'MommyBloggers' Turn Their Hobby Into Profits
Heather Armstrong’s blog got her fired. Six years later, it pays her family’s mortgage.
Armstrong, a 33-year-old Salt Lake City mother, is one of thousands of “mommybloggers” who are finding there is money to be made in writing about the traditionally uncompensated work of child rearing.
Armstrong, who has chronicled her life on Dooce.com since 2001 – and lost her Los Angeles Web-design job a year later after writing about her co-workers – now spills much digital ink on the topic of her 4-year-old daughter, Leta. Readers love it – to the tune of 5 million to 6 million page views a month.Armstrong spoke of her experience to about 1,000 women, 60 percent of them moms, attending the BlogHer conference over the weekend in San Francisco.
Most of these mothers started online journals for personal reasons. But a handful have taken blogging from a sanity-saving hobby to a career, and many others – more than 1,000 in BlogHer’s ad network alone – are collecting at least a little extra income through their blogs.
Some, like Armstrong, earn money through advertising on their sites, while others profit from selling merchandise or writing product reviews, or have used the popularity of their family sites to start related careers. A lucky few have even landed book deals.
Mommyblogging – a term embraced by some and reviled by others – has become one of the more lucrative blog categories because of marketers’ intense desire to connect with mothers, who are leaving traditional advertising venues such as soap operas for the Internet, said BlogHer co-founder Jory Des Jardins.
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