Most new bloggers fail to spend enough time in their organizational skills. It’s just not enough to have most of your best ideas on post-it notes all over your computer desk and no idea how you’re going to manage your blog. It’s also extremely important that you have a clear and focused plan for your blog overall, but also for the time you spend working on your blog as well. If you don’t have a set schedule for working on your blog or online business, then your failure rate increases. Even more detrimental to your new blog besides the lack of a clear schedule for working on it, is not having a plan laid out for the time you do spend on your business or blog.

Does this sound familiar? You’ve made yourself a nice two hour slot to sit down and work on your blog but you haven’t decided what it is you’re going to do with that time before you sit down to use it. So you open up your email and there are six new emails from friends and family wishing you well with your new venture and so you feel obligated to write them back. Then as you’re replying to those emails, the phone rings and it’s your mother wanting to see how you’re doing so you indulge her for a little while but then after fifteen or twenty minutes you cut the call short only to find you’ve gotten three new emails. One is from someone’s blog you subscribed to and the article they’ve sent you looks fantastic, the headline is a real attention-grabber so you can’t help but to read that article and head over to their blog to read the rest. While you’re there you see a nice free eBook you might like to read so you subscribe to their list and head back to your email to finish going through the two emails you haven’t read yet.

One email announces you’ve got a new follower on Twitter and so you have to head over to there to check them out and make that crucial decision whether or not to follow them back…it’s a real plot twist in the middle of the time you should have been working on your blog and growing your online business. Now an hour has passed and you’ve got 60 precious minutes left to get your arse in gear and get focused on the tasks at hand. But then you start to wonder just what tasks you want to accomplish with your blog today. Maybe you wanted to write a post but then you tell yourself that might take more than an hour and you don’t want to have to stop in the middle of your inspiration so you point form a few notes and move to the next thing on your non-existent list. Suddenly you’re thirsty so it’s time to go and grab a nice drink and flip through the mail you left on the kitchen counter. So now you’re back at your desk, you’ve quenched your thirst, sifted through your mail, and now there’s a new email waiting for you. It’s a joke email from a co-worker and you know clicking on it will distract and you only have 35 minutes left, you but you just can’t help yourself and once you’ve opened it and chuckled at its contents, you’ve lost your train of thought completely so you pack it in telling yourself the next time you have to work on your blog will be “real time” and nothing will distract you. But will it? There just might be 6 or 7 emails waiting for you in your inbox…

In the Wordpress Admin there is a Settings tab and within that tab is the Permalinks tab. Setting up this area of your blog administration is crucial to having your blog post urls (or links) be the way you want them. The default setting for your posts is p=”whatever the post id number is” but it’s not such a nice url to have. Here’s an example: You’ve written a post on your dog care blog about how to choose the best breeds. With Wordpress’s default permalink strucutre your post would look like this:

“http://dogcare.com/p=123/” – What the heck does that even mean to anyone? Not much and if anything were to ever happen to your blog and you didn’t have a backup of your post database, would you be able to remember all of your post id numbers? Probably not, and then all those people finding your posts in the search engines would click and receive an error message because the link they followed would be invalid.

Next option is day and name and again this option is not so great either…why? Because time moves on and again if anything ever happened to your blog and you had no backup of your post database, you would have to re-post to your blog and the date from the re-post wouldn’t match the previous date. You would end up having to implement a redirection plugin to have your old post structure match up to your new post structure. Here’s an example of the original post link using this structure:

“http://dogcare.com/january/how-to-choose-the-best-breeds/” and if you had to repost it months later your new post would look like “http://dogcare.com/december/how-to-choose-the-best-breeds/” and you can see how the new link structure could never match up to the old link structure without a redirection plugin from the old link to the new one.

The same issues would arise with the month and name option so make sure to keep track of which posts were posted in which month.

Same thing goes for the numeric option but again you will have to keep track of which posts go with which number.

The best option by far is the custom permalink option and one of the best custom permalink structures to use is to have your post url structured by category and post name. The value you would need to enter for this field looks like:

%category%/%postname%

This will have your posts looking like this example: “http://dogcare.com/breeds/how-to-choose-the-best-breeds/”and if anything ever happens to your post database it would be easy to remember your categories and post names and they wouldn’t be dependent on variables that change like the date or post id numbers.

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