Another website review for you today! Carol/Careann of Careann.wordpress.com is another one of those bloggers I feel like I’ve seen just everywhere. We’ll look at how she can find and apply a niche to help grow her blog.

Kathleen’s comments

Hello Careann!

Yours is another blog that I’m honestly not sure what to talk about! Your title and picture accurately represent the content, and it’s laid out in an easy-to-follow and eye-pleasing way!

I’m going to ask you the same question I’ve asked a few others. What is the goal of your blog? If it’s self-expression and telling people who you are, then I really don’t see anything to change! I don’t think it’s to promote the articles you’ve written, as they’re already published in magazines, and you won’t get paid more if they go find an old issue. (Or will you?)

Are you wanting to interest people in your unpublished novels? I don’t think so, since you don’t mention them that often . . . which is fine. Some of us like to do that, while others wait to be published. Neither approach is wrong. Once you DO have novels to promote, you’ll want to change the whole focus of your blog and site . . . but that’s not right now.

The final possibility is that you’re like last Friday’s blogger . . . you’re just looking for community online, and your blog is a part of that. If that’s the case, then I’ll copy something I shared with her in the comments.

In order for something to succeed in today’s world—where the whole world is essentially connected and available to everyone—it has to fit a niche . . . a smaller target or focus. We all can’t “afford” to be interested in everything and involved in everything on the entire Internet, so we “weed out” what is slightly less important. We look for that thing that interests us 101%.

Your website/blog will be more likely to succeed if you find SOMETHING to center it around . . . something a little more specific than just “writing.” If you don’t want to center it around a genre, then you can center it around your location and try to find writers near you, or who are interested in your location. [This might be what you want to do, Careann. All you’d have to do is highlight your location.] Or you could target writers in your age group. Or you could center it around writers-who-live-in-the-country. You could even pick something quirky, like writers who love yellow or writers who love to go barefoot. Of course you’d welcome writers (and readers) who love pink a little more than yellow, or writers who really don’t go barefoot all that often . . . but just the fact that it’s got this “grabby” idea will make your visitors more interested, and also make your blog stick in their minds a little more.

Have some fun with ideas!

—Kathleen MacIver, KatieDid Design

Jordan’s comments

Whoa! My next WIP was going to be set in the Fraser Valley Regional District (in a fictional city between Abbotsford and Chilliwack—I was going to call it Lackaway, but I wasn’t sure if that’d sound too rhymey to be believable as a neighbor to Chilliwack. Um . . . anyway. . . .). Awesome—if I ever go back to it, I’ll know who to call!

Pages

Your about page is good&madsh;personable, friendly and informative. It has links to connect with you and your email address. But if I didn’t already know it was there, I might not think to look on the About page before giving up (and, of course, I might). This is why it’s also good to have a dedicated contact page—it doesn’t have to be long or even say anything interesting. You can use a form or list your email address (but do keep it on the about page, too).

I like that your writing page has your writing credits with links to the articles where possible. That’s great! But, like Kathleen said, I’d like to see more about your fiction WIPs (if you’re comfortable with that). It doesn’t have to be an excerpt; even a pitch paragraph or log line description would be good.

I also like that you highlight your Flickr stream on your blog. You link to your Facebook profile on your About page as well; you could add a badge to your sidebar if you’re comfortable with that.

Search engine presence

You’ve got some competition for your name (without your middle initial)—apparently another Carol Garvin is a painter. Yahoo has your blog at #4 for [Carol Garvin], and Google has your about page as #10. Bing . . . well, let’s just move on.

With your middle initial, your blog is #1 on Yahoo and Google (well, #1 and #2 on Google), and #2 and #3 on Bing. Your IMDb page (that’s right, folks, she’s in the Internet Movie Database) outranks your site on Bing.

For [Careann], Yahoo has your blog at #1 and #2, Google has your Flickr stream at #1 and your blog at #2 and I’m about ready to slap Bing in the face.

As always, the standard advice to improve your rankings is to get more links. In addition to the usual sources (guest posts, etc.), you might ask the magazines with your articles online to include a link back to your blog, either in the byline or if they have a short author bio, using your name as the link anchor text.

Finally, I just want to reiterate what Kathleen said about using a niche approach to blogging. Working to appeal to a specific, if narrow, audience can help to grow your blog more than trying to appeal to everyone. This is just like fiction—we don’t expect that everyone will love everything we write (well, okay, we do, but we don’t reasonably expect that 😉 ). We know that we have to write to our audience—our niche, our genre.

Also, check out some recent posts on my other blog for help on finding your blog niche and expressing your blog niche.

What do you think? Have you focused on a specific audience with your blog? How did you find your niche?

Photo credits: yellow paint—Tom; puzzle piece (get it—a niche?)— Andronicus Riyono