For a person who has never had a weight issue until recently, Asithi has covered the topic on her 6-month old blog Small Steps to Health, due to a midday traffic accident that left her with a new set of body dynamics with which to deal.

Asithi only has 15 pounds to get back to her goal weight but with an 800-pound gorilla of a niche, she has her work cut out for her.

The diet and weight loss industry in America commanded as much as $35 billion annually in 2006, according to a CBS News report. With obesity on the rise, that figure has certainly gotten more plump and a lot of businesses want a slice of the pie.

Asithi states that she has a 'part-time blog with a full-time job' which means her online writing is more of a hobby that is only required to gain enough revenue to pay for its own hosting fee.

Despite this, she has a good chance of succeeding with monetization since she notices additional traffic when posting on certain topics. "The few posts I wrote about exercise injuries, I've actually gotten a lot of hits from that. I notice on some of the other health and fitness blogs, they really don't touch too much about that either or go into details talking about it," she said during a recent phone conversation.

It would be helpful to fuel that interest with a few keyword optimized posts that are more likely to generate even more contextual advertising revenue. For example, it may make sense to include the occasional post on the benefits of car accident insurance and how it can help during the recovery process, but Asithi's content direction will do well to avoid obvious AdSense monetization keywords about injury attorneys and claims.

With that kind of content direction and comfortable traffic levels that are currently averaging 100 unique visitors daily, her review also touches on design.

Considering her unique car accident recovery experience, Asithi may want to consider a header design that better reflects her special interest in healthy eating and weight loss. There is a lot of imagery that can reflect recovery, triumph or hard-won success and a graphic designer can custom make one for her quickly once she's able to distill and convey that unique positioning.

Her three-column layout betrays the wealth of content she's created in such a short time. The two sidebars, while great side by side (as opposed to separated by the body content), stop the visitor from quickly knowing what to do next. Testing her internal traffic flows once the Categories tag is above the scroll is in order.

Tossed onto the other side of a highway by a car doing a merge that covered multiple lanes, Asithi's blog is backed by a compelling story that should have more of an opportunity to shine: both for her personal health benefit and the further benefit of readers.

STATS
Blog Name: Small Steps to Health
Blog URL: http://smallstepstohealth.com/
Blogger(s): Asithi
Platform: WordPress
Age: 6 months
Feed: http://smallstepstohealth.com/feed/