VLOGGING IS A FAMILY AFFAIR
Ashley Gonzales used to work a notso-great detail at the National Guard armory on Westheimer Parkway. She was trained as an intelligence analyst, but often found herself cleaning out Humvees.
She really wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. But doctors told her that no matter what she decided, if it involved having children, she needed to act fast. Gonzales was showing signs of a hormonal imbalance that could make conception impossible. She was worried. At 20 years old, she had moved in with her boyfriend, Jeff Sugura, whom she missed dearly while she was away at basic training for a year.
The next part of her life story, most readers of her blog “New Mom in a New Era,” might already know. The couple conceived, but not without some problems. Ashley needed an emergency C-section during birth, something she hadn’t planned on. What followed was a bout of postpartum depression, and one day, while she was discussing her anguish at home, her mother encouraged her to share those thoughts with others in the form of a blog. That’s how she began to share her experience on the internet.
Recently though, Gonzales and Sugura, 24, stepped into the world of vlogging, telling their stories about parenting as young Hispanics through videos. Still, it’s the blogging that’s the foundation of her budding career in online marketing that she does from home.
“I always just started out as a way for me to get over my postpartum depression,” she says about the blogging. But she’s created her own brand and built her own business around a form of internet marketing that reaches people through personal stories about life, and she opens up certain aspect of her daily life for public
consumption with constant updates.
In their new video blog, or vlog, series “Fridays With the Fam,” Gonzales and Sugura sit with their daughter Camila, 2, and discuss the issues in their life — home repairs, raising a child, reacting to the flooding from Hurricane Harvey.
The vlog is filmed by Sugura, who followed his partner into the blogging realm when he saw that she was making money for posts about motherhood, food and lifestyle. His focus, the couple decided would be style. He worked for a time at a salon and knew how to look good. But he was also interested in telling a story about how fatherhood has changed him. His “Daddy Style Diaries” has built a loyal following and scored him contracts from auto dealerships in the area.
“I’m a young dad who’s sharing his point of view about being passionate about fatherhood,” he says.
Being able to stop chasing a day job — they were both laid off from oil company jobs last year — has happened pretty quickly. Gonzales’ first big contract came from the supermarket chain Aldi, which offered her a few hundred dollars to make her mom’s arroz con leche dessert using products found in their stores. Later came more contracts, and now a check for several thousand dollars from Playtex, which capitalizes off all the posts showing Camila as she gets bigger.
Gonzales has been paid as much as $10,000 to provide what people in the ad industry call influencer marketing. It involves getting a product and telling a story around it, with video and pictures. The vlog she helps create is just an extension of putting her family’s presence out in the world. She says it’s not about how many followers you have or people who visit your blog, it’s about how much your audience is into you and what you do, engagement, as it’s called in the biz.
Juan Alanis, who runs Houstonbased Big Oak Tree media firm, helped guide the couple after they came out to a local gathering called Houston Bloggers, in December 2015.
“From the very first moment we met Jeff and Ashley, (my wife) Anjelica and I knew they were serious about the business of blogging. They were young, passionate and very determined to have their voices heard,” he says.
Still, Gonzales says, “We don’t share everything. Some things we keep to ourselves.”