Blogging and Other News from The Zoo

I’ve been blogging since 2007 and what was once just a hobby has turned into a full time work from home job. I love it, have made great online friends along the way, and in the past, some decent money. But now I am frustrated because I have reached a plateau with The Healthy Moms Magazine. I feel like I am stuck and don’t know how to continue to climb the mountain.

If you have been following my main blog you might know that I have a fairly large following and am very outspoken when it comes to health, fitness, and obesity awareness.

I also started a social network for healthy living mom bloggers back in 2009. When I started it, it was a hopping community and the members updated it regularly. Today, I am the only one that updates it every single day. I am frustrated! I really want my community to grow, but I also understand that there are a ton of mom blogging communities online. How can I compete?

A little over a year ago I still had 30+ contributors on The Healthy Moms Magazine. They all wrote about various topics from parenting, fitness, pregnancy, fashion and beauty. But after a while they just stopped writing regularly. The few that did write on a regular basis were involved in work at home opportunities and their posts looked more like advertisements. They were all in some sort of direct sales or mlm like opportunity. So I removed every single one of my contributors.

Fast forward to today. I continue to receive hundreds of e mails every single week from pr companies requesting me to interview their expert or review a product on The Healthy Moms Magazine. I do not like doing phone interviews because I am home alone most of the day with two very noisy and active little boys. I prefer to e mail questions to experts but some PR companies have time set aside for expert phone interviews. When my kids are in school full time I will be able to do more of that.

I’m also trying to get away from product reviews because most of the pitches I get are for things that I will not use, nor would I recommend them to my readers. I also want my site to focus on educating my readers. But I am frustrated because I just do not have enough time to write everything that I would like to.

So I have decided to re launch the contributor program for The Healthy Moms Magazine. I am also looking for bloggers to help me grow my social network. You can visit this link for details.

Chris went to Salt Lake City this week. While he was down there he visited Temple Square and this cool mall that brings the outdoors inside. In a couple of weeks we are going down to Phoenix for spring break. Chris said that we will have time to stop in Salt Lake City on the way down. He’s planning on taking us to that mall. I can’t wait!

The kids are doing pretty good this week. I don’t really have a whole lot to report. Goose just started the third trimester at school. I can not believe that she will be a senior in the fall. Kitty is still struggling with her trichotillomania. Her teacher gave her some pipe cleaners. She tears them apart instead of plucking her eyelashes. But, last night I noticed that her left eye was plucked clean. Maybe the pipe cleaners are not working. We got Parrot a new two wheeled bike and I am attempting to teach him how to ride without training wheels. But he will only practice for about 10 minutes and then he says, “I’m done riding my bike today.” Monkey has a little baby doll that he plays with and lately Baby has been joining us at the dinner table. He was pretending to feed him/her (the gender of his doll changes every hour or so) real food from the table. After asking him to stop he finally began feeding him/her pretend food. On Tuesday Little Bear had four potty accidents before noon. He still poops in his pants almost every day, but usually he uses his potty when he has to pee. I don’t know what the issue was on Tuesday.

How has your week been?