Mom Blogging Competition as “Co-opetition”

By Wendy Piersall from Mom Blogging For Dummies

Elise Bauer of the Food Blog Alliance absolutely gets that other bloggers in her niche are not competition — they are co-opetition (a hybrid of cooperation and competition). Like most of us, Elise realizes that what’s good for one blog can be good for the entire blogging community.

The CraftJr.com blog links to other craft blogs, even though those links directly help those sites rank well (and sometimes better than CraftJr.com) in the search engines. The reasons for providing these links:

Readers really enjoy seeing a wide range of craft projects, and one blogger can’t post new ideas 24 hours a day.
CraftJr.com becomes a resource not just for one bloggers creative projects, but for many more related projects from around the web.
Many of these blogs link back to CraftJr.com.
As more craft bloggers succeed, more opportunities will be available to the community as a whole.

In fact, craft bloggers are becoming more successful as a whole — and opportunities are flooding in to the writers in this community. Marie LeBaron writes the incredible Make and Take kids’ craft and activities blog. Marie landed a fantastic ad-network partnership last year with Federated Media, who hadn’t worked with many craft bloggers before.

She also recently landed her own first book deal, and is working on a kids’ craft book. More and more creative- and craft-supply companies and brands are getting involved with social media, sponsoring Marie and several other high-profile craft bloggers.

This was evident at the most recent Craft and Hobby Association trade show in which craft bloggers were actually featured as part of the signage at some of the vendor booths. The community is getting so much brand attention, in fact, that BlogHer launched a new event just for craft bloggers in 2011 — BlogHer Handmade.

None of this would have been possible if all the craft bloggers only featured their own projects. Take that cheesy old adage, “A rising tide raises all ships,” to heart. It was support of each other that created an industry from the seeds planted by a few creative and generous bloggers.