I didn’t grow up in the South, and neither did my Mom. But every time I hear Miranda Lambert’s drawl mimic her mama’s advice to “hide your crazy,” I always think of my own Mom.
My Mom was the queen of stoicism, a trait that I honestly admire and tried to mimic most of my life. My Mom always put people at ease with her calm voice and absence of outbursts. I grew up with zero stress because my Mom wasn’t one to complain or express dissatisfaction. This doesn’t mean that Mom didn’t have hardships or difficulties. She just didn’t feel that it was very lady-like to share them.
While my Mom had plenty of friends and lived a perfectly comfortable life, she wasn’t the first person people turned to for a good story. She wasn’t the life of the party, and she wasn’t one who you felt you could pour your heart out to unless you knew her well. Because of this, my Mom would have been a lousy blogger. She wouldn’t have shared enough. She wouldn’t have been authentic enough.
To have a successful mommy blog, you have to have readers. To keep readers, you have to offer value to your content by telling a good story or giving good advice. And you need to be authentic. Here’s how to show authenticity in your writing.
Tell It Like It Is
One of my favorite mommy bloggers is the queen of honesty. She writes about how exhausted she was after entertaining her three kids for almost an hour in the doctor’s examination room. She stops and takes a quick photo of her youngest, who is screaming on the floor at Target because she didn’t like how her socks felt on her feet.
Of course, you wouldn’t want to read about this chaos every day, and people might start to judge you if all your photos depict red-faced kids throwing fits. But reading about this blogger’s issues may make someone feel a little better about your three-year-old threatening to throw away your phone, makeup, and a coffee mug because you didn’t peel her banana right. Reading about how a blogger’s toddler woke up with a wad of gum stuck under her armpit might make you feel better when you just caught your little darling washing her hair in the toilet.
Try to Write Like You Talk
Some bloggers get so caught up by trying to depict a perfect life that their writing style suffers. They begin to sound like anal-retentive English teachers instead of regular moms who are just trying to get through their day.
If your tone is more formal and less conversational, try telling someone else what you want to write about in your blog before you sit down to write it. Sometimes writers start off loose and easy, but after a series of edits, their writing ends up being too stuffy and impersonal.
Quit editing so much. You’re not writing for the New York Times. No one expects your writing to be perfect, and no one cares if it is. If you live your life peppered with four-letter-words, use them in your writing.
If you are really ticked off with your husband because he threatens the kids with ridiculous punishments that he can never follow through on so the kids lose respect for you and start acting like a bunch of barbarians, don’t worry if you just wrote the longest-run-on sentence ever. Get it out, girl.
Get Off Your High Horse
I’m an eye-roller. I always have been. My Mom used to tell me that if I got hit on the back of my head during an eye roll, my eyes would stay that way. It’s a bad habit, so since I’m a grownup, I try to limit my eye rolls to times when no one is looking, or else I do an “inner” eye roll, which only I know about.
When I read Mom blogs of women who LOVE their kids SOOO much and have the PERFECT spouse who takes her on OMG – a SURPRISE weekend to wine country, I have to be careful not to hit the back of my head.
Where I grew up, people who talked like that were said to be on a “high horse,” which is kind of a funny expression when you think about it.
Not only are you making the rest of us feel bad about our unglamorous lives, but you are also losing readers too.
So, forget about hiding your crazy. Let it all out. Your readers will thank you for it.
This article was originally posted to Mom Marketing Coach
