Kiddley Blogs – Blog Case Study

One of my favorite bloggers in my early years of blogging was Loobylu – an award winning blog written by a fellow Melbournian Claire Robertson.

Claire is an illustrator and toy maker and has been featured for her illustration work and blogging in many places over the last five years. I’ve always been very jealous of her sense of style and beautifully designed blog.

Six or so months ago Claire and her husband Phil launched a new blog by the name of Kiddley – a blog with loads of ideas, projects and tips for parents to enjoy with their kids. In a sense it is a DIY blog for parents.

It’s a blog that is brimming with the creativity in Claire’s other works but is also an entrepreneurial blog also with a real commercial edge (advertising and affiliate links).

Claire writes about Kiddley’s growth and emerging income stream that it brings:

“Kiddley has been going from strength to strength and no one is more surprised than me that we are starting to make a small income. It’s exciting to be working on a project like this with Big-P and it’s immensely satisfying trying new things and see what works. We are learning so much about blogging and marketing and our audience and after lots of planning and thinking and projecting we have decided that another new (small) blog is the next step for us followed by yet another in the new year. It’s all a bit of an experiement at this stage.”

In the last week or so Claire and Phil have added another blog to their growing network – Kiddley Links. It’s more overtly commercial in nature as it is a shopping blog and is specifically looking at and reviewing products related to kids.

I love the work that Claire and Phil are doing on these blogs and want to highlight it here for a number of reasons:

Firstly – its a brilliant example of people blogging about something that they obviously have an interest in and finding a way to monetize it. While it’s possible to pick a topic that will be financially rewarding and learn to love it – I think it’s much easier to sustain a blog that is on a topic that you’re passionate about.

Secondly – I love the way that Claire and Phil are expanding their blogging by picking related topics and are leveraging previous success to drive traffic to their new blogs. I wish that I’d done this in my early days of commercial blogging instead of picking a wide array of topics.

Thirdly – The clean design and layout of these blogs and ad placement is pretty smart. While there might be a few tweaks that I’d suggest – all in all I really like their integration of ads and design. Their blogs are warm, inviting and exude character and personality.

Fourthly – I quite like the husband and wife team approach on these blogs. I know of a few family partnership blogs like this and while it’s not possible for everyone it’s really great to see this type of partnership in action.