Sixty-Seven Names For Nine Things

I audited my own archive this week and it embarrassed me.

Four hundred seventy three published posts. Sixty seven different category names.

Sixty seven.

I do not write about sixty seven things. I write about maybe nine. Faith. Rebuilding. Business systems. January 6. East Texas. The work I build for clients. Motivation. History. The record.

Nine subjects. Sixty seven labels.

Here is how it happened, and it is going to sound familiar if you publish anything at all.

Every time I sat down to post, I typed a category into a box. Whatever felt right in that moment. Not Motivation but Motivation and Resilience, because that particular post was about resilience. The next week, Motivation and Discipline. Then Motivation and Hard Truth. Then Motivation, Faith and Asking for Help, which is not a category. That is a sentence.

Nine different spellings of the word motivation across thirty eight posts. Ten separate labels with the word history in them. My January 6 writing, which is the most important thing on the site, split across four different names holding forty one posts between them.

Twenty seven of those sixty seven names hold exactly one post. One. A category with a single post in it is not a category. It is a post wearing a costume.

Meanwhile eight names carry two hundred sixty four posts between them, which is more than half the archive. So the true shape of the thing is eight working shelves and fifty nine junk drawers.

Now the part that costs money, because this is not about tidiness.

A reader lands on a January 6 piece and wants more of it. The site shows them the other posts in that category. If my J6 writing is split four ways, that reader sees a quarter of what I have. The rest sits behind three labels they will never click, because they do not know those labels exist. I did that to them. Nobody else did.

Search does the same thing to you. Forty one posts pointed at one consistent label is a topic. Forty one posts scattered across four labels is four thin topics that each look like nothing much.

And it gets worse the longer you run, because drift is not a one time mistake. It compounds every single time you publish. The moment you allow a free text box, you have guaranteed that today's you will invent a name yesterday's you did not use.

The fix is not clever. It is boring and it works.

Write the list down. Nine names, or six, or four. Whatever your actual subjects are, not your moods.

Then take the free text box away from yourself. The category field becomes a dropdown of the approved list and nothing else. If a genuinely new subject turns up, you add it to the list on purpose, once, as a decision. Not at eleven at night in the middle of writing something.

Then map the old work. Every one of those strays gets pointed at one of the survivors. You do not delete anything. You just stop making readers guess.

That is the part that stings. I built the guardrail on the side nobody sees and left the front door standing open.

If you run a site, a store, a blog, a podcast feed, anything with a tag or a category or a collection attached to it, go count yours today. Not next quarter. Today.

Count how many labels you have. Then count how many of them hold exactly one item. If that second number is anywhere near half the first, your navigation is not organizing your work. It is hiding it.

I fix this kind of thing for other people through The LeadFlow Pro. It is a great deal easier to set the list on day one than to untangle four hundred seventy three posts on day four hundred.

Ask me how I know.