The Digital Mom Handbook Review (ARC)

TITLE: The Digital Mom Handbook

AUTHOR: Audrey McClelland and Colleen Padilla

PUBLISHER: Harper Business

PAGES: 232

MY RATING:

BACK COVER BLURB: To work  or not to work? That seems to be the bottom-line question for most mothers today. But Audrey McClelland and Colleen Padilla are proving that the equation is changing. Both of them left the corporate ladder behind to stay home with their children, but instead of permanently keeping these women out of the workplace, this choice was the catalyst to their reinvention. Audrey and Colleen literally blogged, tweeted, Skyped, vlogged, and Facebooked their ways to the top. In The Digital Mom Handbook they show other moms how to find middle ground -- via the frontier of the Internet and these seven basic steps:

1. Find your passion
2. Hang a digital "shingle" and start typing
3. Find your tribe
4. Make opportunity knock and learn how to answer that door
5. Manage the Benjamins
6. Don't forget the children
7. Live happily ever after

OVERALL IMPRESSION: This is a good starter book for anyone who is thinking about creating a blog. I myself do not have children, but I still found this book helpful. The first point that I really enjoyed that this book made is "writing about your passion is not work" (page 26). I agree with this 100%. If you center your blog around what you love to do, you will not feel like you are working, and you will enjoy your time more.

A great feature of this book is that there are real stories from people interspersed throughout the book. It just shows you that this is a possibility and people have done it before. It's great to read about other people's experiences to learn from them.

I love all of the lists in this book. It makes it so easy to read through them and check off in your mind if you have done the things they are talking about or if you need to spend some more time on them.

The appendices in this book are so valuable, especially Appendix A. Appendix A has a section for each social media platform and explains how it works, the terminology and other tips.

A few things I learned from the book that I found helpful:

• "When possible, title blog posts as if they're news headlines" (page 51). This is such great advice. You want your blog titles to pull people in and cause them to read what you spent so much time and effort on writing.
• You don't have to say yes to ever offer given to you by companies. Pick and choose the ones that are relevant to your blog.

COVER: Cute cover. I like all of the pink accents.

I received an advanced reader's copy of this book for review from Amazon Vine.