Another blog in the family

After my post yesterday about resolving to update my blog every day in November, Alison suggested I should sign up for National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo). What a wonderful coincidence! Once upon a time I signed up for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and found that writing a 10,000 word rambling family saga based around the trials and tribulations of a group of circus performers in 30 days was beyond me. So I cheered from the sidelines as Paul and my Dad finished their opuses and I felt proud to know them.

So here I am resolving to do this, and not only does it coincide nicely with NaBloPoMo, but also not so nicely with Lily deciding she doesn’t like sleeping so very much anymore and also crazily with the fact that Big-P and I are launching ANOTHER new blog!

Nuts?

Perhaps.

Today we are launching a little sister site for Kiddley called Kiddley Links; a shopping blog full of wonderful products for kids we discover as we browse the internet. For a while we were putting such things up on Kiddley but the more we went on, the less it seemed to fit and the more it seemed to need it’s own site separate from the DIY nature of Kiddley.

Kiddley has been going from strength to strength and no one is more surprised than me that we are starting to make a small income. It’s exciting to be working on a project like this with Big-P and it’s immensely satisfying trying new things and see what works. We are learning so much about blogging and marketing and our audience and after lots of planning and thinking and projecting we have decided that another new (small) blog is the next step for us followed by yet another in the new year. It’s all a bit of an experiement at this stage.

I love blogging, and I find it so much easier to do this kind of work than freelance illustration work which seems to suck up vast amounts of time and demands that you are flexible enough to meet ever-changing deadlines and specifications. I find this so hard to do with little kids. I am really pleased to see that blogging might be some kind of family business for us to make up for it.

If you are interested in reading more about this kind of blogging, the resources we have found the most inspiring and useful are the wise words of Darren Rowse at problogger.net and Steve Pavalina’s essay on How to Make Money from Your Blog.

But after all is said and done, it’s also nice to have Loobylu – which is just my place to write about the random stuff that happens to be on my mind today and that’s what NaBloPoMo is all about for me.