Former Canadian Fashion magazine mavens Ceri Marsh and Laura Keogh have ditched writing about designer duds in favour of a literally more fruitful endeavour: food.
The duo have launched SweetPotatoChronicles.com, a blog-style website dedicated to offering quick, easy and nutritious meal options for parents and their families, as well as profiles, nutritional information and mealtime tips and tricks.
‘We really wanted to be a one-stop shop for parents. Before we started this, Laura and I would always be on the phone, asking each other things like ‘Do you have a good site that would tell me about supplements?’ I’d be like ‘Yeah, I do’ [and vice versa]. So, we thought, what if there was a place that you could go to for all of it? Where recipes, products, personalities, would all live together; we thought that would be a really good service to families.’
Sweet Potato Chronicles is both a website and weekly newsletter. Up in beta form since April, it officially launched this week on its new WordPress platform, currently getting a few thousand unique visitors per month and sending the newsletter out to a few hundred subscribers. The goal is to have 15,000 unique visitors on average to the site every month by May 2011.
The website’s audience is still in its infancy, Marsh emphasizes, and its founders have not yet embarked on any significant promotional activities. Due to the high-profile nature of Marsh and Keogh, though, garnering early PR has not been a problem, with television appearances in the works and mentions on websites such as CanadianLiving.com.
At present, promotion of the site is mainly being executed via social media, but Marsh says one of the main promotional strategies they will use is content sharing with other high-profile, topically related sites. Marsh stayed mum on the deals currently in the works, but allowed that content-sharing arrangements were being made with a major parenting site, health magazine and food newsletter.
Ad opps on the site are still being developed, but display ads, sponsorship and editorial/advertorial integrations are all ideas the women are open to, says Marsh, and the newsletter currently features an ad unit, which this week was held by Joe Fresh. Video will also soon be added to the site as well.
While developing SweetPotatoChronicles.com is Marsh and Keogh’s focus, creating a mini media empire around the brand is definitely something in the backs of the co-founders’ minds.
‘I think that the website is really going to be the hub of a larger project for us. The website is a great place to develop ideas and material, and then we hope to spin it out. We’re considering digital magazines for 2011 – really narrowly focused ‘specials,’ beautifully produced pieces – we’re talking about developing a book, we’d love to be a TV show. But we see the website as the cornerstone to it all.’
