Bringing Home The Bacon
The modern woman, per the popular ’70s television commercial, was once “bringing home the bacon and frying it up in a pan.” Now she’s also writing a blog.
As many as 3,000 women attended the fourth annual BlogHer Conference 2008 to talk about their lives, their businesses, and their blogs. And in some cases, they’re all one and the same. Despite the popular perception that women bloggers are all stay-at-home mothers, many women here run their own businesses or work full-time, and they use a blog as a personal outlet, a connection to a community, or as a way to boost their career.
Jamie Risdon Lentzner, for example, is the founder of Foster City, Calif.-based Jamie’s Painting Design, a design shop, and she writes a blog about what it takes to run your own business. A first-timer to the BlogHer conferences, she said that she felt a bit overwhelmed because of the lineup of polished writers and the sheer volume of women.
An estimated 13 percent of women on the Internet write a regular blog, according to a new report from Forrester Research. That’s up slightly from the 12 percent of adults who blog, but is still eclipsed by the 15 percent of online mothers who blog.
“Today, American women are not only the most powerful consumers in the world, we’re also the power users of Web 2.0 and social-media technologies,” BlogHer co-founder Lisa Stone said.
Many of the women here are trying to figure out how to turn their blogs into a business. Among the more popular sessions on Friday were those on how to syndicate or promote a blog. The session “DIY Content Syndication and Promotion” had women lined against the walls and strewn across the floor.
Photo by Stefanie Olsen.
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