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Rachel Lister, Busy Mommy Media

Congratulations to Rachel Lister
Busy Mommy Media
http://www.busymommymedia.com

Rachel was one of our 5 recipients of the Mom Central Inaugural Grants Program. She received $2,000 to grow her brand, build her platform and ultimately grow her influence!

Read Rachel’s submission!

The vision behind your personal brand:
As a mom, I know what it is like to scour the internet for information that will help me be a better parent, give me tips to lose the last of the baby weight, and find ideas to keep my kids occupied on a rainy day. Busy Mommy Media was created to give moms a way to come together and share their ideas. We wanted to put everything busy moms needed in one place to make it easy for them to find the answers that they need.

What do you aspire to do next?
Knowing how hard it is to find a work at home job that is flexible enough to do while parenting young children, it has always been our goal at Busy Mommy Media to support moms by offering paid writing positions and helping to promote mom-owned businesses. While we do currently have paid writing positions, we hope to increase the pay for our current writers and bring in several more moms.

The purpose of this grant is to assist you with your vision. How will you use this grant to better your influence and personal platform?
This grant would be so helpful for us at Busy Mommy Media because we would be able to immediately raise the pay for current writers and bring on several new topic editors as well as a graphic designer to help keep the site fresh and exciting. With the increase in content, it wouldn’t take long before the site would be covering the cost of the payments to the writers. We just need a little jump start to get it going.

How long have you been engaged in creating your own personal brand?
3-4 years

What have you already done to achieve your goals for your blog?
Busy Mommy Media started as a hobby because I wanted a place to share the activities I was doing as a home daycare provider. It has grown to become an active site with a page rank of 4 that brings in consistently high traffic and is in high demand with brands who want to reach out to moms online. We regularly attend conventions such as the ABC Kids Expo, Toy Fair, CES, and BlogHer in order to bring quality content to our readers. We have already been able to offer a handful of paid writing positions but I hope to be able to raise the pay for current writers and bring on several other talented moms who need to earn some extra money working from home. What have been your biggest challenges in achieving your goals for your blog and personal brand? The biggest challenge we’ve had in building Busy Mommy Media to the point that it can support several work at home moms is finding the funds to pay moms what they are worth to provide quality content. There are some amazing mom writers out there but they deserve higher payment than what we can currently offer. I firmly believe that if we have the ability to pay talented moms to provide more content, that the revenue from the site will increase to cover the cost.

Why should the public vote for you:
Busy Mommy Media has always worked to be what our readers want. This grant would enable us to not only provide more of the great content we are known for, but also help several moms earn money from home in the process.

Top 3 things you would like to share with those just starting out:
1. Be authentic. You can’t write about anything you aren’t passionate about. While it’s tempting to accept offers from brands and PR agencies, you have to be sure that you are only helping to promote products that you really do believe in. Your readers can certainly tell the difference between authentic content and content that you don’t really believe in. 2. Content comes first. Beginning bloggers often get excited about getting free stuff in exchange for a review or being contacted by a brand to work on a campaign but if you don’t focus on your content first, you won’t keep your readers for long. 3. Don’t worry about what everyone thinks. Blogging can be whatever you want it to be but it’s hard to be honest in your writing if you are trying to please everyone. If you accept early on that there is no way to please everyone, you’ll be better off in the end.

Congratulations, Rachel! We can’t wait to watch your influence grow!