Recently I wrote a post, What's A Mommy Blogger? (Part One), with the intention of writing a follow-up post after I'd looked more closely at what exactly puts a blogger into the category of "mommy blogger."
What I found is that the most basic thing that defines a mommy blogger is that she is a mother with children under the age of 18, who blogs. That's about it in terms of anything unifying because there is, as Kayley Frye might say, a vasty universe of bloggers who hang the tag "mommy blogger" on themselves. There are some mommy bloggers, in my completely unscientific samplings, who have accepted that for now their lives consist mostly of caring for their kids and writing about it online. A bonus is interacting with other bloggers helps them keep a handle on their sanity (half kidding, folks). 
However, most mommy bloggers in the world of selling your blog/yourself online seem very much okay with telling tales of their wee ones, uh, wee, publishing page after page of every milestone their children reach and with that material they venture forth to make money mostly by doing reviews of the many clothes, supplies, toys and so forth that growing children use.
But very few mommy bloggers despite their unrelenting efforts, are like the most famous of all, dooce.
Dooce (rhymes with puce) was documenting mommyhood whilst her daughter was still in the womb and despite the fact that four years into mommy blogging, her child has shown herself to be no more interesting, smart, or attractive than any other kid whose visage is exploited on the web, dooce the mommy blogger has been able to carve herself out a name and she remains in the top 100 of all blogs on the Internet. Kudos to her for doing so because as a "premium blogger," she makes a living from her blog.
Dooce got a real boost from the start of her blogging career by being one of the first publicized cases of a person getting fired by her employer for keeping a blog and mentioning work topics on the blog. She garnered national attention for doing so and pretty much picked up the ball and ran with it.
Last time I looked a month or two ago, dooce was still writing a monthly letter to her daughter whose age she ticks off in months (more blog posts is the result) even though the child is moving towards kindergarten age. I understand how dooce is in the mommy blogger category because not only does she write often about her feelings about being a mom and the minutia of the daily life of a mom but her audience is vast and comprised of many mothers as well.
One thing I will give dooce props for is that her website does not look like a splog (spam blog). All splogs including Mommy blogger-type splogs, are as ugly as they sound, though mommy blogger splogs are filled to overflowing with blinking ads and far more baby themes and colours than should ever be allowed anywhere. It's quite apparent that theses self-declared mommy blogs are only marginally about motherhood and exist in fact, to sell stuff. Now before I get yelled at for being a hypocrite about selling stuff on my blog, please type "mommy blog" then "splog" in your search engine and then take some time to look at what I'm talking about. I'm not linking to any splog-like or wholely splog blogs because, well, think about it.
As a person who has entered the sometimes blog-for-pay world, I'm exposed to many self-described mommy blogs, just as I am to so-called SEO blogs, self-proclaimed tech blogs, cooking blogs, contest blogs, and so forth. Essentially, a blogger can give her/himself a label and whether or not s/he is qualified to present her/himself to the world as a [insert label here] blogger s/he does, and further s/he makes money for doing so.
Interestingly, I came across quite a number of blogs that though I reached them through the "mommy blog" network, when reading their mommy blogs I clicked their links to their other half dozen or dozen blogs(!) and they were "authorities" on myriad topics!
I couldn't help but wonder how ever they find the time in the day to be a mommy blogger as well as an expert in travel, photography, web design, SEO, cooking, ect. I mean do they, unlike me, get 48-hours each day rendering them capable of producing consistent quality blog material on just about any subject?
The short answer of course, is no.
In their zeal or less charitably, their quest for big-blogging bucks, both mom and non-mom bloggers have ventured forth to become all things to all people and in doing so have diluted the quality of their blogs--though they may in fact be moderately successful financially whist doing so. Still, when I clicked to the blogs of these "experts" on everything including parenthood, I often had to scroll through all manner of advertising for everything baby before I came to actual blog entries which often took the form of a few sentences that appear to have been rendered by someone whose native language is not English. There is simply very little of substance on some blogs except the advertising. If one looks into the background a bit of said bloggers as they brightly urge you to do, they often do have six, eight, twelve blogs all running at once--and hey, more power to them if that's their goal. No one is forcing people to read blogs, good or bad.
I have to wonder however, can a mommy blogger or any blogger for that matter, find a unique voice for every blog they write, a fresh perspective? Or are they simply churning out words to fill space so they can fill more space on their blog with advertising?
