smartpeoplepodcast
When you think about professional blogging, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind? Mommy bloggers of course! The term “mommy blog” has become part of our common lexicon due to the insane success of so many mothers turned bloggers. And this week we are fortunate to interview the queen of mommy blogs, Deedra Determan. Deedra created a blog initially targeted towards moms in her local community and quickly turned it into a 7-figure business with national reach. In this episode Deedra teaches us how to start small, find your niche, create a profitable business, market on a zero dollar budget, and much more.
Deedra has 20+ years of marketing experience starting on the agency side at Ackerman McQueen Advertising Agency to 10 years in the television industry launching news at KOKI Fox 23 making it one of the top Fox affiliates in the country. She went on to launch niche websites for moms including 918moms.com, 405moms.com, and MoneySavingQueen.com with over 100,000 moms visiting the websites each month. After one year from launching, she sold the websites to Griffin Communications. Determan then followed her true passion in launching D2 Branding, an innovative marketing firm igniting brands to be the market leader in their industry through marketing, public relations, social media, advertising, strategic partnerships, sales, website creation, search engine optimization, content creation, video production, graphic design, and more! Deedra is also a mentor at Thrive15.com.
“You can be passionate all day long, but until you realize what your revenue streams are going to be, passion will only take you so far.”
– Deedra Determan
Quotes from Deedra:
[shadowbox]”We started with a local market because from a revenue standpoint we knew we could get advertisers. We strategically went after moms as our readers for the purpose of being able to sell advertisements.”
“We started with an extremely small niche, targeting my local neighborhood, and then we thought we would expand geographically. Instead one of our blogs became very popular and expanded nationally.”
“It’s easier to go after an advertiser when you focus on a local market. We had 100,000 local moms, which was huge. If we would have had 100,000 moms nationally, that’s not that big.”
“Burnout happens really quickly if you’re working 12 hour days and not making any money.”[/shadowbox]
What we learn in this episode:
- Your business doesn’t have to be huge, just find your niche
- How to start small, find your market, and pivot
- How to find your revenue model for your business or blog
Resources:
https://www.thrive15.com/mentors/deedra-determan
Twitter: @deedradeterman
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