How to be a special blogger

With twin boys and a daughter, Sharon Beesley and her husband moved from San Francisco to NYC. No wonder she started a blog. A wonder her blog is.

I’m a regular reader of NYC Taught Me and love it. Sharon is enough parts style, charm, wit, smarts and sassy-ness to offer up the unexpected just when you think you have her pegged. It wasn’t until I chose Sharon’s blog to review that I realized my description above is just an introduction to NYC Taught Me.

Sharon Beesley likes to dive in

Sharon Beesley dives into life in NYC and shares it on her blog but her design doesn’t tell you this. It’s a gentle presentation that belies the depth that is made up of equal parts curiosity and know-how that she generously shares about life in NYC, motherhood, parenting tips, friendships, healthy eating, traveling with a family, kids crafts, cooking, kids fashion, wrangling kids and a ton more.

I wouldn’t change its vanilla-bean design (appealing to everyone but with a premium flavor), which is perfect for the ‘getting-to-know-you’ phase; showing new readers it’s available to them. But I would suggest to Sharon that she has reached the point all growing blogs arrive at: it’s time for show and tell.

Sharon shows us why she is worth reading regularly through the design, gorgeous + big (!) pictures and engaging daily blog post, but now she needs to tell us what we can’t see so easily, that NYC Taught Me has a lot to teach us.

Adding subject categories to either the top level navigation or the left rail (as is the case for NYC Taught Me) would mean I could use Sharon’s blog for more than a daily read. I could search for helpful tips on parenting twins or learn from her regular how-to posts. I wouldn’t be too traditional about the subject categories in this case because Sharon’s charm is that she is curious about near everything.

Rather than go noun-y with Food or Craft or Kids Fashion I would suggest be verb-y with an ‘How-To’ category that houses all the posts that share tips and instructions regardless of their disparity, and a ‘Living in NYC’ category, with all her great finds for life in the big city.

Adding categories is a step that you can take slowly, adding a couple to begin and seeing if it works. What this will mean is that Sharon shifts her blog from appearing to be a generalist one to defining itself as a specialist, which is a good way to grow new readers into old ones.