Harnessing the Power of Mom Bloggers for SEO
One of the more popular groups of bloggers today in terms of sheer number of blogs and readers is the “Mom Bloggers” or “Mommy Bloggers” category. I’m sure many of you have at least heard of Dooce which is probably the most well known in the genre (she gets over 3 million pageviews a month!). But there are literally tens of thousands of other smaller sites with hundreds of thousands of readers and you can use this to your advantage.
While it’s hard to generalize about such a large group, I’ve found that some of the more popular topics that Mom Bloggers write about is kids and parenting, family life, coupons and deals and contests. Again generalizing here but I’ve found Mommy Bloggers to be VERY receptive to relevant comments on their site and direct emails. Of course like any other site you can leave comments for links. But let’s delve a little deeper.
If you write a post or article that is somewhat related to kids, parenting, or whatever else the topic of the Mom Blog is, then compile a quick list of Mom Bloggers (google it) and tip them off about the interesting article you wrote. I’ve found minor success with this method; I’ll typically link to a post with an interesting kid related product (which includes my affiliate link to the product, of course) and if it’s cool and unique enough a few sites with pick it up. But this still isn’t your best way to harness the power of the Moms. Here it is:
Contests. There are without exaggeration thousands of Mom Blogs that will post contests, sweepstakes, and giveaways. They are easy to find (Google and then you’ll find that many are interlinked with one another). You can hold a simple sweepstakes on your site and easily get hundreds of free backlinks from the Mommy Blog sector.
Now here’s the interesting part: the item you giveaway doesn’t have to be expensive or targeted towards women. You can even give away a service like web design or graphics or whatever. Besides just the backlinks, you can also use the contest to build your list by requiring a signup (email, Twitter follow, Facebook like, whatever you want) to enter your giveaway.
I’ve given away cheap but interesting items (under $10) and received 100 backlinks, 1000 visits to my site and a few hundred signups to my list. All for $7 items (plus about $3 to mail them out to the winners). It’s cheap and effective. Approximate time invested to get all these links was about 2 hours the first time and 30 minutes each additional. Once you have the list of Mom Bloggers emails that will post your contest, you can simply reuse this list every time you run a new contest. Note that some sites use a web based contact form instead of email, so you will have to do some bookmarking as well as emailing. Thanks Moms.
