‘nother side to explore here, too—and potentially some really great benefits for everyone involved.

• Brands can embrace the individuality of their team and become more relatable to their audience
• The team can have a positive impact on the quality and variety of content the brand shares

I’m particularly excited about how wholeness, personality, and diversity can fit into the equation here, too. For all the work we aim to do with refining and perfecting a social media strategy, perhaps this exact type of variety is the next frontier for brands to engage on a deeper level with the wonderful, creative, unique individuals that make up an audience.

I’d love your thoughts on this!

It’s all a very new idea I’m still sorting through myself. It’d be amazing to hear any thoughts or questions this brings to mind. I’d love to discuss in the comments or on Twitter.

The post Social Media Advocacy Is the Future (Just Not the Way I Was Doing It) appeared first on Social.

20+ Best Free WooCommerce Plugins for WordPress

WooCommerce is the most popular WordPress eCommerce plugin, and it comes with tons of extensions. Among all the paid ones, we’ve hand-picked some of the best free WooCommerce plugins. There’s an extension in here for just about everyone so have a look and let us know which one is your favorite.

1. WooCommerce Poor Guys Swiss Knife

WooCommerce Poor Guys Swiss Knife is a powerful free plugin for WooCommerce. It is more like a bundle of extensions allowing you to perform various customization tasks on your WooCommerce store. You can customize your checkout forms, adjust WooCommerce for country specific needs, fine tune cart operations, add custom fields, etc.

2. WooCommerce EU VAT Compliance

As the name suggests this simple plugin makes your WooCommerce shop compliant with the new EU VAT. It will automatically detect your customer’s location and will display prices with correct VAT from the first page.

3. WooCommerce Customizer

WooCommerce Customizer provides a GUI to use built-in WooCommerce filters. These filters allow you to customize things like button text, labels, fields, and much more. However, you have to write PHP code to use them. With WooCommerce customizer you can easily use those filters from an easy to use settings page.

4. WooCommerce Multilingual

WooCommrce Multilingual allows you to translate your product and other WooCommerce pages using WPML. It allows your users to switch languages and order products in their local language.

5. Stripe for WooCommerce

As the name suggests, this plugins adds support for Stripe payment gateway in WooCommerce. Stripe allows you to accept payments using credit cards on your WooCommerce store.

6. Pay With Amazon

This plugin embeds pay with Amazon on your WooCommerce store. It allows users to use their payment information stored in their Amazon account on your eCommerce site.

7. WooCommerce Product Slider

WooCommerce Product Slider allows you to add a responsive slider featuring your products.

8. WooCommerce Product Gift Wrap

WooCommerce Gift Wrap plugin allows you to add gift wrapping option on your product pages. It also allows you to add additional fees for gift wrapping.

9. WooCommerce Smart Sale Badge

Smart Sale Badge enhances the WooCommerce Sale badge by displaying how much a user will save upon each item. This is a proven sales technique, that you can now apply to your online store.

10. Order Delivery Date for WooCommerce

This simple plugin allows users to choose a delivery date for products during the checkout. WooCommerce store owner can see the delivery date on their orders page in the admin area.

11. Weight/Country Shipping for WooCommerce

Shipping costs vary from one country to another depending on the weight. If you need to adjust the shipping cost based on customer’s country and the weight of products then this plugin is for you.

12. WooCommerce My Account Widget

This simple widget displays customer’s account information with links to their shopping cart, account page, checkout, and other URLs.

13. WooCommerce Checkout Manager

WooCommerce Checkout Manager allows you to create highly customized checking out experience for your users with the help of additional fields. You can add new fields, make fields optional or required, display them on order and receipt pages.

14. Minimum Purchase for WooCommerce

A simple plugin that allows you to set rules for minimum purchase on your WooCommerce store. You can set rules that must match before a user can proceed to checkout page.

15. WooCommerce PDF & Print

This plugin adds buttons to save product pages as PDF or Doc files. Users can also click on the print button to instantly print a product page.

16. Product Enquiry for WooCommerce

Product Enquiry for WooCommerce plugin allows your customers and visitors to enquire product information right from the product listing page.

17. WooCommerce Product FAQs

This plugin allows customers to ask questions about products which are then displayed as product faqs. This allows you to build FAQs based on actual customer interactions.

18. WooCommerce – Gift Cards

Gift Cards for WooCommerce plugin allows you to sell gift cards and certificated on your WooCommerce store. Allowing your users to gift them to their loved ones.

19. WooCommerce Currency Switcher

Allows you to add a currency switcher to your WooCommerce store. Your customers can instantly switch currency to see prices in other currencies. The currency switcher can be added using a widget or a shortcode.

20. WooCommerce Export Customer Email

WooCommerce Export Customer email adds a simple link to the customers tab, allowing you to download all customer email into a single file.

21. WooCommerce Advanced Product Quantities

WooCommerce Advanced Product Quantities plugin allows you to set advanced rules for product quantities. You can set minimum and maximum quantities, you can also set incremental quantities. You can create multiple rules and apply them to products as you add them.

22. WooCommerce Colors

WooCommerce Colors plugin allows you to easily change the colors of default WooCommerce elements. Simply install the plugin and visit Appearance » Customize to change the colors. An easier tool for users who just want the buttons and labels to match their theme colors.

Bonus: OptinMonster (Not Free)

Building an email list is crucial for your eCommerce store. OptinMonster is the best lead generation and cart-abandonment software that integrates perfectly with WooCommerce.

It allows you to create beautiful optin forms and popups for your website and convert your abandoning visitors into subscribers.

It comes packed with features like page-level targeting, analytics, split testing, and exit-intent technology which allows you to display optin form when a user is about to leave your site.

Start converting abandoning visitors into customers with OptinMonster’s onsite retargeting.

We hope this article helped you find the best free WooCommerce plugins for your site. You may also want to see our guide on the best affiliate tracking and management solutions for WordPress.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

To leave a comment please visit 20+ Best Free WooCommerce Plugins for WordPress on WPBeginner.

Does Video Enhance Predictive Search?

Predictive search is nothing new, but as YouTube has grown to the second-largest search engine, it's spread to video. Does that help it? Experts say yes, both in direct and indirect ways.

How to Easily Add Custom CSS to Your WordPress Site

Sometimes you may find yourself needing to add Custom CSS in your WordPress site. Perhaps it’s because you’re following a tutorial on WPBeginner. If using FTP is too confusing, then there is an easier way to add CSS on your site. In this article, we will show you how to add custom CSS to your WordPress site without editing any theme files.

First thing you need to do is install and activate the Simple Custom CSS plugin. Upon activation simply go to Appearance » Custom CSS and write down or paste your custom CSS.

Don’t forget to press the ‘Update Custom CSS’ button to store your CSS.

You can now view your website to see the custom CSS in action.

Using a Custom CSS plugin vs Adding CSS in Theme

Adding custom CSS snippets into your parent theme is not recommended. Your CSS changes will be lost if you accidentally update the theme without saving your custom changes.

The best approach is to use a child theme instead. However, many beginners don’t want to create a child theme. Apart from adding custom CSS they really don’t know how they will be using that child theme.

Using a custom CSS plugin allows you to store your custom CSS independant from your theme. This way you can easily switch themes and your custom CSS will still be there.

Another great way to add custom CSS to your WordPress site is by using the CSS Hero plugin. This wonderful plugin allows you to edit almost everything in your WordPress site without writing a single line of code.

We hope this article helped add custom css to your WordPress site. You may also want to see how our guide on how to create a site-specific WordPress plugin to store your custom code snippets.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

To leave a comment please visit How to Easily Add Custom CSS to Your WordPress Site on WPBeginner.

Grow Your Audience, Business Intelligence Database with Google AdWords

Optimize your PPC ad campaign by effectively leveraging the functionality of Google AdWords. Here's an easy way to collect customer persona data that is actionable and targetable.

How to Add Topics in WordPress Navigation Menus

We are often asked by new readers about how they can add topics in their WordPress navigation menus. Most users assume that they need to create pages for each topic and add them to menus. However if you do that, then you won’t be able to display relevant posts there. In this article, we will show you how to add topics in WordPress navigation menus without having to create pages or writing any HTML code.

Let’s say you want to create a website about traveling guides for different cities. You may want to add city names in your navigation menu and show relevant articles when users click on that link.

This is where categories come in. WordPress comes with a powerful built-in system that allows you to sort your content into taxonomies.

By default, you have two taxonomies ready to use with your posts. These taxonomies are called categories and tags in WordPress.

Categories are hierarchical, and they are supposed to be used for a broader range of topics. Tags are non-hierarchical, and they can be used to sort articles for very specific topics.

We recommend you to read our guide on the difference between categories and tags.

You can add or select categories while writing your blog posts. The categories meta box will appear on the right column of the post editing screen.

Once you have created a few posts and filed them under different categories, you can now add these categories into your site’s navigation menu.

Simply visit Appearance » Menus and click on the categories tab to expand it.

Next, select the categories you want to add to the menu and then click on Add to menu button. Your selected categories will now appear in the right hand column as menu items. You can move them up and down using drag and drop.

Once you are satisfied with the menu, click on the save menu button to store your changes.

You can now visit your website to see your changes in action.

Since categories are hierarchical this means that they can have parent and child categories.

Most WordPress themes support multi-level menus. If you are using sub-categories, then you can easily add them under the parent category by moving them slightly towards right.

This way you can create awesome drop-down menus that could cover all your important topics. This will also help your users quickly find the information they need.

We hope this article helped you add topics in WordPress navigation menus. You may also want to see our tutorial on how to create category templates in WordPress.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

To leave a comment please visit How to Add Topics in WordPress Navigation Menus on WPBeginner.