From Blog to Bestseller

Well – I’ll be damned it’s true! My husband, Ken Schafer, urged me a few years back to start blogging my parenting advice. I am a psychotherapist and parenting expert, not a net geek in love with the idea of blogging or a “mommy blogger” looking to commiserate with other moms. I figured if I posted all this professional information for free no one would ever pay to take my courses or hire me as a parenting coach. After all – couldn’t they just read all I had to say online? Blogging would kill my revenue I argued. “No, it will wildly increase it” Ken argued back.

Here are some of the larger-than-life benefits I have experienced since joining the world of creative commons licensing and putting it all out there for the world for free:

Parents found me – My parenting course enrollment went up so high, I had to cut off enrollment due to lack of chairs. People offered to bring folding camp chairs for Pete’s sake. They had read me and they wanted to learn more – learn it all – meet me in person. My personality and philosophy was more in the forefront in my blog and I was drawing a following that would pay for my other services. It was more additive than redundant as I had assumed.

The commercial sites found me – After all, they’re always hungry for new content and my blog posts were typically insightful parenting tips that lent themselves nicely to other content hungry sites, so the links and reprints just kept coming.

Journalists found me – If a freelancer is doing an article on nose-picking, they typically start by googling nose-picking and bam there I am, rising up higher and higher in the Google results. I’m becoming the “go-to” person on every obscure (and not so obscure) parenting issue out there!

Other media found me – The Gill Deacon Show on CBC was looking for a parenting expert to join their roster of resident experts and their segment producer found me – again – online. Having read my “stuff” they agreed with my parenting philosophy and had me in for an audition. I am now shouting my advice from a new soapbox on national television.

My publisher found me – And most excitingly, when publisher John Wiley and Son was looking for new writing talent they found me via my blog. Having read my posts they approached me to write a book which has just been published and is (as I write this) the number one ranked parenting book on Amazon in Canada. Of course I’d be a marketing fool if I didn’t cite the title Breaking the Good Mom Myth and offer a link to buy it on this blog!

By the way – speaking of giving it away for free – if you sign up for my newsletter you can download a free sample chapter. See, sharing has become a big part of my strategy now. 🙂 And to think I was afraid blogging would cannibalize my business. Wow.