May 24, 2016: Business Insider reports the remarkable story of Josi Denise — a top-flight “Mom Blogger” who quit the business and published an epic rant on what the job actually entails.
While the point of Ms. Denise’ lengthy blog post was to lambaste the entire category of Mom Bloggers – and the brands supporting this cottage industry – her post reveals some of the many successful tactics she used to build her blog — called The American Mama — over the past three years:
1. Using giveaways to build subscriber lists
Ms. Denise reports that, as a result of “dozens of giveaways sponsored by brands,” she gained “hundreds and then thousands of email subscribers and social media followers by requiring a follow (or e-mail) in exchange for a giveaway entry.”
This tactic is smart, especially because after acquiring e-mail addresses, these e-mail addresses can be subsequently used, by either the blogger or the brand, to populate a Custom Audience, on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Google, to efficiently retarget these people (it is not clear if she actually used latter tactic but it’s certainly available). It’s also ethical– provided of course that the blogger discloses the paid relationship he/she has with the brand donating the item.
2.Using virtual assistants to post links
Ms. Denise writes that she “paid a virtual assistant to post my links in round ups all over the internet, for back links and extra traffic.” Given that her blog launched in 2013, well after Google became more vigilant about link schemes violating its Webmaster Guidelines, it’s clear that this tactic was risky — possibly even reckless. But there’s no mention in Ms. Denise’ account of suffering a loss in traffic or receiving a manual penalty, which indicates that Google may have more work to do in terms of policing this kind of prohibited link scheme, perhaps by issuing more manual penalties of the type witnessed several weeks back.
3. Getting listed where it matters
To promote American Mama, Ms. Denise joined several blogger directory services likely to be inspected by PR people searching for product placement opportunities. Ms. Denise doesn’t appear to think much of these directories, criticizing one for employing an incentive scheme in which the prospective blogger is required to mobilize her own audience to aggregate clicks to this listing in order to rise to the top of the list. She also reports that she promoted her blog via a media kit — complete with “embellished stats” — sent directly to agencies and brands to burnish her bona fides.
4. Not over-estimating one’s reach
Ms. Denise indicates that many product bloggers may be overestimating the quality of the traffic they are actually receiving, and that the bulk of this traffic may have no intention of converting. Many blog “readers” are more likely competing Mommy Bloggers “scanning it for keywords they can use in the comments,” and the people clicking on it from Pinterest aren’t reading it. They are looking for your recipe, or helpful tip promised in the click bait, or before and after photo, then they might re-pin the image, then they are done.” While it’s not clear how Ms. Denise reached this conclusion, her assertion should be considered a wake-up call for brands relying on raw, unverified traffic numbers when deciding which blogger to hire.
5. Learning on one’s own
Ms. Denise asserts that most of the tactics of successful product blogging can be self-taught, and that participation in conferences has limited utility. She writes: “There is an entire industry waiting to take advantage of your insecurities when you want to be a better blogger, and in reality all they are doing is shoving tips down your throat about how to make their jobs easier, how to put more money in their pockets by building an army of cookie-cutter bloggers who will keep paying for conference tickets and ‘exclusive’ insider info…You are wasting your money and they are laughing all the way to the bank.”
Obviously, there are many people who would take issue with this broad characterization, and they don’t all work in the social media conference industry. Participating in conferences can result in mixing with real people and having conversations that are more meaningful than those experienced online. Speaking before a real crowd creates deeper branding for the blogger than tweeting to an audience of equivalent number. But there is no question that a reasonably curious person could discover the main operational tactics used by bloggers to gain visibility and snare sponsors from a day’s worth of research on the internet.
Ms. Denise’s very frank mega blast may have forever burned her bridges to PR agencies and brand managers, but she writes with passion and fire. In a kinder world, she’d have a thriving career as a journalist ahead of her, but as we all know, newspapers are an endangered species. Let us hope that she finds a more meaningful career doing something that she truly loves.
You can read her complete and most excellent post, “Dear Mommy Blogger,” here:
http://josidenise.com/dear-mommy-blogger/
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