Audrey McClelland - The Digital Mom Handbook: How to Blog, Vlog, Tweet, and Facebook Your Way to a Dream Career at Home

The
DIGITAL MOM
HANDBOOK

How to Blob, Vlog,
Tweet, and Facebook
Your Way to a Dream Career at Home

AUDREY McCLELLAND AND COLLEEN PADILLA

To all the Digital Moms and all the Digital Moms-to-be.

Contents

Dear Readers:

Mothers have been looking for the middle ground for more than half a century. Staying at home and raising the kids full time isnt it. Working full time and rushing home to tuck the kids in at 7 p.m. sharp aint it, either. Even part-time work outside the house can be a scramble for most women as they try to have it all between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. To work or not to work? That seems to be the bottom-line question for most women today.

But we believe that equation is changing. In fact, were living proof of that change.

Both of us left the corporate ladder behind to stay home with our children. But instead of assigning us permanent stay-at-home status, this choice was the catalyst to our reinvention. Miles apart, we sat down at our computers one day, kids cooing in the background, and began to blog. Colleen specialized in product reviews; her blog was called ClassyMommy.com. Audrey was a down-to-earth fashionista whod once landed a dream job with Donna Karan; her site, MomGenerations.com, focused on fashion trends for moms. Slowly but surely, our audiences grew. The portability of computers and smartphones, the connective powers of social networks, and an overwhelming desire to happily mix work and family enabled us to move past the Mommy Wars (i.e., stay-at-home moms vs. working moms) into a territory all our own. Today we are bona fide online entrepreneurs; our respective blogs lure upward of 200,000-plus viewers a month; weve been quoted by Good Morning America, Fox News, ABC News, even the New York Times; and weve forged alliances with the biggest corporations around, including Frigidaire, Tide, T.J.Maxx, and Hanes (they call us for advice about their productsand they listen!).

Were telling you all this not because we enjoy tooting our own horns but because writing it down makes it real for us. And we honestly believe that other moms can do the same. After all, neither of us even knew how to create a blog when we started out! What we did know, though, was that we wanted a change, so we dove in and began blogging, tweeting, skyping, vlogging, and facebooking. Four years later, our lives as moms will never be the same.

We may not be the fashion designers, corporate execs, or journalists we once aspired to be. However, were something we think is even more funsomething that lets us balance our mommyhood with our sanity.

Most days, we can sit on a play-mat beside our children, a sippy cup in one hand and an iPhone in the other, and get motherhood and career-hood taken care of. Thanks to the endless possibilities on the Internet, weve found the magical middle ground. We each defined the terms career and success for ourselvesno person or corporation did it for us.

Not bad for a days work.

The Digital Mom Handbook is our attempt to show other moms how to find their own middle ground via the frontier of the Internet. Do you want to be a booming six-figure eBay saleswoman? A twenty-hour-a-week brand consultant? A local Twitter correspondent? The terms are yours to define. Money, hours-per-week, titlethese dont dictate your Digital Mom success. Personal satisfaction does. Thats a very important takeaway, and well repeat it often.

Over the course of this book, well share our stories, as well as those of other moms who have found success online. Ultimately, though, becoming a Digital Mom is a highly personal journey. The reasons why we started wont be the reasons why you startexcept perhaps to make a bit more money, because everyone could use thatand thats okay. The last thing we want is to tell you that your online experience needs to be identical to ours. After all, what fun would that be? You might not be interested in fashion or product reviews at all. Maybe youll even come up with a better way to launch your blog than we did.

Instead, well try to give you all the tools and advice youll needtools and advice we wish wed had when we were starting out!to have your own successful Digital Mom experience. And the most important part of getting started is figuring out what it is that you really want to write about, so in our first chapter well help you find your own passion.

Whether your passion is geography or politics or food or the geopolitics of food, youre about to start a project that will change your lifeby design. We hope you enjoy every second of it!

Digitally yours,

Audrey and Colleen

Our Stories

Technologies that let us balance the competing demands of family, housework, paid labor, and the responsibilities of being the social glue in many relationships are technologies that women have in their lives. It is perhaps unsurprising, against that backdrop, that women also find themselves gravitating to social media and social networking tools. Facebook, Twitter, and other online community sites can fit into and support our fragmented lives and fulfill our need to connect with others, regardless of time or distance.

Dr. Genevieve Bell, cultural anthropologist, Intel fellow, and Intel Labs Director, Interaction and Experience Research

T echnology and blogging have truly changed our lives. We both never imagined that someday when someone asked us what we did for a living, wed say, I blog. More likely we would have said, We travel to the moon! But one thing weve learned about the social media world: the sky is the limit. We both started blogging for very different reasons, and we each have our own distinct story. We want to give you a sneak peek into our digital lives so you can get to know us better and see where we came from and how weve gotten to where we are (and why were still determined to go further!).

Your digital path may be different from ours, but let us show you how ours unfolded.

AUDREYS STORY

I treaded into the Internet waters in early 2006 after self-publishing my book, Preconception Plain & Simple: A Deliciously Smart and Sexy Guide in Preparing for Pregnancy, with my mother. The book, filled with tidbits to enhance conception, came from my own experience; I wanted to conceive without the stress that seemed to consume so many women around me. From the book, we created a preconception community, PinksandBlues.com, for hopeful moms-to-be. Women came to PinksandBlues to share thoughts and chat. Even after women conceived, they looked to me and our website for motherhood advice. I shouldve realized then that I was starting a brand. But its like the nose on your faceits hard to see when its right in front of you.

As my family grew bigger (by June 2008, I had four boys, three and a half years old and under), PinksandBlues.com became more of a family product review site. My special area was fashion. Id learned so much working for Donna Karan, and, even with four boys and the daily threat of spit-up, I accessorized every outfit, wore makeup and cool boots, and read Vogue in my spare time each week. I still had a great and deep passion for fashion, and my readers felt it and connected with it. Slowly but surely, I began to talk less and less about how to become a mom and more and more about the clothes moms should be wearing. I woke up every morning excited to write. I felt my authentic self emerging.