Mom Blogger Pro (Formerly Profitable Mommy Blogging)
How to blog from professional mom bloggers who share their experiences and tactics for earning from their blogs.
Last year, a new type of advertising service called YouData was launched.
Rather than adding the standard size buttons or banners to your blog, YouData places a unique widget on your blog that features ads specifically tailored to your visitors. (I have one on my Mom blog if you want to see how it works. It’s the long white box in my sidebar.) [Read more...]
Recently a client of mine asked me if I knew how to write a disclosure policy and if I thought she even needed one. I knew right away how to answer her first question and later in this post, I’ll tell you how to create one for your own blog.
But her second question – do I need one? – wasn’t quite as easy. So the answer I gave her was “It depends.”
First, let me explain what a disclosure policy is. You may hear the word “transparency” being tossed around the blogging world, especially when it comes to Big Name bloggers and sponsored posts. A disclosure policy is essentially a couple of paragraphs explaining how you handle reviews if you’re getting paid or compensated for writing them. [Read more...]
Have you ever visited a blog and been overwhelmed with buttons and badges and links? Or (here’s a huge pet peeve for a lot of people) scrambled quickly for the little X in the corner because you couldn’t figure out how to turn the music off?
Its tempting when you first start blogging to add all of those pretty buttons and audio players but it can quickly turn into clutter. Once you end up with too much stuff on your blog, not only does it detract from your blog’s content section, it also takes up valuable real estate on your blog that you could be using to sell as advertising space or promoting products as an affiliate. [Read more...]
I was planning on giving Mom Force some time to see how it was going before I wrote about it here at PMB but in the first 2 days since it launched, two Moms have already been hired! Wanna take a guess who one of those moms is? ME
I’m very excited not only about this opportunity but also my upcoming interview with Jessica Smith of JessicaKnows who is the force behind MomForce. But before I let Jessica tell you more about MomForce, I wanted to share my experience with you. [Read more...]
If you’ve been hanging around in the blogging world for a while, you probably have a few favorite blogs and there may be some professional bloggers who you admire. I can think of at least six just off the top of my head. If one of those six bloggers recommends a product or shares some advice, I am more likely to act on their suggestions because I trust them and I value their opinions.
One of these six bloggers is Michael Martine of Remarkablogger. Michael has made a career out of blogging and even provides coaching and consultations to aspiring pro bloggers. I’ve had the pleasure of connecting with Michael on Twitter and he was gracious enough to agree to answering a few questions for me about profitable blogging. I’m very excited to be able to share his responses here with you.
April: Michael, for our readers who are not familiar with ‘Remarkablogger’, can you tell me just a little about your blogging experience, such as when you started blogging, how you started making money from blogging, and what kinds of topics you cover at Remarkablogger?
Michael Martine: I started blogging in 1999 or 2000 on Blogger, and I simply loved it. I had a personal blog and nobody was really monetizing their own blogs back then. I had a web design business and an unrelated blog. Google AdSense changed everything. It really kicked off a revolution: anybody could make money simply by slapping some ads on their blogs, easy-peasy. I had a video blog (which no longer exists) that was getting great traffic as a result of being on Blogger’s “buzz” list for 3 weeks. I put ads on it and began to learn about ad optimization. At one point, that blog made about $400 a month. [Read more...]
In my last post about Twitter, I mentioned some Twitter tools that would help you get the most out of using Twitter to promote your blog. There are a lot of different Twitter-related websites and services and the list grows longer every day. I even received an invitation to Twitters Anonymous this morning. I sure hope someone wasn’t trying to tell me something!
The first type of Twitter tool I want to mention is the Twitter client which basically means a program you can use to access Twitter in ways other than going to Twitter.com. Two of the most popular are Twhirl and TweetDeck, both of which use the Adobe Air platform.
The advantage of using a Twitter client is that you can access it from your desktop without having your web browser open. They update automatically so that you’re not constantly having to refresh. It will also notify you when there are new tweets or DMs (direct messages) by either a sound or a pop-up or sometimes both. [Read more...]
Hopefully you’ve at least heard of Twitter by now and you may already have an account. But have you thought about how you can use Twitter to promote your blog?
First, let’s back up a little just in case you haven’t heard of Twitter. Twitter is one of the many (and I mean MANY) social networking or social media services. Think of it as instant messaging with hundreds of people at once. Better yet, since you can only send messages that are 140 characters or less, its more like texting with hundreds of people. The basic concept of Twitter can be seen in the little box where you enter your text. Twitter asks “What are you doing?”
There are two components of “social media” – the social part and the media part. Unlike standard media (print, radio, TV), Twitter and other social media services involve conversation and interaction with your audience. In this case, your audience consists of the people who are following you because those people will see your updates.
If you’re thinking about becoming a Mom blogger or if you’ve been blogging for a while, you’ve probably struggled with the decision of how open you will be. Should you use a pseudonym? Is posting pictures of your kids a no-no? What about family, co-workers, neighbors…should you blog about them or not?
There are pros and cons to both full disclosure and total privacy. There is no right or wrong option and what works for one blogger may not work for the other. Its a personal decision that only you, the blogger, can make.
Let’s use one of the most well-known Mom bloggers as an example. You’ve heard of Dooce, right? Dooce, a/k/a Heather Armstrong, gained major publicity in the world of blogging when she was fired from her job because of her blog, specifically some unflattering posts about her co-workers. Ouch.
Perhaps being so candid and open on her blog and revealing its existence to people in her offline life wasn’t such a good idea. But then again, being terminated over blogging was the catalyst that launched Heather/Dooce into the Mom Blogging Hall of Fame. [Read more...]
