Blogging about Blogging

Yep.. I am going there, blogging about blogging. I have had a few readers reach out to me in the last few months and ask me how I started my blog, why I started my blog, and how to make a blog successful. I am extremely flattered that there are people contacting me and asking me how to start a blog and who consider me successful! I am nowhere near where I want to be in terms of success; I want to reach more people, I want more breastfeeding mothers to be able to find me, I want my writing to be published in more places and of course I would love for this to also be a small source of income for my family if possible. I am a stay at home parent and we have had to make a lot of sacrifices to make that work for us.

How did I get started blogging?

I have always wanted to create a website or blog for many years. IT was my career for the last 15+ years and I have always had an interest in the behind the scenes aspect of the web and how it all works. It was that interest that led me to pursue a career in IT. And, I did have a great career that I enjoyed. My most recent position was with a web hosting company where I helped people with their websites and their web hosting. I enjoyed my job and fully intended to go back to work full time when my first baby, my daughter, was born. I had a daycare picked out and a deposit down. I had 8 weeks of maternity leave (which was not enough) and as those 8 weeks came to an end I really panicked. There was no way I was ready to put my baby in daycare and spend so little time with her. After discussing it with my husband we figured out that I might be able to leave my job, but I wasn't really ready to hang it all up yet, so after discussing it with my company I proposed a part time schedule and they went for it. I was shocked they accepted my idea, but it was really great for me. I got to take care of my daughter and still work.

Flash forward to my 2nd baby. I had been doing the PT gig for a couple of years and then my company was acquired and they laid a few people off. I was one of them. I understood it, I was part time and it was a completely new company.

Suddenly I was a stay at home mom and this is what led me to start my blog. While it was something I always wanted to do, I never had the mental space to add another thing to my life. Caring for two kids under 2 and working and maintaining a home was about all I could handle. I wanted to start a blog but I never could get started.

One night in the week after my job loss, I was researching starting a blog and stumbled upon a website to help you do just that. While there are many many wonderful blogging resources and ways to get started, this one worked for me at the time.

Since then I have found a new calling. I love to write, I love blogging and the more I learn the more I realize that this is a never ending adventure. There is so much to learn about blogging from keyword research and SEO, to social media tricks and tips, HTML and writing code, and of course networking! I have to admit that the technical geek side of me LOVES it!

Why did I decide to write about breastfeeding?

When I started my blog I didn't really understand all the different niches out there and whether to label myself a mom blog, a home blog, a parenting blog or a lifestyle blog. I wanted to start something that I knew would help parents and breastfeeding is something I am passionate about. Sure, there are wonderful breastfeeding resources out on the web but I wanted to give the perspective of a mother going through it. I never knew before becoming a parent that I would love breastfeeding so much or that it would become such a part of my identity while raising my babies. I really didn't think about it before becoming a parent, and those are the women I want to reach. The ones like me, who are up scouring the internet for info on how to survive cluster feeding at 3 AM, in tears with a hungry six week old on their lap. I was that mom in my first weeks breastfeeding.

There are so many mom blogs and I wanted to narrow that down to something a little more specific. The funny thing though is that the more I write, the more subjects I want to write about, so although breastfeeding is the main focus of my site all things parenting are going to be covered here.

Why am I writing all this?

Well, like I said there have been readers who have reached out to me asking about my blog. I am very flattered and wanted to share a little about myself and how I got started. My blog is still young, less than a year old, and I do feel I have achieved a level of success with it I wasn't expecting. I have joined some wonderful networking groups that have helped me a ton, and I will discuss those more in the future as well. Getting published on Huffington Post and having my work featured in other places has been wonderful and I continue to push myself to achieve more. I have high hopes and expectations for my blog. So I thought I would start a little part of my site where I write about blogging related subjects. Whether that is the technical aspects that I enjoy, or more general blogging info, I would love to share this with my readers as well. Bloggers love to help other bloggers, I have had a lot of help and I want to pay that forward, so stayed tuned for more coming soon!

*Update - after a couple of years I have moved on from my original hosting and now use Studio Press Sites. They are currently running a promotion with Free Migration for StudioPress Sites.

I have also started another blog if you would like to check it out!