Familienpolitik

My blog needs more readers. I need to improve the design of the blog to make my material more easily navigable. I also need to improve my networking to increase readership with an actual interest in my blog’s topic. I need to comment on blogs and articles discussing the different subjects of my blog and link to sites who post links to their articles in their comments section.

A weakness of the current blog setup and design is that the categories only allow me to divide my content geographically. The tags and tag cloud allow people to navigate by topic, but separate pages on different topics (i.e. same-sex marriage, adoption, underage marriage) would allow me to develop readership around those areas of interest. While I think all of these family policy issues are related, some readers may be more invested in certain topics than others. I need to tap into communities who are interested in some of the specific topics covered by my blog.

Geotagging would be a visual way to organize the content geographically for those readers who are particularly interested in a certain region.

To better capture the very personal side to my blog’s topic, I would also like to add a section of audio interviews with people from different countries discussing their experiences with family policy. Each interview will have two sections, the first asking the same five general questions of every interviewee, the second will get into the specifics of the country’s family policy. Here is an example of the first kind of interview, asking a Malaysian woman five questions about her country’s family policy.

The interviews could link to blog posts relating to the specific country’s family policies and would provide a first-person element that most news sites are unable to provide. The audio interviews could cover countries and cultures that are somewhat ignored by the media or they could provide a new perspective to an event being covered by the news.

I have also recently added a poll to my blog with some success. Any future Familienpolitik would have to increase the use of interactive devices and polls are an easy way for readers to express their opinion about issues that are often contentious.

Lastly, I need more images. While I don’t think that more pictures would up my readership without making the changes described above, I do think making my blog more visually appealing will increase interest in the topics I am covering.