Gian Reyes launched Wayward Son in August, an Australian men’s lifestyle blog. Reyes started the blog after noticing a gap in the market for Australian men.
Wayward Son is targeted towards upwardly mobile men aged 25-35 and by the end of September has reached 98,000 views (71,000 UPV).
“We’re the forgotten demographic, we’re not all about T&A and we’re certainly not driving around in Lamborghini’s wearing Tom Ford suits. There was no lifestyle media product that appealed to me, I’m an ambitious young man but I still can’t afford all the fancy things in the glossy magazines and I certainly want a little bit more substance than just looking at girls in bikinis,” remarked Reyes.
Reyes credits the success of the blog to a few things: Social media which 80% of his traffic came from, interviewing influencers and good old fashioned cold calling. Reyes recalls calling every PR representative he knew, messaging everyone twitter who may be doing something interesting, he interviewed influential people, and just old fashioned shaking hands.
“I’m quite proud that we reached this milestone and there were a few rocky moments like having to change hosting providers twice to handle the traffic. It all sort of just happened. I’m hoping to keep providing engaging content that my demographic are interested in, less of a news site but more of a real life stories blog. I won’t ever be writing about things that’s just too unaffordable, too aspirational, we’ll always be about attainable luxuries,” added Reyes.
Reyes is still continuously tweaking and changing his content, he’s become a little obsessed with analytics and trying to figure out who his readers are and what they want. He’s found that his users are more engaged in integrated content, a recent article he wrote about camping which featured a Ford vehicle got 17,000+ views in a week whilst a traditional product review would be closer to 2,000.
Wayward Son is an Australian men’s lifestyle blog for upwardly mobile men aged 25-35 covering topics like fashion, bars, restaurants, health, travel, entertainment and inspirational people.
