Monday, February 9, 2009

mom blogs can make money? really?!?

According to"Mom Blogs and Making Money," a recent post by Trisha from MomDot, yes they can, which is great news for a lot of blogging moms. On one hand you have the moms who've been blogging for a while, still waiting for their first AdSense payment. On the other you have moms toying with the idea of starting a blog, wondering if it could really pay for their child's college tuition. (By the way, unless you're super famous that probably won't happen.)

But blogger beware. Starting or even continuing to blog with the sole purpose of making money is quite possibly
the biggest mistake you can make:

If you totally encompass your blog with making money, when your adsense rolls in to be about 1 penny a month, you’re going to cry yourself to sleep at night. That leads to poor morale and you will quit before you started. Right? Right.

The article goes on to talk about
three very important steps a mom blogger must take in order to achieve achieve a measure of financial success with her blog:
  1. Have a goal
  2. Build good content, build a following and market your blog
  3. Market yourself, not your blog
The first step sounds simple, but it's not as simple as it looks. What really is your goal? What are you trying to accomplish with your blog? And steps two and three require a lot of work on your part. Fortunately Trisha goes into detail about the different ways you can market your blog and get the word out about you and your content. "Mom Blogs and Making Money" is a must-read for all bloggers regardless if you have offspring or not. I'd even suggest reading through it two or three times. I've read through it once and still have much to learn from Trisha's post.

"Mom Blogs and Making Money" is a wonderful guide even if you've been blogging for years. It's also a great action plan and source of hope for those of us still wondering if our writing will ever do more than take up space on a page! --Emily

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

My question always is--sure, you can make money, but how much?

If you're blogging from the sheer joy of it and happen to make some extra cash on the side, that's great.

If you're working 6-8 hours a day marketing yourself, creating great content, etc with the goal of earning money, and in the end you're bringing in what amounts to pennies per hour...is it worth it?

For some, maybe, but the numbers would change the equation for me. I'd really like to know what is considered a "good" amount of money to make from a blog and how much these successful mom blogs are really earning. Especially since I think many people are focused so much on SEO, branding and marketing with the end goal of earning money that they're not getting the joy out of blogging that they otherwise could. That could totally be worth it, but only IMO if you're making enough for the tradeoff. So far I haven't seen a lot of proof that that's the case for the vast majority of bloggers.

Unknown said...

Great article! Thanks for sharing this. Yes, great content is the KEY point any blog needs, especially if trying to monetize. :)
Lisa
http://www.boutiqueup.com