Website analysis of 3 lifestyle bloggers
Alyson Haley, Gal Meets Glam and Lauren Kay Sims have gained massive followings on their blogs over the years, and here’s why.
Lifestyle blogs provide a curation of ideas, activities and interests within a blogger’s everyday life. Not only do they provide valuable information but they are written with a sense of heart that allows you to because more engaged with the writer. Lifestyle bloggers combine the best parts of informational and personal blogging together allowing anyone to find someone that they can relate with.
Lifestyle bloggers come in many forms and write about a wide variety of topics. The most common that you’ll find are:
- Beauty
- Home improvement
- Family
- Health/Fitness
- Food
Although they may focus on one topic more than others, lifestyle bloggers often have the freedom to write about the things they are most passionate about at that time.
However, how do these bloggers gain and maintain the attention of their audience? Today I will be looking at 3 lifestyle bloggers and analyzing like posts and websites to gain an insight into their similarities and differences.
Alyson Haley
Alyson Haley has become a major inspiration for women interested in fashion and beauty. However, she is also an active traveler and occasionally breaks apart from that niche to share her travel guides and essentials.
Her website has a more magazine-esc style- catering to collage-style photos and bright pops of color. Her layout is simple but clean — she showcases her name, start of blog and location at the top of the page and segmented the menu into the most commonly searched categories of a lifestyle blogger.
She posts several times a week and keeps her topics relatively simple, using headlines that will easily garner SEO traffic such as “The Cutest Shoes In The Nordstrom Anniversary Sale” or “Four Skincare Must Have’s For Beginners.” She is smart to add links to her social media at the top and bottom of her site and continuously have a section set to get people to sign up for her newsletter.
She utilizes a heavy amount of affiliate marketing on the products she recommends which helps to keep her page free of pop up ads. She also has a partnership with Nordstrom’s and has that link posted several times on her blog in different places.
Gal Meets Glam
This blog lifestyle was created by Julia Berolzheimer in 2011, while she was still in college. She aims to please the niche by bringing women together through what she calls the “feminine aesthetic” and posts a lot of content relating back to fashion and her family.
Her aesthetic is clean and airy — hosting neutral and pastel colors and thin elegant fonts. Her blog is almost like a breath of fresh air as you are comforted by the soft shades and flower decals spread across her page. She posts content to her blog daily allowing it to stay constantly fresh.
Similar to Alyson’s blog, she is also utilizing affiliate marketing for the items she features on her blog. On the front page of the site, she offers “Julia’s Favorite Pieces” which links items to the places where you can buy them but that is the most of it. She segments on another page her “daily looks” linking all the pieces of her outfits — which are most likely also affiliated. However, unlike Alyson’s blog, it doesn’t feel over to the top and like a con.
Her menu section is a little odd, she has 5 sections: featured, daily looks, stories, categories and shop. To me, it feels as if stories and categories are pretty much the same thing and could be combined. I personally find it more difficult to find things on her page because it is so cluttered in the stories section.
Lauren Kay Sims
Lauren is an incredibly diverse blogger, spreading her topics into many facets of her life including fashion, fitness, family, food and beauty. She posts to her blog almost daily with a random collection of stories.
Lauren offers the most modern and unique layout of the 3 bloggers — allowing the use of different display boxes, photo collages, graphics, varying text styles and moving pieces. She also manages to do this without her page feeling cluttered or overly busy to look at. Once again we see the use of affiliate marketing but this time they do seem more like the traditional ad with stock photos.
Unlike the other 2 bloggers, Lauren did not go with a menu that stretches the top of the page and instead opted for a menu you click for at the top left. That is most likely because she hosts 12 categories on her menu and if it stretched across the top it would make the page feel cluttered.
Lifestyle blogs hold a special place in the world of blogging because they allow the reader to learn more about the everyday life of another. After following these bloggers for years, you can grow with them. You see them graduate college, begin working or start a family — they become like a friend.
Lifestyle bloggers have a lot of opportunities to grow with their site and step away from traditional blogging. As we saw on the 3 sites, these women didn’t have the traditional pop-up advertisements and instead utilized affiliate marketing on the products they talk about.
By creating an aesthetically pleasing website, these women were able to cater to a larger public. Their sites weren’t overly cluttered or chaotic and often sported simple themes and neutral colors. Yet with every site, you could see the differences in the woman’s personality through their layouts and topic choices.
