SALT LAKE CITY - There are hundreds of thousands of blogs on the Internet and most are just hobbies, but some women have turned their mommy blogs into big bucks.
Jessica Williams' husband lost his job almost four years ago. While he was looking for a job, she says their family had barely enough money to put food on the table.
"One week we had like seventeen dollars to spend on the weekly groceries," Jessica said.
Since money was tight, Jessica's couponing skills became a necessity. She started emailing friends and family about the great deals and discounts she found.
There was a lot of interest in Jessica's shopping tips, so she launched "Utah Deal Diva." Four years later, the Deal Diva blog is visited by 70,000 people a month.
Thanks to Deal Diva, Jessica has been a 'mommy blogger' guest for Betty Crocker and Green Giant. She receives freebies from companies in return for product reviews. She has managed to make a part-time blogging hobby into a generous income.
"I have worked full time and there have been a couple of years where I definitely exceeded that full-time income," Jessica said.
Dustin Checketts, who works with Salt Lake-based Hyper Ex Media, says some bloggers can make around $50,000 or $60,000 a year.
"Those who find the most success I think are those who literally treat it like a business and not just some kind of whimsical thing I am going to do now and again," Checketts said.
To help set up for potential success, Checketts suggests bloggers find a good content management system like Blogger or WordPress, choose a blog topic that they're passionate about, know about social media and how to use it, set up an editorial calendar to keep posts timely and - most importantly - start getting advertisers to pay to be on your site.
"The easiest and most accessible was to make money is through Google AdSense. It's free to set up an account. It's very simple to do even for the novice user to take a little snipet of code put it on your site and within minutes you are generating advertising on your site," Checketts said.
Payouts through Google AdSense are often very small - about $1 per thousand impressions - but if a blog becomes popular and generates high traffic, advertisers will begin to seek you out.
Mommies aren't the only ones on the blogosphere; daddy bloggers have started to share their parenting experiences, too. Read more about that here.
