Content Marketing

Content Marketing Lessons from Mommy Bloggers

Heather Armstrong, known as Dooce to her followers, launched her popular blog in 2001 as a place for satirizing her experiences at work. She has since chronicled her experiences with depression, pregnancy, parenting, and health – or whatever is currently going on in her life.

Ten years later, her blog receives tens of thousands of visits per day. Armstrong became a consultant for a media network, authored two books, and entered into a partnership with HGTV.

Armstrong, and the 3.9 million blogging women in the U.S. alone known as  “mom bloggers” aren’t claiming to be experts or journalists. Yet many of these women have evolved into community leaders who provide advice, solve problems and influence purchasing decisions.

So what’s their secret?

They embrace the relationship with their like-minded audience to the fullest, crafting the mundane into beautiful stories. As we’ve previously discussed here on our blog, the best ideas come from experiences, conversations, and moments in daily life. So here are a couple ways we can learn from them.

1. Your Blog Should Speak To A Real Human Being.

Whether you’re writing for business leaders, programmers, mathematicians, teenagers, moms or dads, your blog should speak to a real person. No matter who we are or what we do, we can appreciate many similar interests like humor, humanity and good stories.

Becoming Sarah, by Sarah A. Schlothan Christensen leverages her blog to showcase her life experiences, photographs, values and illustrations.

But by using titles like I’m running out of witty titles for posts about my kid humiliating me, Christiansen admits her flaws and makes other mothers laugh (and consequentially click).

 

2. Your Personality And Your Skills Should Be Used As An Advantage.

From her fonts to her personalized banners, it is clear that Armstrong has a great aesthetic for design. Her photographs are clear and inviting, and her blog layout is very crisp. Many “mommy bloggers” have trouble understanding HTML and computer tools, so Armstrong’s skills give her a leg up.

 

3. Subjectivity Is Valuable, So Trust Your Voice.

Traditional journalism teaches writers to approach topics objectively and with detached omniscience. Mom bloggers tend to take a more casual approach, frequently writing from a first-person perspective. Defying this basic rule of essay writing, mom bloggers give universal power to the words “I” and “we.” But even if you don’t take a purely first person approach, you can still inject personality into what you are saying.

From there, whether you write about marketing or what vegetables to buy at the supermarket, your readers will listen and trust you. Which, is, after all, the point.

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