In 1999, Andrea Tomkins of Ottawa was home with a new baby, feeling isolated, sleep deprived and in need of some kind of creative outlet. “All of my friends at the time were single,” she says. “I wanted to share my cute-baby stories.”

And so she started a blog. She called it A Peek Inside the FishBowl. It was really about her daily life with the kids and her husband, Mark: the parenting dilemmas she and Mark faced, the activities the family pursued, the recipes she liked to make for them. Initially she had about 10 readers including her husband (“of course”), her in-laws and her mom. Every once in a while she’d email a link to the blog to her single friends so she didn’t have to “torture” them with baby pictures. Before long, those friends were passing the link along to their friends, who started passing it to their friends. “Something in the content must have resonated,” says 39-year-old Tomkins.

It didn’t initially occur to her that she might be able to profit from her blog. In fact, she waited a good nine years before soliciting ads on her site in an attempt to cover the costs. She started out by asking a candy shop she frequented with her kids to be a patron for $50 per month. “I pulled that figure out of a hat because I could not find information anywhere on what to charge,” Tomkins recalls. The candy store signed on, and over the next few years other advertisers started approaching her, including a children’s arts studio, the Ottawa Public Library and the National Arts Centre. When she thought the market would bear it, she raised her rates.

Now, 12 years after she started, Tomkins’ blog has become a legitimate enterprise, logging some 58,000 hits per month and attracting $2,000-plus monthly in advertising, mainly from local businesses. On top of that, it has opened up career opportunities for Tomkins, who now writes for other online and print publications. “Seriously, had you told me 12 years ago that I would be making an income off this blog, I would have found that pretty ridiculous,” she says. “Funny how life works out.”