The 5 Stages In The Life Of A Daddy Blogger

by anna on 03.01.2010

in monetizing the mommyblog

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Via Daddy Scratches' Flickr

The mommyblogosphere can be a magical place, full of parties, sponsorships, and bags stuffed with coupons for mass-marketed foods laden with high fructose corn syrup. It’s easy to get caught up in the glamour of it all, particularly if you are one of the few daddies in our midst. As a daddy blogger, you stand out — whether you like it or not (and it appears that most daddies have no problem with it) — and this works in your favor. At first, anyway. As a beginning blogger, it is so much of an advantage to be a daddy blogger, in fact, that your fellow traveler mommy blogger colleagues might become jealous of your astoundingly quick ascent up the ranks. They will say things like, “You’ve been blogging for six months and already have a picture of yourself with Dooce? Do you know how long it took me to get one of those?” or “How do I get over five thousand followers on Twitter? Grow a penis?” But fear not, daddies: I’ve got a list of what you can expect in the next year or two of your life, as well as a set of tips for how to survive the mercurial experience of blogging as a man among mommies.

Stage One: The ‘It’ Boy.

As a daddy blogger, you have a good chance of being welcomed with open arms by the vast majority of the mommy blogosphere. Where other comments on blogs by mere mommies are glossed over, neglected, your comments are far more likely to be reciprocated, you will be followed back on Twitter, and if there’s some kind of special event to which you need an invitation, well — you can probably sweet-talk your way in on the arm of one of the blessed invitees. Now, if in addition to your maleness, you are also blessed with social savoir-faire of any kind, unusual writing talent, or better-than-average looks (by blogger standards or otherwise), then there is no limit to the heights to which you might ascend in your first foray into the mommy blogosphere. Indeed, you have a chance to quickly reach a level that is well beyond where most mommy bloggers ever dare to hope — collecting subscribers, followers, coveted back links from the most elite of web real estate, and the like. Enjoy it, boys, while you can.

Stage Two: DadCentric Regular.

Soon after you have been recognized on a mass scale by the mommies with power, you will start to wonder why, though your traffic is higher than most of your peers, you still don’t seem to be courted by corporations in a manner befitting your stature. You will question the wisdom of associating yourself with a blog network called “BlogHer,” given the fact that you are a “Him,” but ultimately decide that you can deal with it, because if you weren’t man enough for this gig, then you wouldn’t have signed up to be a mommy blogger. Er, daddy blogger. Still, your heart will yearn for more publicity, and your brain will craves the challenge that only a change of venue can provide. You will start to want to reach out to others of your own kind, and will seek solace and community in the form of DadCentric, where you will occasionally write posts for an audience smaller than that of your own blog, but earn the credibility that only Federated Media ad sponsorship can provide. At Dadcentric, you will become a regular and get something back of that male camaraderie that you lost when you sold yourself out to the group of chicks looking at nursing blankets outside the ballroom at the last blogging conference.

Stage Three: MamaPop Staff Writer [EDIT:](Paid).*

But writing about daddy stuff will start to get old, and you will resist the feeling of being pigeonholed. You will look for another outlet for your writing, perhaps something that offers a chance to discuss — well, if not sports, then at least something close to it. “Popular culture?” you’ll think, “That sounds close enough.” And you will find yourself as a MamaPop staff writer, waxing philosophical about the underwear choices of Lindsay Lohan and the relationship between Tiger’s latest infedelity and Immanuel Kant. You will wonder why you still aren’t getting endorsement deals from Quaker Oats, or why the PR rep from Bounce won’t return your calls. Let me explain it to you: you’re a dude. Corporate sponsorship of blogs is one of only two areas in life where this is not an advantage. The other one is getting into bars.

Stage Four: Seasoned Veteran Or Disillusioned Curmudgeon.

At some point, your subscriber numbers will start to fall, and you will think that you have done something wrong. But really, all that is happening is the leveling out of the too-quick ascent to the top. Whereas you once had over a thousand subscribers in Google Reader, you’re now down below 500, and though this will seem like a slap in the face, you should take comfort in the fact that it ordinarily takes a mommy blogger three years or more to build up a number like that, that even with this setback you are way ahead of most people. If you’re not careful, though, the changes in how people look at you, the dwindling down of DMs and link love, can turn you bitter. You will start to question the sense of it all, and begin writing vague philosophical posts in which you question the wisdom of going “meta,” and then decide to do it anyway. If you are a truly talented writer, your true fans will stay with you at this point, cheering you on from the sidelines, and hoping that you pull yourself out of the rut that the shifting spotlight always seems to cause. This period of your career as a daddy blogger can last indefinitely, and is mostly contingent upon the desire of the daddy blogger himself.

Stage Five: Irrelevance, Book Deal, Or Both.

The good news is that the single most factor leading to commercial success as a blogger — mommy, daddy, or otherwise — is just continuing to do it, rain or shine, for years and years at a time. If you manage to stick through the ups and downs of your success, you will end up with a decent sized following of your greatest, truest fans, and with that comes bragging rights, and sometimes other, bigger opportunities. This has held true for bloggers in all niches, regardless of the talent or connections for a book deal. So hang in there, daddy, you’re in for a wild ride!

___________________
*It has come to my attention that, apparently, all MamaPop writers are, in fact, paid. My bad. I did not know this, good for you/them. Carry on.

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More On Dooce And HGTV: Is The Future of Mommy Blogging An Expansion of Platforms?

by anna on 02.26.2010

in monetizing the mommyblog

At Mom 2.0, I asked Heather Armstrong if she saw the kind of multimedia expansion she’s currently doing with HGTV as being the future of blogging. Her response was to say that she felt that her move to HGTV was an “expansion of the platform,” and she did not elaborate beyond that on whether she thought that this was the kind of thing that would be happening with more and more bloggers as time passed.

As much as I would have liked a more in-depth answer to work with, I think that this is probably the smartest way of answering that question, because the truth is, asking if other bloggers will be able to build their own brands to the extent that she has is like asking if any extra in a film is going to be able to pull off building an A-list acting career, as well as a production company on the scale of Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment.

Or something like that.

Because who the hell knows? Nobody on the web at present has the kind of crossover opportunity that Dooce does, except perhaps Ree Drummond (of Pioneer Woman). That includes all the big male web celebrities like Seth Godin, Jason Kottke, John Gruber, Merlin Mann, and whatever other SXSW regulars you feel like including in that mix. In terms of media appearances, they are small potatoes when compared to Dooce: they don’t get put on Time’s lists, they don’t get on Oprah, they don’t have multi-billion dollar conglomerates banking on building their web presence around their popularity. Even within the mommyblogosphere, where there is decidedly less hero-worship of Dooce, the number one search term on blogs with search widgets is Dooce. And while I’m sure this annoys people beyond belief, it also gives them traffic.

It would be impossible to say if expansion to TV is where bloggers are going, because, well — are any other bloggers going to where Dooce is going?

Context Happens

As part of her deal for content collaboration with HGTV, Heather Armstrong is writing weekly on the Design Happens blog at HGTV. Her first post went up on the evening of February 25, 2010. In short, the post documents how Dooce’s design choices are not always practical, using her choice of putting decorative butterflies (projectile butterflies) on the wall of her newborn’s room did not turn out to be the best of choices, because her second daughter, Marlo, is far more fidgety than her first child, who would never have grabbed something off the wall in this manner. In short, she ended up having to remove all of the butterflies because having projectile butterflies around a changing table is not a practical choice for a newborn’s room.

The post is pretty typical Dooce fare — take an everyday dilemma and make it funny by juxtaposing Heather Armstrong’s legendary perfectionist tendencies with the chaos of a life with young children, mix in a pinch of hyperbole, season with a few expertly processed pictures and a well-placed reference to the enduring practicality of Jon (her husband) and bake for 1000 words. The post deliberately begins with a design dilemma, which is of course part of the effort to meet the constraints of the Design Happens blog on HGTV.com, and presumably, the post is free from any kind of expletives as a result of its context on HGTV.com as well, though the title of the blog itself, Design Happens, is a pretty decent fit to the Dooce brand, even if it’s cleaned up, because by reference to a well-worn phrase, “shit happens,” HGTV has managed to capture the kind of edginess for which Dooce is known, even without the explicit use of a word that might be objectionable to the middle Americans in their audience.

The Design Happens Dooce might be cleaned up and more restrained, but there’s no question that it is Dooce. And, as far as I can tell, her post matches HGTV’s intention for the blog, which is to “[not] let bad design happen to your home!” by allowing “The HGTV team [to share] design inspiration to help you on your way to design victory.”

But what is fascinating about the post is not so much its content, but the different feeling one gets from reading it — the overall experience of reading it, that is — when removed from the experience of Dooce.com. The Design Happens blog is smaller than Dooce, more corporate, less visually appealing. And while they might be allowing Dooce to use some (corporately approved) pictures, they don’t let her present them in the full glory as they appear on Dooce.com, where even pictures that appear smaller are linked to huge, glossy versions of their originals — the kinds of pictures that make your mouth water, or want to crawl up inside of them with a good book, and buy all of the products depicted within them immediately.

On Design Happens, these are pictures of any old house, or any old newborn’s room with ill-advised wall projectiles. I suppose this blog is meant to funnel people to HGTV for the more deluxe content, but if Dooce is in charge of “convergence,” I have to wonder why they aren’t letting her do what she does best?

But I haven’t even got to the most interesting part yet.

The community engagement is the astonishing part. Bear in mind that Dooce gets hundreds, sometimes thousands of comments on her posts at Dooce.com. As of the time that I started writing this post this morning, Heather Armstrong’s post at Design Happens had 21 comments, which is not too shabby of a number of comments for a typical blogger like, say, oh, me. But I would imagine it felt a little strange for Dooce to have so few comments. And more disturbing was that, after the first few supportive or “I’ve been there!” kind of comments, the chorus of Dooce detractors take over the comment section, as they often do, whenever Dooce does anything on the internet. But what’s odd here is that the smaller number of comments make these Dooce detractors appear to be far more powerful and significant here than they do on Dooce.com — possibly far more significant and powerful than they actually are, actually. And to a certain extent, it doesn’t matter how powerful they actually are, because so much of what happens on the web and how power and money is allotted has to do with illusion.

The illusion, after twenty one comments, was that Dooce was not a good choice for HGTV. In fact, it was so overwhelming that I — of all people — felt compelled to leave a comment about the design technique depicted in the post. My comment, if not explicitly supportive of Dooce, was at least constructive and not detracting from the message of her post, and served to further the conversation (I thought) and downplay the significance of the other comments like

So is your point, hi I’m Heather, I have no common sense myself so let me tell you how to make dumb parenting design choices too? I just doing get it.

or

Is this point of this post supposed to be, “Be ye not so silly or stupid?” If it’s not, I can’t really figure out what the point is. Although, with some certainty in my opinion, I can tell you that it is not funny nor remotely interesting. Epic Fail HGTV. [by Kristen.]

or

WHO are you?

or

Heather you had like 400+ comments telling you what a bad idea this was. Oh but you knew better! We don’t have a design show, but it didn’t take much common sense just good parenting to know, that the flowers above her changing table were a horrible idea. Just like the pictures above her crib.

HGTV this is not your voice, this is just awkward This entry should have been something Heather put on her website, because no where in here is decoration advice. Just Dooce doing what she does…whine and defect.

I’m not sure why I felt compelled to do this, but I think it has something to do with this: on Dooce.com, I don’t really pay attention to the people who detract, because there are so many supporters, and the whole Dooce brand appears so powerful, there’s no reason to feel bad for her. But in a new context, Dooce is a beginner of sorts — she’s got a new set of people to contend with, and yet she’s still getting beaten up like she’s the pro that everyone wants to bring back down to their level.

It’s funny what context can do.

As I kept writing, I noticed that Dooce came in and commented on the Design Happens blog, something she rarely (if ever) does on the comments for her own posts on Dooce.com. So my guess is the effect was not lost on her, either — bloggers who are starting out always comment back and forth in their comment section, and they find it hard not to comment when somebody shows up to say something negative. In a way, Dooce is back to her roots.

I cannot wait to see what happens next.

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