One of the more reliable ways to make money on the Internet, especially if you are a stay-at-home mother, is to have a life and blog it. It isn’t really enough to blog until your fingertips are blue every day and every night of your life: you really have to have something others would be interested in reading. So you might be thinking that there are so many millions of blogs out there, why would the Internet, let alone the world, really need another one? The answer to that is, no the last thing anyone needs is another blog.
What makes this mom-blog phenom so interesting, though, is that for years women have been trying so many weird at-home jobs to keep two incomes for the family while also being there for their kids. These are jobs like transcribing or stuffing envelopes or running a day care facility or being a virtual assistant. But who would have guessed that the answer could be sitting right under their beleaguered noses?
There are several mom-bloggers who do well enough to mention here. In fact, they do so well that they have begun earning a living for the entire family, many of them. This isn’t just a hobby. One woman, Danielle Friedland, began Celebrity-Babies.com after the birth of her own daughter. She began covering more than just her own life with her new baby but also covered the babies of celebrities and a hit site was born. Recently, Celebrity-Babies was bought by People.
Another very successful mom-blogger is Heather B. Armstrong, who writes the very very popular online blog, Dooce.com. Armstrong became rather infamous when she was fired from her job in Hollywood for blogging about it but she developed her own readership and now is easily in the top 500 blogs, if not the top 100. Armstrong is one of a handful of very popular mom-blogs that double as photography appreciation sites. The women use big, expensive cameras while they snap their kids and various things they see. Armstrong uses a Nikon.
The most addictive of these sites has to be PioneerWoman.com. Run by the self-depreciating Ree Drummond, Pioneerwoman.com is divided in several sections, all reflections of Ree’s home life on the prairie. She was a city girl who fell in love with and married a cowboy, had four kids with him and a couple of years back decided to document it. She has a cooking blog full of gorgeous, delicious and easy recipes, a home and garden section, which gives updates on a recent remodel as well as various other things that don’t seem to fit anywhere else including, a photography section where Ree gives her readers tips on digital photography and Photoshop. The jewel in the crown, though, is the main blog, Confessions of a Pioneer Woman where Ree talks about her life, her “punks,” her movie star handsome husband (she calls him Marlboro Man) and the ups and downs of a very full and busy life (she home schools her kids).
Ree’s site is a good one because she is so generous with her readers. She is always holding giveaways (which must be part of the lucrative ad package she’s garnered) for gift cards, cameras and all kinds of great things. Her photography, by the way, which she offers as downloadable prints, is reason enough to visit her site. She is simply there trying to make the world a better place one desperate housewife at a time.
