There are 4.2 million American mothers — many of whom detest the dismissive term “mommy blogger” — who blog about their family lives, according to eMarketer. Among them are perfect moms, bad moms, crafty moms, vegan moms, anti-vaccination moms, pioneer moms, city moms, diva moms, Pinterest moms, moms who joke a bit too much about whether it’s “wine o’clock” yet.
Many of the women are stay-at-home mothers hoping to monetize their blogs: In exchange for free stuff and experiences, or more formal paid-sponsorship agreements, they enthuse about a company’s product on their blogs and social-media platforms. Some of them make as much as they would at a traditional job outside the home.
This is the world that Josi Denise, a 27-year-old pregnant mother of three, inhabited until May 13. That’s when, after deciding to shutter her popular blog, the American Mama, she wrote of “fake nonsense I used to share on the Internet . . . writing about my fake life and oh-so-happy marriage,” calling it “pure bulls**t.”
The post attracted backlash from other blogging moms, who attacked with comments that ranged from, “You’re a sick, sick person and I feel horrible for your children,” to, “I think she is jealous, hormonal and just plain unhappy.”
Denise started blogging in 2013. She was 24 and married with two young children, living in Miami Beach, Fla., where she worked as a marketing director for hospitality groups. She was working 60 to 70 hours a week when the relative who watched her kids had to move away suddenly, and Denise was faced with a decision: Keep working and put her children, then ages 1 and 4, in day care 10 hours a day, or quit her job?
She opted for the latter, putting her career on hold to stay home until the kids were a little older. But Denise quickly realized that she was bored and restless. This was right around the time Instagram was getting popular, and she had been occasionally sharing recipes and anecdotes to good response.
She thought about starting a blog. It seemed like a no-brainer.
At first, Denise was excited — other mom bloggers were encouraging, and it was thrilling that she could possibly create a career.
In the beginning, starting a blog is inexpensive. “Anyone with Wi-Fi and some kids to take pictures of can start a blog,” Denise tells The Post. “That’s the lure that draws so many women in. It’s only later that you start to realize there are a ton of things you hadn’t thought of, from technical details to website design to joining all these networks and conferences, where they teach you how to grow an audience, to, you know, how to actually make money doing this.
“Other bloggers make it seem easy. It really isn’t. If I wanted to make money — and I did — it was all going to be a sponsor game.”
There are companies that act as the middleman between brands and bloggers and they post sponsorship opportunities — a k a shopportunities. To prove herself, a blogger might do a few posts for free, writing about a product she already has and uses. If this attracts notice from the brand managers, it could lead to a few paid posts.
Since Denise had already been working in marketing, she knew how to play the game. Soon, she had her pick of brands.
“But these posts take a lot of time, and the [brand] campaign leaders will critique everything you write and ask you to repost,” says Denise. “For instance, when I got my first paid ‘shopportunity’ with Tyson Foods for a game day, chicken-finger post, I wasn’t allowed to say ‘Super Bowl,’ because it’s copyrighted. I had to say ‘the Big Game.’ ”
Still, when the first paycheck for $125 arrived, it was validation.
“I felt valuable,” she says. “At the same time, I felt like anything I posted, the brands were watching me. You don’t want to post anything too real.”
‘It wasn’t a steady paycheck, but if you worked constantly and nonstop, you could make a lot of money.’
Dark — say, marital troubles or feeling burdened by the demands of motherhood — isn’t advertiser-friendly. Instead, Denise noticed a “constant positivity” throughout the mom blogosphere.
“The other bloggers in your community won’t share your content with their readers [if it’s not cheery],” she explains. “And if the [blogger] networks don’t share the content, then your own numbers suffer.”
Those numbers are crucial for bloggers to land more paid gigs, but her chirpiness on her blog was in stark contrast to her own unhappy marriage.
“I felt I could somehow control things as long as it looked good online,” says Denise
And, when she tried substantive entries about topics that actually interested her — for instance, “What Millennial Mothers Need To Know About the State of the Union Address” — they received few clicks. Readers didn’t care.
Still, Denise had a huge following: 50,000 unique page views per month on her site. She developed a sponsor relationship with Bigelow Tea, and they asked her to post a recipe with Bigelow Tea Perfect Peach Iced Tea pegged to Father’s Day.
“So there we all are, family time, grilling on Father’s Day with peach iced tea, but you can’t enjoy the moment you’re having with your kids, because you’re taking endless photos and it’s all stage-directed,” says Denise. “You’re worried about getting the company logo in the frame, and your kids smiling, and you’re taking shot after shot. ‘OK, now you stand behind the grill!’ . . . I posted the pictures with a caption that said, ‘We had SUCH a great time grilling Sunday!’ and it’s like, ‘No, actually we didn’t even do that on Father’s Day. We did it a month ago so the content would be ready.’ ”
Her children were mostly good-natured about all the photos she took, but that in itself began to concern her. They’d become used to her being behind the lens rather than involved in activities with them.
And then there was the free stuff. Denise’s haul ranged from inexpensive daily household items — an electric pedicure kit, a soap-making kit, a nonstick frying pan — to an $1,800 experience swimming with dolphins in Jamaica.
Once Denise became an established “influencer” with her American Mama blog, she was invited to the Social Influencers Travel Summit in Atlanta, where her food, drink and hotel were covered for four days.
One agency coordinates the bloggers, and the amenities are taken care of by sponsors. With such trips, there is generally no contract or promise made to write about the event — the expectation was unspoken.
“But of course influencers will share about it. They want to brag to their audience that they are important enough to be invited on an all-expenses-paid trip,” says Denise.
She walked away from the trip wondering, “What was the point of that?”
In December 2014, Denise was invited by NASA to a rocket launch in Cape Canaveral, Fla., after she posted a vacation picture from the Kennedy Space Center. But she spent the sponsored two-day trip wondering why she was there.
“It was clear that social-media influencers being present was a joke to the rest of the attendees,” says Denise. “The majority of [bloggers] were unprofessional, scrolling through their phones while astrophysicists were speaking, and loudly joking about taking the perfect Instagram selfie in front of the rocket rollout as television crews filmed live astronauts just a few feet away.”
Feeling out of place, Denise skipped the rest of the planned events and watched the rocket launch alone on the beach that night, no credential badge required.
“That was the moment that started to open my eyes that maybe I wasn’t cut out for the influencer ‘career path,’ ” she says.
Still, she kept going. The money was hard to resist.
She started to plan family time around paid posts. “Someone wants to send us a board game while eating a certain cereal? That’s what we’re doing on Friday,” she says. “I was playing the game with them, but I wasn’t really there. I was watching and thinking about how I was going to caption the photo I’d take. It all took away from real time with my kids.”
These kinds of dual sponsorship opportunities were common. Denise might get asked to shop at Walmart, purchase a Dr Pepper and a Snickers bar, and take a photo in-store before embarking on a “mini road trip,” telling the story of how her family “refueled” with the aforementioned products.
While most paid posts start at about $125 to $150 apiece, Denise eventually made $700 to $1,500 a post.
In her first six months, she made $12,000.
“I remember one month during the first six months where I made $3,000,” Denise says. “It wasn’t a steady paycheck, but if you worked constantly and nonstop, you could make a lot of money. Still, that leaves no time to live your life. In order to get to the point where people are really paying you, you’re going to write so many $150 posts that take a surprising amount of work.”
‘I’m not playing that game anymore. I’m moving on from writing posts about chicken and cupcakes.’
Most women don’t necessarily do it for the money, Denise noticed, but rather for validation — the feeling of importance that comes from working with big, national brands like Bigelow Tea and Coca-Cola.
“They aren’t very honest about what’s going on in their lives,” she says. “I was certainly one of them.”
Something had to give. It was 2015 and Denise had just had her third child. Suffering from postpartum depression, she had a prescription for anti-anxiety meds, a first for her. She was overwhelmed, and starting to go through a divorce.
“I remember one day sitting in my bed with that bottle of pills and thinking, ‘Should I take more of these or make some changes in my life?’ ” recalls Denise. “So I decided to move to southern Indiana, where I grew up.”
Her three kids — Leonardo, 1, Gabriella, 4, and Nicolas, 7 — were suddenly surrounded by Denise’s family and friends. She started a relationship with the man who has been her best friend since she was 15.
“I felt like I was really me now, actually living a genuine life. If I had a romantic dinner, I didn’t need to take a selfie,” she says. “If the kids and I were having a great time, I didn’t need to Instagram it.”
For the first six months or so after moving to Indiana, Denise put off blogging. She stalled when responding to paid sponsorship requests. She published a total of three blog posts in 2016, and did only a handful of paid social-media campaigns. Her new life brought happiness, but she struggled with the issue of how to keep writing about things she didn’t care about after having already presented a false face to the world.
She realized she couldn’t.
“Nobody is reading your s–t,” she wrote in her screed to other mommy bloggers. “You are not being helpful, and you are not being interesting.”
She has no regrets about the post. “I didn’t do it to attack an entire community,” she says. “I was saying to all these moms who are putting so much pressure on themselves, ‘Hey, there is more to your life.’ ”
The loss of income was obviously a concern for Denise, but, in the end, she decided that money could not be the sole motivating factor behind what she did.
“Knowing I could rejoin the traditional workforce is also comforting,” she says. But as for paid content, “I’m not playing that game anymore. I’m moving on from writing posts about chicken and cupcakes. These days, if I’m at a park with my kids now, I’m there, at that park. I feel a real sense of community — not the false kind I tried to create online.”