Think you can turn your mommy blog into some serious cash? It's possible, but not likely.

Ronda Kaysen: The Mommy Blog is big business. What was once a place where lonely mothers gathered online to commiserate has become a serious endeavor, with some bloggers raking in real money.

Jennifer Mendelsohn, herself a blogger, penned a story in the Sunday Times about the rise of the mommy bloggers -- and the advertisers who love them.

Advertisers see a market to be tapped: moms who shop. Bloggers, meanwhile, see that their musings have financial muscle. Eager to get in on the action, these at-home entrepreneurs attend blogging seminars to learn how to make their sites more profitable and try to figure out how to parlay their writing talents into paying gigs.

But all good things come with a controversy, and this one centers around the bloggers who long for the days of yester-cyberyear when they enjoyed the online equivalent of the town potluck, sharing everything from yummy muffin recipes to potty-training foibles. Now, with cash entering the equation and new restrictions on how much bloggers must disclose about the goodies they peddle on their site, purists feel that something has been lost.

To the purists, I say: Get over it.

If women are figuring out how to turn writing into something lucrative, more power to them. Times are tough. We do what we can to bring more money home, and if that means hawking some company's wares or slapping a banner ad on the top of your site, then so be it.

The real dark spot in all this is the reality that only a small handful of women actually generate any substantial income from their sites. Most make nothing, a few make chump change and a small fraction of the bloggers can count on their site for real cash. Most of the bloggers who attended the Baltimore conference that Mendelsohn covered likely won't make anything from their blogs, despite all the handwringing.

Ronda Kaysen is a freelance writer. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, BusinessWeek.com, Architectural Record, Huffington Post, The New York Observer, Babble.com and AM New York. She lives in New Jersey with her family. Follow her on Twitter.