Blog Page Critique: Janmary

Welcome to another page critique! About pages, PR pages, product pages and so on are critical in helping you meet your bloggy goals. Each week I dissect a page on someone’s blog as a way to refine it into being more awesome. Read, learn and apply these tips to the important pages on your own blog. Here we go!

Blog: Janmary

Blogger: Janice

Page: PR Welcome

Janmary is a blog about life in Northern Ireland including family, recipes, crafts, travel and reviews. On the PR Welcome page, Janice wants it to provide relevant information required by PR companies. Over the last year, she has definitely received more and more PR opportunities that are of interest to her and her readers. She’d like to improve the page to continue the growth.

Janice struggles with the look and feel of the PR Welcome page. She feels it looks a bit boring and is not an interesting read. She wonders if she should include more stats and rates, links to existing reviews, additional personal info, possibly some photos, and maybe even a catchier title. If she does include more personal info, she wants to know how to make it different than the About Me page. Overall, Janice’s hope is to have the PR Welcome page fit in the overall design/tone/style as the rest of her blog since, currently, it feels like an add-on and not an integral part of the blog.

Visual:

• From a design standpoint, you start off well with a customized font for your page title. But that’s really the only visual component or color on your page (other than blue hyperlinks). Consider using subheadings on your page so that font is elsewhere on the page.
• As for other ways to add color, perhaps highlight a few reviews you’ve written and use an image from the review to link to the posts. You could also use your social media icons again instead of links.
• Another idea is to add a strip of images at the top highlighting the main topics you write about. You say “family life, craft, photography, food, travel, jewellery design, parenting” so use little thumbnails of each one to create a fun design element.
• I noticed you have an extra bullet at the end of your list without any content beside it. Either remove it or add some more content.

Navigation:

• While it’s great that you have the PR page in your navigation menu, consider adding a link to it from your About page. On your About page you talk about working with brands so it’s a perfect place to link to this page.
• Add links to showcase examples of your work. For example, link to some reviews or sponsored posts so PR reps can get an idea of how you write them.

Content:

• I think you have a great start here. While you don’t have a lot of content, you make it easy to read with bullets versus a long block of text.
• When it comes to your page title, consider using something other than PR Welcome or PR Friendly. A guest blogger recently wrote an awesome post about what PR folks think about that term and it might surprise you. I’d change it to PR/Advertising, Advertising or something similar.
• For your actual page title, it doesn’t have to be the same as what’s in your navigation menu. Use the title to sell you and your blog a little bit. Something that highlight’s your blog’s uniqueness or shares something specific about your blog like you’re an Irish blogger, you’re a jewelry designer, your audience is international. Or you could focus on your PR opps like “Opportunities for every budget and business.” You get the idea.
• When looking at your bullets, I see I’s going all the way down. The PR page is all about what’s in it for your potential advertisers so vary your language so you shift the focus over to them. An example would be “Reach a new audience by…” or “Feature your brand through…”
• If I could say one thing about your offerings, I’d recommend against selling text links. It’s against Google’s Terms of Service and could get you booted out of coming up in search engines. Here’s a perfect explanation from Type A Parent!
• As far as how much to say on this page, it’s really up to you. Some people give away all their stats and rates, some only share some and others share none. My advice is not to give away every single thing- if you do, there’s no reason to contact you if they don’t see what they want. If someone doesn’t like what they see, they’ll leave your site and you’ll never be the wiser. At least if they contact you and then decide they’re not interested, you can ask to be kept in mind for future campaigns (many reps work with multiple clients). If anything you could list things like number of fans or Twitter followers and perhaps a key stat that you’re proud of (like a long average visit).
• Regarding information about you, I’d definitely include it. In fact, you don’t really have an introduction to this page so consider writing a little about you and your blog. It can be pretty similar to your About page but consider that your audience is different. For your About page, your readers will be your main audience (though you want PR people to look too). For this page, PR people are your audience so make it relevant to them. That might mean tweaking some content you already have for a new audience or writing a new sentence or two altogether.
• In your sidebar I didn’t see a distinguishable place where an advertiser would go. If you don’t have any current advertisers (or only have one), use affiliate link banners instead so you can showcase where advertising is placed. Then have either a button or link that directs to this page for more details!
• Okay, so this isn’t quite about your PR page but if you want to make it easy for reps to contact you, create a Contact page too! Some reps may initially look at a PR page but once they get approval for the bloggers they want to hire (if that decision isn’t theirs), it’s easiest to search out a blogger’s contact page than to look for an email in a PR page or other page.
• At the very end of your page, consider a stronger call to action. Remember you’re trying to get them to contact you! Instead of a simple “Contact Me” you could say “If you’d like to request a media kit…” or “To learn more about how Janmary can work with your brand…”

Let me know your thoughts on the critique in the comments below. If you have an extra moment, head over to Janmary and give Janice some comment love.