If you’re a mom and keen to get into blogging, you might be wondering how to start a mom blog.
As profitable blogging niches go, mommy blogs are a smart option.
Moms rely on the internet to help them through the various stages of parenthood — from potty training to kitting kids out with the latest tech and toys. So they’re online a lot, and they have a ton of buying power.
As a mom, you’ve probably spent a fair amount of time on mom blogs yourself. So you’ll know it’s not only is it a great community of fellow moms, but it’s also a way to earn money for your family. To do well, you need to do things right from the get-go.
We’ll show you exactly how to start a mom blog and give you insider tips to becoming truly successful in this highly attractive niche.
Why Start a Mom Blog
First things first, a disclaimer:
If you’re researching becoming a mom blogger, you might have come across articles or videos promising that you’ll be guaranteed to start making money blogging immediately.
The fact is, blogging is difficult in any niche. Speaking to 1,000+ bloggers in various specialisms, Orbit Media found that the proportion who report “strong” results has declined in recent years.
But that’s not to say you can’t make it work, as long as you’re prepared to put the effort in.
Here are three reasons why we think it’s worth all the toil to start a mom blog…
Grow a Business In Your Free Time
Raising kids isn’t easy.
In fact, one study of full-time moms in the US with children aged 5 – 12 found they spend the equivalent of 2.5 full-time jobs on parenting-related tasks, with the average mother “clocking in” at 06:23 and signing off at 20:31.
Clearly, the average stay-at-home mom doesn’t have a ton of free time.
Yet that’s exactly why lots of moms choose to start a blog. Because it’s totally flexible, they can do the work in their downtime — whenever that might be!
While you’d probably love to get your blog up, running, and generating traffic in a week, realistically it doesn’t matter if it takes a month, a year, or even longer to make it happen.
That’s a relief because the last thing you need is more time pressure.
Make Money Blogging
It’s no secret that one of the biggest reasons to start a mom blog is to generate sweet, sweet passive income.
There are various ways for moms to make money blogging. We’ll go into them in more depth later in this article, but in our opinion, the smartest route is through affiliate marketing.
In a nutshell, being an affiliate marketer means finding products you love, joining those brands’ affiliate programs, and recommending the products to your audience via the content you create.
That content should target high-value commercial terms. Again, we’ll discuss this in greater depth later on, but those sorts of terms might include:
| Keyword | Ahrefs Keyword Difficulty | Volume |
|---|---|---|
| best potty training seat | 15 | 5,100 |
| best detangling brush | 12 | 2,400 |
| best baby wrap | 14 | 1,900 |
| best shampoo for eczema | 14 | 1,600 |
| best postpartum clothes | 12 | 1,300 |
When someone clicks an affiliate link in your content, visits a brand’s website, and makes a purchase, you get a chunk of the profits.
Sounds good, right?
(Like the sound of making money by recommending products you love? Check out our guide on how to become an affiliate marketer!)
Build a Community
Let’s be honest: having kids can feel pretty isolating at times, especially for the primary caregiver.
Indeed, research shows that 82% of moms under the age of 30 feel lonely some of the time, with 80% saying they meet their friends less since having a kid.
Even if you’re lucky enough to have a fantastic support network who you get to see on a daily basis, a lot of other parents don’t have that.
That’s why many mom bloggers choose to start a mom blog in the first place — it helps them build a community, reach out to like-minded people, and generally blow off some steam.
Successful Money-Making Mom Blog Examples
In our experience, the best way to begin your mom blogging journey is to check out the competition.
What do other mom blogs look like? What topics do other bloggers cover? And how are they making money blogging?
With that in mind, let’s take a look at three mom blogging success stories:
Your Modern Family
Your Modern Family is the work of Becky Mansfield, a certified child development therapist and teacher.
Her site provides a ton of advice to parents, covering everything from potty training to sustaining a happy marriage. It even crosses over into the personal finance niche by offering helpful tips on how to save money.
Becky monetizes her site in lots of ways.
For starters, she’s part of the Mediavine ad network, which means she gets paid when people click ads on her site.
Beyond that, she sells physical products via her own online store, and also includes affiliate links in some of her articles:
Scary Mommy
Scary Mommy is more of a digital magazine than a traditional mom blog, but it’s obviously targeting the same audience, so it’s worth looking at here.
Part of the BDG media group, it writes about a wide range of parenting topics, from trying to conceive, to pregnancy, to parenting.
It also covers a lot of topics you’d expect to find on lifestyle blogs, such as fashion, beauty, health, and wellness.
As with Your Modern Family, the site has various ways to make money. Again, it sells ad space, and it also publishes sponsored posts created alongside its advertising partners.
And it also dabbles with affiliate marketing, primarily via the Shopping category of its website, which is packed full of buying guides.
Alpha Mom
Alpha Mom bills itself as a parenting and pregnancy resource, although — as with Your Modern Family and Scary Mommy — it also covers topics that overlap with the mom blog niche, such as health, relationships, money, and work.
Once again, it has multiple routes to make money, from selling ad space via the MediaMath network, to running affiliate marketing activity through Amazon Associates and various other affiliate programs.
How to Start a Mom Blog In 10 Steps
Now that you’ve seen what success looks like, it’s time to get your own mom blog off the ground. At Authority Hacker, we’ve been helping people start and run profitable sites for years. Our approach is practical and easy to follow. Follow this step-by-step guide to get started on your journey.
1 Choose Your Mom Blog Niche
There are a lot of other bloggers out there writing about all things mom-related.
In fact, according to one old but fascinating survey, the number of moms who had started blogging reached an astonishing 4.2 million in 2017.
That’s some serious competition! With all those other blogs out there, how on Earth are you ever going to generate any blog traffic, let alone make a bit of cash along the way?
The answer is simple: niche down.
In other words, don’t start a mom blog that aims to be all things to all moms. Rather, focus on a niche within the broader mom blogging industry.
But how do you choose the “right” blog niche?
Start by thinking about your target audience — the people who’ll be visiting your site and reading your content. They might be:
- Full-time moms
- Home-schooling parents
- Newly pregnant moms expecting their first kid
- Working moms with busy careers
- Moms with teenage kids
Or they might fit into any number of other demographics.
Don’t waste too much energy creating a lazer-targeted audience profile at this stage. Trust us, a lot of your initial conceptions will end up being wrong! Instead, try to jot down a few ideas about the types of people you’ll be writing for.
Hopefully, out of all those vague concepts, one or two standouts will emerge. You can then start thinking about the sort of stuff they might want to read, which will give you an angle for your mom blog. The options are practically infinite, but examples might include:
- A tech-themed blog offering moms advice on online safety
- A site offering educational resources for moms home-schooling their kids
- A food-themed mom blog offering recipe suggestions for busy working parents
- A lifestyle blog offering distracting, entertaining content for full-time moms
- A blog that talks through the stages of pregnancy for first-time parents
Not feeling at your creative best?
Don’t worry, you don’t need to do all the hard work yourself. Sites like Detailed and FeedSpot are a great source of inspiration, offering tons of successful blog examples across lots of niches. Pick out a few that you like and ask yourself what makes them unique.
Alternatively, if you’ve got some money to spend, we highly recommend signing up for Ahrefs.
We reference it at various points in this article, because it’s brilliant for lots of reasons. One of those reasons is its Competing Domains tool, which allows you to copy-paste a mom blog that you love, and immediately find dozens of other sites targeting similar keywords:
Trawl through the results, figure out what niches they’re targeting, and use your research to inspire your own blog.
2 Pick the Right Blogging Platform
There’s an elephant in the room.
We’ve already explained how tough it is to build a successful blog. So why even bother?
Why not just start a YouTube channel or a Facebook page instead? Wouldn’t that save a bunch of time and effort?
The short answer is: yes, you can totally become a mom blogger without actually building your own website. It just massively limits your options down the line, giving you fewer ways to:
- Generate blog traffic
- Build an engaged audience
- Make money blogging
This isn’t rocket science. Whether it’s a Facebook group, an Instagram page, a Twitter account, or something else, social media accounts are bound to a single platform.
You’re more or less wholly reliant on those platforms to reach your audience. And if they decide to change their algorithms overnight (which happens more often than you might think), you might suddenly lose a massive chunk of traffic.
In contrast, when you start a blog, you’ve got a wealth of options to build and grow your audience. You can:
- Generate blog traffic through SEO by targeting relevant keywords
- Send your latest blog posts straight to your audience’s inboxes via email marketing
- Build profiles on multiple social networks, all sending traffic back to your mom blog
Okay, so it’s a good idea to join those legions of mommy bloggers and launch your own site.
But first, you need to choose between the myriad blogging platforms out there.
A blogging platform is the “tool” you use to manage and publish content. Without it, your mom blog will only ever exist in your head.
There’s no shortage of options, from free blogging platforms like Blogger and Medium, to premium platforms that cost a little (or a lot) of money, but offer much greater scope for customization.
So which is best?
In our view, there’s only one choice: create a WordPress blog. Specifically, we mean WordPress.org, not its near-namesake, WordPress.com.
There are lots of reasons why starting a new WordPress blog is the right way to go:
- While it’s not a free blogging platform, it’s very cheap
- It doesn’t require any advanced technical skills to get started
- Despite its low cost, it offers lots of ways to customize your site
- WordPress.org gives you ownership over all your blog files — not every blogging platform does this
- It offers lots of ways to make money from your mom blog, like joining an ad network or selling your own products
- You can create your own domain name, which makes your site look more legit
Want to find out more? Check out our in-depth guide to the best blogging platforms.
3 Come Up With Your Blog Name
Time for another big decision: choosing your blog name.
Look at some of your favorite mom blog names and you’ll see they all have something that makes them memorable.
It might be a pun, or a description of the mommy blogger in question, or a way to group the audience together. And it also gives some insight into what the mom blog is about.
It defines who you are, and it’ll be front and center in your branding — from your website to your logo to your social channels to your newsletter to your email address.
So no pressure, but it’s kind of important!
We’d recommend doing a bit of research before you get your thinking cap on. Look at what other mom bloggers are doing, and use a tool like Instant Domain Search to come up with a few potential options.
Next, brainstorm as many blog names as possible. You could obsess over this part of the process for weeks on end, so it’s important to give yourself a deadline — after all, there’s a ton of other stuff you still need to do after this step.
Obviously, we can’t tell you exactly what your blog name should be. But we can definitely give you some general best practices. In our experience, your blog name should:
Be a .com domain. These days, you can choose from a giddying array of fancy domain extensions. Things like .blog or .mom might seem more exciting and characterful than plain old .com, but research suggests 70% of users don’t trust those new types of domain. So you’re better off sticking with the classics.
Give you some wiggle room. By which we mean, don’t back yourself into a corner that leaves you targeting a tiny audience or writing about a limited set of topics. For example, momwithteens.com is a solid if unspectacular name for a mom blog about parenting teenage kids, whereas momwitha13yearold.com is a lot more restrictive.
Tie in with your niche. Obvious as it sounds, your blog name needs to tell people what your site is all about, so don’t try to be too clever. Subtlety isn’t your friend here.
Short and memorable. The shorter your blog name, the easier it’ll be to remember. You’ll probably struggle to sum up who you are and what you do in a single word, but 2 – 3 words should give you enough creative freedom without being too clunky.
Not be your name. You might love your name, but annsmith.com isn’t a good blog name. Unless you’re a household name (or have some sort of established audience), it doesn’t give any clues about what your new mom blog is actually about.
Make use of synonyms, where relevant. Given all those millions of other mom blogs that already exist, there’s a good chance your first choice blog name won’t be available. So don’t be afraid to use synonyms, such as swapping kids for children or family for household.
4 Buy Your Domain Name & Web Hosting Service
You’ve picked your blog name. Congratulations! Now it’s time to make it official by actually buying it.
With WordPress.org, you don’t get a permanently free domain name. However, it won’t be expensive — expect to pay around $9 – $14.99 per year.
And because WordPress.org is a self-hosted blog platform, you’ll need to choose a web hosting provider too.
As far as we’re concerned, the best solution for your self-hosted WordPress blog is Siteground. There are tons of other hosting options, but Siteground is:
- Cheap
- Easy to use (e.g. you can install WordPress in just a few clicks)
- Reliable
And that’s good enough for us.
Follow these steps to set up your self-hosted blog with Siteground:
Step 1: Click through to Siteground and click “View Plans”.
Step 2: Choose your web hosting plan. Unless you have unusually advanced needs, we advise choosing the cheapest option, StartUp.
Step 3: Enter your preferred domain name. If you’ve already registered it (which you won’t have done if you’ve being following these steps), click I already have a domain; otherwise, hit Register a New Domain.
Step 4: Check your domain is actually available. Provided no one else has registered it before you, you’ll be asked lots of questions about how to contact you, where you’re based, and how you want to pay.
Step 5: Choose the length of your agreement. Siteground’s plans range from one month to three years; pick the one that offers the best value.
Step 6: Choose your optional extras. You’ll likely need to pay for Domain Registration, but you can probably live without the other two.
Step 7: Confirm your choices and hand over the money!
5 Select Your WordPress Theme
Now, let’s move on to the aesthetics of your new blog.
The first step in this mini-process is to pick a WordPress theme, which is kind of like the interior design of your website. It needs to look stylish enough that visitors want to stick around, while also making it easy for them to click deeper into your site and find relevant content.
Beyond that, your theme should tie in with your blog niche. Most mom bloggers portray a pretty wholesome image — but then again, you might want to go against the grain and choose something more edgy. Think about what your audience would expect to see from a mom blog like yours.
Once you’ve got a few ideas in mind, head to platforms like Astra and Kadence to take a look at the available options:
At this point, you’ll notice that some themes are free and others aren’t.
While a premium WordPress theme will give you more scope for customization, new bloggers will be able to cope just fine with a free theme.
And remember, if you want the added functionality, it’s easy to upgrade to a premium theme down the line.
If you’re anything like us, you’ll end up with an extensive shortlist of themes to choose from, and you’ll struggle to narrow it down. To help make your mind up, look for a theme that’s:
- Fast
- Responsive
- Has enough customization options
- Backed up by excellent reviews
- Made by a company with strong customer support
Once you’ve found the perfect theme for your WordPress blog, set it all up by following these simple steps:
- Log into your WordPress dashboard
- Click Appearance
- Head to Themes
- Click Add New
- Search for your chosen WordPress theme
- Hit Install
6 Design a Logo & Pick Color Theme
Again, remember there are literally millions of other mom bloggers out there.
So it’s practically guaranteed that some of them will pick the same theme as you.
That’s why it’s important to stamp your imprint on your own blog by designing a logo and picking a unique color palette.
If you’re not a professional graphic designer, that might sound kind of intimidating. But it’s actually pretty simple if you use the right blogging tools.
Start by picking out your brand colors with Coolors, a site that generates a new color palette every time you click the spacebar. Find one that you like and take note of the hex code (a combination of six letters and numbers) for each color).
Now to move on to your blog logo.
Don’t worry, we’re not expecting you to design something from scratch.
Instead, simply trawl through the tens of thousands of logo templates available on Canva.
Filter by style, theme, and color until you’ve found one that works for you, then customize by adding your blog name.
7 Set Up Your Most Important Landing Pages
Sure, you love each and every page on your shiny new blog.
But while you’re never supposed to pick favorites, some pages are undeniably more important than others.
This is the step in the process where you’re going to build those essential pages:
Homepage
For a lot of people, your homepage will be the first part of your site they ever get to see, so it needs to make a great first impression.
Not only that, but it needs to explain who you are. And it should be easy to navigate around — so keep the clutter to a minimum. Tidy homepage, tidy mind!
About us page
This is your chance to tell your story. Talk about what inspired you to enter the blogging business in the first place, and give a little insight into who you are as a mom and a person. The more color, the better.
Contact page
While you likely don’t want to give away your home phone number, you should make it easy for people to find and follow you on social media. And you might want to add a contact form for things like guest posts and sponsored blog post enquiries.
Privacy policy
Not the most exciting page, but essential nonetheless. It sets out what types of data you collect on your audience. Not sure where to start? Use a service like PrivacyPolicies.com.
You’ll obviously want to give some thought to the content and layout of these pages. But the practicalities of building them couldn’t be easier:
- Login to your WordPress dashboard
- Navigate to Pages
- Click Create New Page
8 Start Planning & Writing Blog Posts
When you first started thinking about how to start a mom blog, you likely imagined that writing blog posts would be an immediate priority.
But as you can see, there’s a bunch of other work that needs to happen first if you’re going to build a successful, profitable mom blog.
Now you’ve laid the foundations and set up your new blog, it’s finally time to craft your first blog post.
Chances are, you’re practically overflowing with potential blog post ideas. But before you start working on the first topic that comes into your head, bear this in mind:
Your blog posts should be keyword-focused.
If these are the first blog posts you’re writing, and you’ve never dabbled with SEO before, that might sound a little complicated.
But in reality, basic keyword research is pretty easy.
There are a couple ways to go about it. The more time-consuming option involves typing “seed” keywords into Google and analyzing related queries (or using a tool like Answer the Public to do it for you).
However, the faster, smarter, and more insightful option is to use Ahrefs. Sure, it’ll cost you some money, but it won’t just give you a bunch of phrases to target — it’ll also tell you how many searches they attract each month, and how difficult it’ll be to rank for them.
That gives you the best chance of appearing on the first page of Google for the terms you’re targeting, which means more traffic and more opportunities to make money.
There are a couple ways to use Ahrefs in the keyword research process.
One option is to enter a successful mom blog into the Site Explorer tool, then analyze the organic keywords it currently ranks for, looking out for two types of content:
- Informational content, such as guides and how-to posts
- Commercial content, like reviews and buying guides
For instance, a quick look at Your Modern Family shows us they’re targeting lots of commercial “best of” terms, such as:
Keyword | Keyword difficulty | Search volume |
|---|---|---|
| best parental control app for iphone | 59 | 2,500 |
| best gifts for one year olds | 44 | 2,200 |
| best gifts for teen boys | 57 | 2,000 |
| best fidget spinner | 12 | 1,600 |
| best outdoor toys | 37 | 1,600 |
When you see how many valuable commercial terms are out there and how much search interest they attract, it’s easy to imagine how much money mom blogs can make!
And we can also see Your Modern Family is creating lots of informational how-to posts targeting terms like:
| Keyword | Keyword difficulty | Search volume |
|---|---|---|
| how to make slime | 58 | 131,000 |
| how to break a fever | 38 | 32,000 |
| how to make spaghetti sauce | 46 | 12,000 |
| how to make candy grapes | 3 | 8,600 |
| how to potty train a girl | 40 | 6,500 |
Repeat this process for a handful of different mom blogs until you’ve gathered a bunch of potential keywords.
Alternatively (or in addition), use the Ahrefs Keyword Explorer to search for keyword ideas based on a single “seed” keyword, such as kids toys. That spits out results like:
| Keyword | Keyword difficulty | Search volume |
|---|---|---|
| best outdoor toys for kids | 33 | 1,000 |
| best pool toys for kids | 16 | 250 |
| how to organize kids toys | 12 | 200 |
| best toys for autistic kids | 22 | 150 |
| how to make toys for kids | 22 | 100 |
Use your research to plan out working titles for your first blog posts (10 is a good number to start with, but feel free to plan more if you’re particularly inspired!).
For instance, the above research gives us potential titles like:
- How to Make Slime In 6 Simple Steps
- What Are the Best Outdoor Toys for Kids In Summer 2022?
- Protect Your Kids Online With the Best Parental Control Apps for iPhone
- How to Make Spaghetti Sauce the Whole Family Will Love
- The Ultimate Guide On How to Break a Fever
Sketched out the titles for your first batch of blog posts? Then what are you waiting for — get writing! Just be sure to refresh your memory of these blogging best practices:
Make your post dedicated to one purpose. In other words, don’t try to cover too many topics in a single post. If you find yourself veering onto another subject, consider splitting it out into two (or more) posts instead.
Target one main keyword per post. Naturally, there’ll be some overlap between your various posts. A guide to the best outdoor toys could cross over with a list of the top beach toys. A little cross-pollination is fine, but generally, you want to avoid repetition because it risks cannibalizing your keywords. As the scary name suggests, that’s a bad thing.
Keep your audience at front of mind. Different readers will have different goals in mind when searching for a given query. For instance, parents of teens will be looking for different activity suggestions or gift ideas for parents with toddlers. Remind yourself who you’re speaking to before you start writing.
Write with personality. This isn’t an academic journal or a dictionary. People expect to learn a bit about you from reading your blog posts, so sprinkle them with personal examples and anecdotes. It’ll make your content much more engaging.
Strike up a conversation. Don’t lecture your readers — encourage them to get involved. Persuade them to add their own thoughts on social media or via the comments section at the bottom of your blog posts.
Guide people toward complementary content. Be sure to provide links to relevant content throughout your posts so readers can find additional information (and also because it’s great for SEO).
9 Build a Blog Post Promotion Strategy
You can’t just expect to write one blog post, hit “publish”, and immediately generate a ton of traffic.
It just doesn’t work that way — at least, not in the very early days of your new blog.
Instead, you need to get out there, find your audience, and bring them to your website.
Fortunately, as we’ve already noted, starting a WordPress blog gives you a ton of promotional options, such as:
Optimizing your blog posts for search. Creating search-engine-friendly content isn’t difficult, but there are quite a lot of moving parts.
Sharing your content on social. Simply put, every time you write a post, you should share it via social media. Also, be sure to post it in relevant forums, Facebook groups, and subreddits, many of which have large, active audiences.
Building an email list. When someone clicks through to your latest post, ask if they want to sign up for your newsletter. It’s a double win: they get your content straight to their inbox, and you get more eyes on your posts.
Running ads. This probably won’t be an option from day #1, but once you’ve started to make money blogging, you can reach new audiences by targeting them through search or social ads.
10 Make Money From Your Mom Blog
Mom blogs aren’t just a nice way to share your thoughts with a community of like-minded people — they can be a highly valuable business venture.
Throughout the blogging world, there are three main, tried-and-trusted ways to make money:
1. Recommend Affiliate Products
In our opinion, this is the best and most reliable way to monetize a mom blog.
Why?
Because you’ll naturally find yourself referencing products you love anyway. So why not earn yourself a commission when your audience clicks through and buys those products?
Importantly, it doesn’t cost your readers any more money to purchase via your affiliate links, so it’s literally a win-win scenario. They get recommendations from someone they trust; you get to make a little cash to support your blog.
There are several niches that might be relevant to mom bloggers, so you can pick and choose the best affiliate programs. Check out these guides to find your favorites:
- Cooking Affiliate Programs
- Food Affiliate Programs
- Homeschool Affiliate Programs
- Kids Toys Affiliate Programs
- Parenting Affiliate Programs
- Baby Products Affiliate Programs
2. Sell Ad Space
Another way to earn passive income from a mom blog is to sell ad space on your site.
You can do this in a couple different ways:
Sign up to an ad network. When you join an ad network, adverts will be displayed on your site, and you’ll earn a small fee every time someone clicks them. Google AdSense is often the first choice for bloggers, but it shouldn’t be — the pay is terrible! Networks like AdThrive and Raptive are much better, but they have pretty demanding entry conditions.
Search for website sponsors. By going it alone, you can potentially earn a bunch more money, but you’ll need to do all the work yourself. That means reaching out to brands, convincing them to advertise with you, and giving them a way to track and report on the results.
Realistically, you’re unlikely to land a big money sponsorship until you’ve built up a big, engaged audience.
That means signing up for an ad network is probably the best choice for selling ad space.
However, bear in mind that adverts can be irritating to your visitors. As such, we’d advise not running ads until you already have a consistent stream of traffic to your mom blog.
3. Sell Your Own Products
As you might remember from the successful mom blog examples we listed earlier in this article, some mom bloggers make money by selling their own products, such as:
Physical products. Toys, books, recipe kits… there are any number of physical products you could sell via a mom blog.
Digital products. Things like learning resources and recipes make for excellent downloadable digital products.
Services. If you have a unique skill, you might even be able to sell it as a service. For instance, you could offer one-to-one courses on budgeting or cooking (or anything else, for that matter).
Inevitably, each of these routes is more difficult than simply selling ad space on your site or promoting affiliate programs.
You have to develop the product in the first place. You have to handle payment. You have to deal with customer service and complaints.
It’s a lot of hassle, so it’s not ideal if you’re doing this as a side hustle.
Take the First Step to Starting Your Mommy Blog
Actually, we’ve been lying all along.
We gave you 10 steps to start a mom blog, but there’s actually a secret first step that comes before any of the ones listed above.
But because we like your vibe, we’ll tell you about it.
It involves signing up for our free training.
We’ve built dozens — maybe even hundreds — of blogs in lots of different niches down the years.
In the process, we’ve made a lot of mistakes, but we’ve got a few things right too.
And because we’re generous types, we’d love to share the seven secrets that make new blogs 83% more successful.
That’s exactly what we’ll do if you join our training — and, to be clear, it won’t cost you a cent.
See you there!
