How To Start a Parenting Blog

Starting a blog is one of the best ways to build an audience, get your ideas out into the world, and possibly make some (or a lot) of money while doing what you love. 

Getting started and taking the first steps can feel like a huge challenge. Building a website, planning your content, and finding the right business model are just a few of the tasks you’ll need to do to succeed.

Don’t worry! By the end of this article, you should have the knowledge and tools you need to feel confident and prepared to start your parenting blog today.

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What Is Your Blog About?

Since you are reading this article right now, you are probably pretty clear about your blog subject - you are starting a parenting blog! But you need to dig a little deeper to determine what, exactly, you want your blog to accomplish. Are you writing a parenting blog for single moms? A parenting blog for dads? A parenting blog for adoptive parents?

Knowing on a fundamental level what you want your blog to be about is a necessity because it will help you focus and decide what type of content you want to write.

There’s a quote that fits this situation perfectly:

"If you try to be everything for everybody, you will be nothing to no one."

Establish Your Niche

When creating a new blog, you need to find your niche. This is the corner of the market that you have the most knowledge about, the place you can establish yourself as an absolute authority. If you try to take on Family Living Today right out the gate, you are going to be overwhelmed and may wind up quitting in frustration. 

You need the right sized niche, one that is not too wide and not too narrow. “Parenting” is too wide - you will never stand out from the crowd. “How to pick shoes for 2-year-olds” is too narrow - you will run out of things to say or fail to find a big enough audience to support your blog. 

Some examples of niche parenting blogs are:

• Having 5 Kids Blog - Beth Woolsey
• Gaining Confidence in Parenting Blog - Alpha Mom
• Christian Foster Parenting Blog - Foster the Family

Name Your Blog

Once you’ve found your niche, it’s a great time to start brainstorming a web domain name for your blog. You’ll want to pick a name that’s brandable and available. Use our domain name tool to check if your name is available. If it is, scoop it up before someone else gets to it first.

Brand Your Blog

The strongest and most memorable businesses are built on a solid brand. When developing your brand, think about what your business stands for. Customers and clients are looking for companies that have a compelling brand, as much as they are shopping for high-quality products and services.

Creating a logo for your business is vital for increasing brand awareness. You can design your own unique logo using our Free Logo Generator. Our free tool will help you brand your business with a unique logo to make your business stand out.

Finding Your Audience

Having a good sense of who is going to be reading your blog is one of the best ways to know what type of content to create, how to shape it, and, ultimately, how to grow your following. With a clear understanding of your niche, understanding your audience should come more naturally.

Finding your target audience - the people you want hanging out on your blog - isn’t only statistics and demographics. It requires a deeper understanding of who these people are and what they want. Your target audience is the people you’re writing to when you write your blog.

It is vital that you choose a specific audience for your blog because knowing your audience gives your content a purpose and helps set your tone. Are you writing for pregnant mothers who are going to have a baby soon, or are you writing to couples who have two or more children? There are big differences between what each audience needs.

Create a Persona

One way to understand your audience is to create a persona of your perfect target audience member. This essentially means creating a mock-up of the ideal person you hope to reach with your blog.

Here is an example of a target audience persona:

Having a persona for your perfect audience member helps you to visualize and understand who you are writing for and provides important direction to your content.

Be Your Own Persona

Another popular way to find your perfect target audience is to be your own persona. Many of the best products and services come from scratching your own itch. It’s possible you’ve searched for the perfect parenting blog to read, came up short, and decided to create it yourself. This makes you the perfect audience member for your own blog.

This can be a great strategy for creating highly effective content. If you’ve noticed a meaningful omission in blog content, chances are you are not alone. By writing personally satisfying content you are likely to reach an audience in search of the same things.

Where Is Your Audience Hanging Out?

No web content exists in a vacuum. While you should strive to create uniquely entertaining content for your blog, your target audience is almost certainly already out there reading other blogs, engaging on specialized forums, and using social media. Finding the sites where your audience already mingles is a great way to discover what topics they are most interested in, what language they are using, and what valuable content you can add to that mix.

Some examples for your parenting blog may include:

• FamilyLivingToday.com
• FairyGoddessBoss.com
• AhaParenting.com
• ScaryMommy.com

Visiting these sites is also a great way to begin engaging with your audience before your blog has even gone live. Jump into conversations on forums and in comments sections and get to know the people you’ll be writing for. This is a great, organic way to build relationships and direct people to your blog in its early days. Sharing your passion with like minded people will make them more excited and passionate about supporting you in your blogging endeavor.

How Will You Present Your Work?

Traditionally, when most people think about a blog they picture written content on a page. However, there are several different ways to present your ideas on your blog, depending on your subject matter and target audience. Every blog will thrive with different formats, so it’s important to think carefully about how to best showcase your content before you start.

There are several effective methods of presenting the material on your parenting blog. They include:

Evergreen Articles

As the name suggests, evergreen articles are composed of content that lasts. These articles are designed to have a long shelf life and continue drawing readers to your blog over time. They are typically long-form, text-based articles that delve more deeply into a particular topic.

The evergreen content you create for your parenting blog will need to fit naturally within your niche. If you write a lot about taking care of babies, you can write reviews of different baby products and post them on your blog. Your reviews will remain relevant for a while, especially if you review products that you know people are going to be interested in year after year. Try to review both new products and tried and true products to attract new readers.

Videos

While the video format is not new, the explosive growth of YouTube and the advent of new and innovative video-based tech like Snapchat and TikTok have shown the true power of video as an online medium. While you may think that creating video is much more difficult and expensive than writing your content, you have access to all the technology you need to make high-quality video content right on your smartphone.

There are plenty of opportunities to produce interesting video content with a parenting blog. You can decide which topics fit your niche, then come up with video ideas based on those topics. If you teach moms how to make baby food, for instance, you could make video how-tos for different baby food recipes and post them on your blog. Do not stress too much about the quality of your videos, at least at first. You will get better at videos the more you work with the medium.

News-type Articles

News articles or other “announcement” type content can be a great way to gather new readers. One benefit of news content is the short-term but powerful increase in search volume during an event. While this bump may be temporary, it can be a great tool for grabbing new readers who end up coming back for more.

Writing about current events or new happenings also means there will typically be less competition for readers. Other blogs and media sources are all getting the information as it develops. Since the base of knowledge available is smaller, this gives you a good opportunity to add your own flavor to the article.

The downside to news-type articles is that they tend to lose popularity much more quickly than evergreen content. While the interest for an event may be very large one day, the next day people may already be moving on to the next shiny object.

New product announcements make good news-type articles. When you discover a new product coming out that you think might be interesting to your readers, you can write a news-type blog about it. You can also set the stage for your review blogs using news-type blogs, which means your research for one can lead to research for the other. You may even start getting early releases of products if your blog becomes popular.

Image-heavy Content

While most people expect to be reading when they visit a blog, image-heavy content can be very appealing and break up your text-focused posts to keep people’s attention. Depending on the topic of your post, displaying multiple images per page on a single subject can give your audience a better sense of what you are trying to convey.

While some topics may take to images very easily, like a car blog or a celebrity gossip site, others may require some deeper thinking to make this strategy work.

You have options when it comes to image-heavy content on a parenting blog. Depending on your niche and your preferences, you could focus more on collecting existing images to use on your blog or you could take your own photographs and post them on your blog. Many parenting bloggers use both techniques. 

If you are writing how-tos for your audience, like how to make your own silly putty or how to make baby food, you can take photos of the process and use those photos on your blog. If you are writing about a new product that you are reviewing, you can take photos of it in use and use the photos provided by the company as well. You can use your judgment to determine what makes for the best image-heavy blogs.

Mix and Match

Mixing and matching content delivery strategies is an important part of being a parenting blogger. While you may have some types of content that you love creating, it is necessary to stretch yourself periodically with new types of content to keep things interesting - both for you and your audience. Try making videos, taking photographs, and varying the length and style of your content from time to time. You may find some new ways to express yourself and reach a wider audience.

How To Make Money From A Parenting Blog

One of the main reasons people start blogs is to generate some sort of profit. Whether you’re looking for a few hundred dollars per month or a job-replacing income, blogging is still an excellent way to make those dreams a reality.

There are a few great ways to make money from a parenting blog:

Display Ad Networks

Display ads are the simplest way for websites to generate any sort of income. Ad networks, like Google Adsense, are fairly simple to be accepted into, and implementation onto your site is streamlined and clean. If you’re just beginning to see some traffic to your blog and want to turn this into dollars, display ads are where most people start.

There are a few downsides to display ads, however. The first is that some feel they detract from the user experience on your blog. Most people have been to a site where large ads pop up and block the content in the middle of reading. This can be distracting, frustrating, and even drive people away from your blog. While it’s possible to clean up and control the type of ads you use, it can be a constant battle to balance effective ad placement with aesthetics and readability.

The other main downside is that they don’t pay a lot. These networks generally use a pay-per-click (PPC) model which, depending on the niche, can pay anywhere from $0.01 to $1.50 per click, most on the lower end.

While display ads are a great way to make your first dollars, you’ll want to make sure any negatives they bring are worth the profits they provide. Once you develop a solid following, you can consider moving on to more lucrative and effective profit-making options.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing programs like Amazon Affiliate have become much more popular over the past few years, as they take the payment model from pay-per-click to cost-per-acquisition (CPA). This means you can refer as many users to an advertiser’s product as you want, but will only get paid when the user makes a purchase.

Both advertisers and publishers benefit from an affiliate marketing setup. The advertiser pays nothing until a sale is made and the publisher enjoys much higher commissions than the pay-per-click model.

You can find a variety of affiliate programs aimed at parenting blogs, each offering different advantages and potential disadvantages. Some offer higher commissions but are harders sells for an audience, while others are easier to integrate into your blog but may not offer as high of a commission. 

Ultimate Bundles affiliate program is one that many parenting bloggers use. The program offers bundles of dozens and sometimes hundreds of products, each chosen by a respected blogger based on a theme - such as herbal bundles or homemaking bundles. The cool thing about Ultimate Bundles is that they may only cost as much as a single item in the bundle, making them a great value. The bloggers and manufacturers get exposure through the bundles, and you make a commission! What’s not to love?

Choose affiliate programs based on what you like and what you think your audience will appreciate. Commission isn’t everything, either. It is better to make a little less and keep your audience happy than compromise your reputation pushing something you don’t really like or agree with.

Sell Digital Products

Digital products are an online entrepreneur's dream. You create the item once, then sell it as many times as you can, with little to no cost of reproduction. This means that you can scale your business to infinity.

Examples of digital products are:

• Ebooks - A piece of writing, generally in PDF format. These can contain literally anything that your audience would want. They can either be true book-length all the way down to a few pages of content. Depending on your niche, audience, and subject, these can run from $1 to $100 per sale fairly easily.
  
  
• Gated Content - This is content that is served on your website just like any other article, except that is behind a “paywall”. If you are creating content that you don’t want to be released to anyone but your true followers, you have them sign up for an account on your site and charge them a subscription fee for access. Generally, authors charge anywhere from $5 to $200 per month for access to gated content.
  
  
• Online Courses - If you can teach a skill that your audience wants to learn, you can create an online course to sell to them. These courses can be formatted in whatever way makes the most sense to you, but most nowadays are video courses. Online courses can sell from $10 to well over $10,000 per course, obviously depending on the subject matter and audience.

A good example of a digital product a parenting blogger could sell is an online course on child nutrition. You could create video modules explaining what small children need to be healthy, alternative options for various allergies or other dietary preferences, and so on. You could even ask your audience what they want in a course and use those answers to help with the creation of your modules. A course in this niche could easily sell for $300 or more.

Sell Physical Products

Selling physical products is the original money-making strategy. You gather an audience that is hungry for something, you sell it to them, and everyone wins. You don’t have to be an inventor, designer, or manufacturer to sell products. Sites like Alibaba and AliExpress import already-made items into the United States and sell them for a markup.

The two main methods for the distribution of these items are: dropshipping and self-fulfilled.

Dropshipping is a method where you advertise a product on your site that you do not own. Once you make the sale, you inform the manufacturer, who will handle the shipping and handling to the end-user. While this is simple because you don’t have to worry about storing or shipping any items yourself, you’ll find that the margins can be quite slim.

Self-fulfilled sales are much more of a hands-on approach to sales. You buy the item from the manufacturer, store it, then ship it to the end-user once you have made the sale. While there is much more work involved, you’ll find that the margins per sale are much higher.

Selling products on your parenting blog is definitely more work than affiliate programs, there is a huge upside if you can do it well. It is best to start small early on, with inexpensive things like branded apparel, stationary, journals, and so on. You can buy such products for just a few dollars and sell them for a significant markup. If your blog becomes popular enough, you could partner with companies you like to create your own products.

While it can be very profitable when done well, selling products is not generally recommended for the beginner blogger. It’s best to secure an audience that you know will be receptive to the product before making a large investment in product development or acquisition.

Create A Service

Providing a service is another very basic money-making plan. If you can provide a service that you know your audience needs, you have a viable business on your hands.

Whether this service is delivered through one-on-one interaction with the user, through a piece of software that you develop, or by directly completing a task for the user, this is a great way to monetize your skillset and your blog.

Your options for offering a service depend a lot on your niche, experience, preferences, and skills. You could offer group coaching for new parents, one-on-one coaching for moms, or even design a software service for something related to your niche, like tracking the best baby product sales. 

Your blog positions you as an expert in your field, which means you should be able to charge a premium for your time. Just be careful with how you schedule yourself because it is easy to overcommit when demand is high. Your blog is still what drives your business, which means you need to devote enough time to keep it running well. With practice, you can learn to balance your time and thrive with a blog and a service combined.

Next Steps To Get Your Parenting Blog Started

Now that you have the strategies in place to build and grow your own blog, check out our free course: How To Start A Blog.

This course includes all the essentials on how to get your blog out of your head and onto its own website. Starting a blog is simple and inexpensive, so there’s no reason that you shouldn’t start today!

Free Course: How To Start A Blog

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