Type-A Mom Keynote Address – Breaking the Mommy Blogging Mold

Now we’re at the Keynote Address: Breaking the Mommy Blogging Mold featuring Allison Worthington (moderating), Anne Fitten Glenn, Julie Roads, Renee Ross, Cecily Kellogg, and Megan Jordan. The video of this session is available on MomTV. It begins in the third video down and continues to the fourth.

Thanks again to WorldWinner for sponsoring me for the Type-A Mom Conference!

Panelist introductions. Lots of awesome stuff being said about each blogger, but I can’t keep up. I promise I’ll blog the meat of the discussion.

If you’re a mom and you blog but you don’t blog about being a mom, are you a mommy blogger? Not many people raised their hands in the affirmative. Example of a woman who pitched herself as a mommy blogger who posted nothing but reviews and giveaways, only tweeted about giveaways, never blogged about anything else. For the company being pitched, that’s not what they were looking for. They wanted to enter a relationship with a mom, not work with someone who manipulated numbers and tried to brand herself as something she really wasn’t. (Not sure what everyone else thinks, but I don’t think the giveaway blogger should be considered a mommy blogger, either. I think you need to be personal if you want to call yourself a mommy blogger. Disagree? Leave me a comment.)

Cecily started as an infertility blogger. Then she became an infertility blogger who had experienced the loss of twins to preeclampsia. Once her daughter was born,  she instantly became a mommy blogger. Although she avoided the label for a while. She wishes we could just be called “mom bloggers.” By making it “mommy,” it seems more diminuitive. (I’d embrace that. Mom bloggers unite!)

Companies want to work with mommy bloggers because we are a specific demographic they want to market to. We run our families. When we’re in charge of the family budget and where our family spends money.

Erin (@QueenOfSpain) called out “carpetbagging mommy bloggers” a few months ago. Like the woman who only does reviews and giveaways and tries to leverage the title of mommy blogger in order to get free stuff.

Those of us who do write about our families, but also write product reviews, have been accused of pimping out our families. This is where the conversation has gone.

Renee said she doesn’t remember anyone setting out the rules for blogging when she started. She doesn’t think that people should be policing bloggers. As long as you’re transparent, why should anyone judge?

Journalists get free stuff all the time, but no one really talks about that.

The blogosphere has changed a lot in the last five years. Product reviews didn’t happen a lot before. (Er, I reviewed loads of products on Epinions and on eBay way back in 1999, but it wasn’t until recently that I started getting review products to write about on my blog.)

Who decides who is a mommy blogger and who is not? It’s touchy. Maybe it’s more representative of our audience and our community than the specific topics we’re  writing about. Whether we’re talking about our  kids or not, if we’re talking to other moms every day, we’re in the mommy blogger mindset.

There’s no reason for us as women to be competitive. It’s not a zero sum game. One woman’s success is not going to take away another woman’s readers. The competitiveness comes from the perception that mom bloggers are “raking it in.”

Except for Pioneer Woman and Dooce, is anyone really making money as a mommy blogger?

Wait, where did the stat come from that there are 23 million mom bloggers? Really? Yikes. But the point? There’s only one you. Don’t judge your value by the number of hits you get or how much money you make. It’s a recipe for disaster.

Should we pay attention to stats? Cecily loves her stats. But she doesn’t base her value on her stats. “It depends on whether or not I have PMS.” It took her a long time to recognize herself as a brand. She needs to do some work to protect how people talk about her brand. She doesn’t work with a lot of companies because she is not attractive to a lot of companies. And her readers don’t expect that of her. Traffic-based ad networks do not pay her what she thinks she’s worth.

Who’s making enough money to buy shoes from their personal blog? Who’s making enough money to buy a car? More hands went up than I thought when asked who makes $1,000 per year just from their personal blogs, not from other things they’ve leveraged from their blogs, somewhere between 10% and 25% of the women in the room.

Numbers are not the most important part of your stats. Check out your referrers, your exit pages, who’s talking about you, what ISPs are visiting. You can get a lot of information about your visitors that way.

We need to keep the power with the moms. Don’t let men come in and pit us against each other like they did with skin care products. (Don’t do this or you’ll get fat. Don’t do this or you’ll look old.)

@appleofmyeye tweeted the suggestion of calling ourselves “digital moms.”

But even though there’s a backlash against the term mommy blogger, we’ve been branded and we need to OWN IT!

We’re not “just bloggers.” We media. When Alli went into a restaurant, she didn’t say, “We need a table. We’re mommy bloggers.” She said, “We need a table. We’re media.” We are new media!

Like it or not, we need some sort of clarity about what being a mommy blogger is. We need some boundaries. What do we do to police ourselves? Do we have the right to do so?

Engaging in mommy blog wars is almost always a disaster. Dooce is a real person. Cecily is a real person. We don’t know the real story about any of this drama. “If you feed the fire, the flames will go right to the ceiling.”

Amy brought up a situation where a blogger stole someone else’s blog subscriber stats and tried to pass them off as her own. When she didn’t respond to private email and DM to rectify the situation, that’s when Amy felt the need to bring it to the attention of the community so other moms could call upon her to do the right thing. And that’s when she apologized and took it down.

“A whole lot of ugly” comes out because of anonymity.

A journalist removes themselves from a story, while bloggers inject themselves into a story. (I like that, Janice!)

“We all look for labels, but the only thing we can be is  unabashedly ourselves.” (LOVE that, @todaysmama!)

Few of us have heard of the term “mousewife.” We don’t like it. It sounds awfully derogatory as a way of describing women who stay home and make money online.

Journalists put us down on purpose because we’re so good at putting ourselves down due to the fact we can’t put the term “journalist” after our names. They put us down because they’re threatened by us.

YOU ARE WRITERS. Those of us who are professional freelance writers write stuff that isn’t really us. We get paid for it, but the the “real writing” we do is when we blog for ourselves. BLOGGERS ARE REAL WRITERS. You don’t have to aspire to be a writer. You ARE a writer!

Being a mommy blogger MEANS you’re a part of a community. You HAVE influence. You TALK to people. You LISTEN to people. That’s why we’re valuable! We’re not valuable just because we have functioning vaginas. (Comment from the peanut gallery… Drew from Eden Fantasys is here purely because we have vaginas. Laughter and howling ensues. I should talk to him about the product review I’m supposed to be doing for him, because I haven’t gotten anything yet. Yes. I’m doing one of THOSE reviews.)

Don’t give trolls power by engaging them. Ignore them! Don’t feed the fire.

Cecily’s going to make me cry talking about how the support she got from the community when her sons died saved her. She got flowers from readers in Japan. I’ve got tears in my eyes thinking about those little angel babies. How can she talk about this without bawling? (The same goes for @mamaspohr.)

Don’t jump on bandwagons in mommy blogging wars when you don’t know what’s going on. Trisha is crying because people jumped on her and left comments calling her kids ugly because of some stupid blogging thing. Which is making me tear up more.

The support of the community can be the most important part of the blogging experience. We cry together. More people are crying here. Everyone has a different job in the community. Everyone gets different pay. We’re all on different levels. And that’s okay!

The future of the term mommy blogger in five years? To the panelists.

“It’s just going to be… more. Bigger and better. More powerful and more empowering… There has to be the contrast. [Twilight reference I didn’t get.] The community is going to grow and the good side is going to win out. And it’s going to make us all so freaking rich.”

“Looking around this room… and just being a voice in the wilderness… I was in the top 35,000 blogs in the world on Technorati six years ago, and now I’m on the bottom… but that’s how it goes. And the future looks good.”

“The oversimplification of the term is going to go away. In five years, the term mommy blogger and the image of poop is going to go away… The media is going to stop recognizing and using the term… ‘Now we know where all the yuppies are.’ Looking at us like we’re all pampered moms.”

“When we all started, all of us [infertility bloggers] were childless. Over time, some of us had children. New people came in, and some of us became ‘graduates.’ Parenting bloggers are going to get broader and broader as our kids age… When our kids move out of the house, are we going to still be mommy bloggers?”

“More and more, I think we’re going to be looked at as  experts… There is a great way for us to go… whether it’s because we’re  writing about our children… not just because we influence our friends and family, but because we are influencers across the board… The world is our oyster.”

All of us here are the early adopters. Don’t let anyone “cool” let you think like you’re anything less than you are.

Standing ovation for Kelby. Now we’re breaking before the BBQ Bash!

Christina Gleason (976 Posts)

That’s me: Christina Gleason. I’m a writer, editor, and disability advocate. I'm a multiply disabled autistic lady doing my best in this world built for abled people. I’m a geek for grammar, fantasy, and casual gaming. I hate vegetables. I cannot reliably speak, so I’ll happily conduct business over email or messaging instead.