Peer Review #3: Self Therapy

Link to Siddhant’s Site: selftherapy.ca

Overview

Your blog is well-made and is generally marketable to your intended audience. I am most likely your target audience because I am really into mindfulness, too, and I found the website very appealing. The design is generally really good too. The State of Mobile Report 2022 discusses how people are spending more and more time on their phones, so it is important that your website works smoothly and quickly on a mobile phone, or people will click off it. In that respect, your site is really good.

Integrating Social Media and Video

The State of Mobile Report 2022 also mentions how “Apps in categories that are already highly relevant to Gen Z can be excellent partners to help you increase engagement, including Photo & Video, Entertainment, and Social.” Therefore, if you really wanted to increase the marketability of your site, you could also integrate some sort of social media aspect with it. I know mindfulness content is extremely popular on TikTok, and I personally follow a few small creators within the wellness/mental health space who seem to get lots of positive comments and engagement. Some of them even get brand deals. If you are uncomfortable speaking in front of a camera, you could use stock footage and do a voiceover like this TikTok Video or create infographics like this instagram post:

This could be an especially good way to build an audience with Gen Z because they tend to spend more time on social media apps versus browsing new blogs. You could also integrate links to videos on other social media sites such as Youtube or TikTok. Battye (2022) also discusses how a personal touch goes a long way, so you could even send the creators you are referencing a quick DM to let them know that you featured them on your blog, and if they are nice, they might even give you a quick shout-out. By doing this, you could potentially access their audience, and some of their followers might begin to follow you.

Monetizing Your Audience

Trevor Battye (2022), in his lecture on monetization, discussed the concept of building a marketing pyramid where people first view your content on social media, then visit your website, then sign-up for a newsletter, attend an event, subscribe, and finally donate. Therefore alongside creating content for social media, you could also create a newsletter too if you wanted people to come back to your site multiple times. You could also add Google Ads and affiliate links within your blog posts. However, if you decide to include affiliate links in your blog, always be transparent with your audience about this. Do not do what Maria Popova did with her site where she was “putting affiliate advertising links in her articles while at the same time asking users at the end of each article to donate to her site by telling them that she runs an ad-free site that is subsidized by user contributions” (Bleymaier, 2013).

Niche Down

Trevor Battye (2022) also mentioned that “success comes if you have either “a niche tribe which you lead” and or “a voice that a brand can attach itself to, to speak to a tribe.” Steve Pratt (2022), in his lecture about “Embracing the Power of Niches,” also discussed how it is better to have a very large share of a small audience rather than a small share of a big audience. So potentially, you could make your content more niche, such as ‘Mindfulness for University Students’, ‘The History of Mindfulness,’ ‘Mindfulness on a Budget,’ etc. and dominate that smaller niche rather than directly competing with bigger mindfulness blogs. Additionally, Hollingsworth (2022) states that “A recent study shows that the first three organic search ranking positions result in over 50% of all click-throughs, while up to 30% of all results on Page 1 and 2 don’t get clicked at all.” Therefore your website is much more likely to rank on the first page and be clicked on if it targets a specific niche. You can help improve your site SEO by building authority by improving your site load time and using keywords in your titles and blogs (Hollingsworth, 2022). As you post more quality blogs on your site, your SEO will likely improve too.

References

data.ai. (2022). State of Mobile 2022. data.ai. http://posiel.com/outline/full-semester-outline/dataai__state_of_mobile_2022__en/

Hollingsworth, S. (2018). 12 Reasons Why Your Business Absolutely Needs SEO. Search Engine Journal. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/why-seo-is-important-for-business/248101/#close

Battye, T. (2022). Week 9: Marketing, Monetization (Nov 8). [PowerPoint Slides]. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1eyodfNZltfPqEReJb8jDwpYcxv_kHV83bROhUqwSgmc/edit

Pratt, S. (2022). Week 10: Revisting Analytics, SEO and Audience (Nov 15). The Creativity Business. https://creativitybusiness.substack.com/p/embracing-the-power-of-niches?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Bleymaier, T. (2013). On advertising- Maria Popvova. Tumblr. https://on-advertising.tumblr.com/