Two Founders, One Goal: To Publish High Quality Writing About Parenting
Tell us a little about yourself and your blog, What is the mission?
We started Motherwell almost four years ago. We set out to create an online space that features—from every angle—the highest quality writing about the parenting experience. Parents, and particularly mothers, have a unique and important voice that is often un-showcased. We wanted to be part of the movement that is changing that. Plus, we love working with so many wonderful new and seasoned writers!
Share with us a favorite quote!
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” —Mary Oliver
What tools or resources do you use that help with your blog?
We are constantly looking for tools to help us optimize our site. We love resources such as Unsplash, for free, high-resolution artwork to accompany our posts and CoSchedule Headline Analyzer, which we use to create the best, most enticing titles we can. We also use Submittable to keep our submissions organized, and MailChimp for our newsletter.
What aspect of your blog strategy are you focusing on most in 2020?
Up until now we have been very content focused—and we still are: the quality of the essays we publish is the bread and butter of our site; we edit everything very carefully and take enormous care with the writing we are entrusted with. But this year we’ve also been paying special attention to building our search traffic and honing in on SEO features.
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What do you focus on most when it comes to creating content?
We aim to publish essays that offer a unique slice of the parenting experience. That are granular and specific to one person’s life, but at the same time speak to something universal about raising children in the modern world. We try to balance evergreen topics with pieces that are timely and relevant to a specific trend or event. We are also always highly aware of the parenting landscape and through our newsletter and social media channels, Facebook in particular, we curate and share the most interesting and entertaining family-related stories from other publications and outlets.
Share with us any goals you have for 2020.
When the year started we were intent on focusing on site traffic and social media numbers, and we still are. But now, because of the coronavirus pandemic, everything looks a bit different and our audience inevitably has different needs. And so we are pivoting to fill that new space for our readers and writers, by running daily content specifically about people’s experiences of parenting in these strange conditions. So too we are continually looking, now more than ever, to showcase a diverse range of voices. On the whole, we we are trying to balance meeting our audience where they are—and adapting to the world around us—with continuing to grow our site and social channels.
Any tips you want to share with bloggers just starting out?
Quality, quality, quality. And also: embrace a writing community. This is how your work will get read and shared.
What’s your favorite book?
Too many to name! We are both always reading and discussing what’s on our bedside tables. This is why we often feature parenting books on the site and in our newsletter: because we want to share our latest finds with our audience.
What are some of the most popular posts on your blog?
What is your favorite part of being a SHE Media Partner?
We love having unfettered access to an SEO specialist for all of our nitty gritty questions!
What steps have you taken to increase your website traffic over the last year?
We’ve definitely been paying more attention to and implementing new SEO strategies since partnering with SheKnows, and we can see an uptick in our website traffic already! We’ve also been concentrating our efforts on social media platforms such as Pinterest, which hadn’t necessarily been a main focus before. Alongside this, we have been taking a careful look at our content and editorial calendar strategies, including adding in internal links to our posts and updating some high performers to give them a burst of freshness and, hopefully, a new life.
