Please feel free to blame Jane from “What About Mom” for the following post. She is truly the one that started it all and therefore all critical comments can be addressed to her. See Jane MADE me go look at this site called Christmas Wrapped. It is a site sponsored by Target put together by Federated Media that highlights all the “top tier” mommy bloggers. I went to the site and I saw the glory of blogging, advertising and free market right there before my eyes. But is it wrong? Is it ethically improper? Are they sell outs? Or are we just jealous?
Why Do We Blog?
It has been my observation that female blogger fall into several different categories:
1.) The Purist: This is the blogger who is truly just documenting their day-to-day life for family and friends. They don’t expect anybody else to read and when it comes down to it they really don’t WANT anybody else to read it.
2.) The Writer: These are bloggers who have a novel inside of them. These are women who either wrote in college or have dreamed of writing professionally and have just never been given the chance. These women write for the art, for the beauty, for the dream of people actually reading something they wrote. They live for comments.
3.) The Specialist: These are women who have an interest, a talent, or a gift and they are quite skilled. These are the craft sites, cooking sites, shopping sites. These are women who have really developed an expertise that should be shared.
4.) The Successful: These are the precious few who have hit that magical combination of good writing, good timing, and good subject matter that propels them into a tier of blogging that allows them to call blogging a job. These women are asked to speak on panels, talk shows, contribute to books, local conversations, etc. They are considered experts.
The ones that are “successful” are usually some sort of combination of the Specialist and the Writer. The question then becomes do we all secretly aspire to be “successful”? Blogging is hard. Blogging well is even more difficult. Would we all grab the golden ring if presented? And what are we willing to sacrifice? Are we willing to change our voice, support products we don’t like? sacrifice our blog for other projects? If we are our own “brand” what would we be? What would it look like?
Oh, I totally vote for blaming Jane.
😉
I’ve been thinking a lot about this, too. I know I’m a writer (#2) and I’ve tried my hand at Specialist (#3) and did have some success.
But…it was a HUGE workload and I quickly began sinking elsewhere. It ended up deleted (although I still have a bunch of folks subscribed to the non-existent RSS).
I’ve been emailing Jane about the content v. marketing aspect of blogging. The reality is that if you’re going to make it into the big leagues, you do have to brand yourself/your blog.
And then you have to market that brand mercilessly.
I sit back and ask myself, “Is this what I want?”
Good post — and thanks for dropping by the other day!
I think I’m probably a wannabe purist, though I wish I were a specialist. Come to think of that, I had problems with the specializing all through school.
I’m not ashamed to admit that I am for sure jealous of those super-successful bloggers, but I don’t think that necessarily precludes me from criticizing their work. Unless there’s a rule that one can only critique things that one has no desire to produce oneself. I mean, I cook, and I like to analyze a meal someone else makes. You know?
One other thing — I think you could maybe label the “purist” something like “scrapbooker” or “geneaologist/family historian” — I’d reserve “purist” for someone like Emily Dickinson, who really didn’t go very far out of her way to make her work known to people, but it really was “work” rather than just an agenda. (Not that there’s anything wrong with a simple record of life).