Comments on: Play It Again, Momma: Five Commandments for Blogging

By: Alyssa

Alyssa — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 22:55:00 +0000

I love this amy and love your sincerity.

By: Michelle Smiles

Michelle Smiles — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 16:22:00 +0000

My biggest hope is that I never edit myself in order to gain traffic or stuff. I write my blog for my own reasons and anything beyond that is just gravy so I don’t want to lose what makes it special to me.

Love the list – thanks for sharing!

By: Shari

Shari — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 21:04:00 +0000

My commandment is to never post photos of my children or family. I know people do it all the time, but I think of photos as our private memories.

By: melanie

melanie — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:27:00 +0000

thanks for the tips. i have just entered this whole bloggy world outside of my own blog and it has been overwhelming to try to stay true to my ideals and values. your commandments really helped me to have perspective. thank you.

By: Noel

Noel — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:42:00 +0000

Thou shalt not allow the blog to rule thy life. I had no idea that I would enjoy blogging as much as I do. That’s the commandment I gotta work on.

By: Sprite's Keeper

Sprite's Keeper — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 11:14:00 +0000

Great post!
I started out posting every day, but it’s now more about quality than quantity. At first, it felt off if I didn’t post for a day, but I’m growing as a blogger, I think. My commandment would be, Share the love. I started a forum for topics to enlarge everyone’s community and I think it’s working, since I find new people every week and they find new ones and start building bigger readerships. I am a big fan of great writers, but I’m a bigger fan of interesting ones.

By: The Mama Chronicles

The Mama Chronicles — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 10:23:00 +0000

Thank you for such an honest and insightful post. I’m very in tune with the product recs. I can’t personally write a review for something if I don’t believe in it. I look at blogs like the girlfriend you trust to tell you the truth – whether it’s about parenting, products, etc.

By: Midwest Mom

Midwest Mom — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 09:44:00 +0000

I *do* blog about my children -- to appreciate them and talk about the lessons I've learned parenting them. Sometimes, I blog to share the day-to-day funny of our lives. It has been an enriching experience.

BUT...

My absolute rules are never to use their real names and to understand that what I am writing is public. Teachers, grandparents, and parents of friends all read the blog. It is important to me that I not share stories that will embarrass my brood in their real lives. Blog life is not real life. That's an important distinction for me.

Great article! Thanks! - Julia

By: Meagan Francis

Meagan Francis — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 09:32:00 +0000

What a great post! I’ve been writing about parenting (including a weekly newspaper column) for 5+ years and my personal approach to the “no exploiting” rule is that I’ll write about an experience with one of my kids to highlight a larger point, but only if I can do it with obvious love, warmth and humor. So, venting just for venting’s sake is OUT. I prefer to blend realism with positivity (we struggled with X, but it wasn’t the end of the world; or we tried Y solution, and it worked)

I figure my kids may still read something I wrote one day and be mad at me, but heck, when they’re teens I expect them to be mad at me for walking next to them on the sidewalk. The important thing to me is that I know I approached whatever stories or anecdotes I shared about them with love and integrity. That way it doesn’t feel like I was using them, it feels like I was sharing about our life in order to illustrate larger concepts about life, parenting and the world in general. That’s the kind of writing I like to read and it’s the kind I’ve tried to produce.

Also, very good points about products. I get the sense sometimes that a lot of bloggers feel entitled to get “stuff” because they will “repay” the companies with their positive words. To me, that’s getting it backward–the obligation should always be to the reader; otherwise they’ll lose those readers (and all the swag) soon enough.

By: Melissa @ The Inspired Room

Melissa @ The Inspired Room — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:41:00 +0000

Great advice Amy. I wrote my own post on my blogging advice a week or so ago, so I won't rehash it in your comments! Most important to me is that I don't let my blog run my life. If I am out to create great blogging success, I can almost guarantee I'll be a major FAIL in life. Blogging definitely sucks you in if you let it.

So today for instance, I have no post. Not because I had no ideas today, not because I didn't want to earn the money by increasing readership today, but because I needed to disconnect my brain from my blog and sometimes I just need to say NO to it. Got to pace myself!

Great post, Amy.