Unconventional Origins is a parenting, family and life blog written by Lucie. She is a law student and mother to a young son who lives with her and her partner as well as stepmother to her partner’s two older children. Her family is also biracial. These origins all contribute to the unconventional in her blog title.
This is part of my review of her blog.
The title reflects both the unconventional origins of her family, but also her unique perspective on life. Her tagline, once an insightful quote, now better reflects the mission statement of her blog: Redefining our perception of the American family.
Lucy had asked for my advice on her editorial calendar and I replied that “I think that, instead of saying you will publish 3-5 times per week, maybe more, you should post 3 times and write in advance when you have extra time (ha!). MWF is best, as readership drops on the weekend. You have 6 themes, so you could do a complete run over two weeks. On the other hand, I love the rant posts, and I think that those and the ‘home’ and ‘projects’ themes should come up more often.”
There are two search bars on her blog- I feel that one should be removed. She needs an archives page, and could then remove the recent posts widget. With at least 10 posts per page, a blog doesn’t really need it. The text styling is very readable; paragraphs are broken up, there are different colors being used, the eye flows nicely over the text and the images.
We didn’t really talked about Lucie’s marketing objectives, so it is hard to develop a strategy. But there are some things that she could do quite easily to boost readership: post to carnivals, guest post at other bigger blogs (I’d be happy to have her guest post for me, for example), join a site like PopTop ranks (http://www.poptopranks.com/), which should drive a lot of traffic your way.
My final piece of advice? Remember, this is all subjective! On the other hand, you are getting a snapshot of what a reader feels and thinks when they come to your site. So if I say that I think your target market is X and you disagree with that (you think your target market is Y), then you’re not communicating your message clearly enough. This is NOT easy to do, and I think we all have problems with communicating our message clearly enough for people to understand, without having the room to spell it out. Blogs that do this well are huge successes.
Recommendations
1. Use a keyword laden tagline- at the very least with the site info, so that there are more keywords picked up by search engines.
2. Move to a self-hosted blog. Moving to a self hosted blog would add credibility and allow you to run ads, which would probably pay the monthly hosting fees.
3. Remove top search bar.
4. Add archives page.
5. Remove recent posts widget.
6. Disable comments on all pages
7. Make the section titles in the Blogroll page smaller, unbold.
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