top mama blogger

From Sue Shellenbarger in the WSJ on Heather Armstrong, the nation's top parenting blogger...

The 32-year-old at-home mother's irreverent, occasionally profane and often hilarious musings on prosaic topics from potty-training to postpartum depression have propelled her blog, Dooce.com, to No. 59 among the Web's top 100 blogs, according to Technorati, a blog search engine. The Salt Lake City resident enjoys enviable influence and enough ad revenue that her husband Jon quit his job in 2005 to manage advertising for Dooce (rhymes with moose).

Among the Web's 200,000-plus bloggers on parenting and family, few have succeeded to the extent of Ms. Armstrong; countless at-home parents would love to be in her position. But less obvious is the behind-the-scenes price an at-home mom pays to shoulder her way to prominence in the blogosphere -- giving up her privacy, sustained time off and any remnants of work-family boundaries at all.

Most powerful individual bloggers, such as Arianna Huffington of HuffingtonPost.com on politics, or Mario Lavandeira of PerezHilton.com on celebrities, keep a measure of personal distance by blogging on public topics. In contrast, Ms. Armstrong writes about herself, her husband, her 4-year-old daughter Leta, clashes with her parents and the escapades of her dog Chuck....

Mommy blogs in general tend to be everyday diaries of details one might share over coffee -- baby's first step or the perils of finding a preschool. Most are blander than Dooce, less humorous and significantly less profane.

Most Web diarists, for example, are too reserved to report, as Ms. Armstrong does, that she's "married to a charming geek," had "lived life as an unemployed drunk" for a while, or landed briefly in a mental hospital for postpartum depression. Some mommy-bloggers find her cursing and vulgarity offensive. But it's that outrageousness, humility and raw honesty that also feed her bond with readers...

Ms. Armstrong's fan base is a powerful lure for advertisers. Neither she nor her husband will discuss ad revenue, but they and the Internet rating service Quantcast say that Dooce draws about four million page views per month. In a "quick back-of-the-envelope guesstimate," Shani Higgins, Technorati's vice president, business development, estimates the site could yield $40,000 a month in revenue from companies coveting her traffic, such as BMW and Verizon.

Ms. Armstrong's product endorsements -- bestowed only on items she's purchased, she says -- wield impressive clout. Yukiko Kamioka in Colchester, England, says she was struggling with only 10 visitors a day to her Web site, seabreezestudio.co.uk, until Dooce endorsed her handmade bags; 3,000 visitors immediately swamped her site, and she soon sold out of her merchandise.

The life of a blogger, though, inflicts significant strain. A scathing parody on ViolentAcres.com, set up as a letter to her daughter Leta, said, "Since your father and I started exploiting you for cash, neither one of us has had to work a real job for a few months now."...Behind her hip façade, Ms. Armstrong feels similar pain. She says she has sought therapy to cope with vitriolic posts....

Of course, Ms. Armstrong can dish it, too....

She's had to learn to draw boundaries on what she writes, to avoid hurting loved ones. An "aching and bleeding diatribe" she posted a few years ago against her parents' faith, Mormonism, alienated them so badly that "it was like a bomb had gone off in my family," she says. "My dad didn't speak to me for several months, and my mom was devastated." She took down the posts, thinking, "OK, this is a little bit more powerful than I'd thought it would be," she says.

She and her parents have since reconciled, but now, "I have strict boundaries in my head," she says. "I'm not going to write anything about my family that I wouldn't say to them in real life, in front of other people." Also, "a lot goes on in our marriage that I will never write about," including her and her husband's sex life, she adds....

The time demands of sustaining what has become a brand name are incessant. Experts say keeping a blog fresh and topical is essential....

"The pressure on her to come up with something unique to say all the time would be enormous," says Susan Carraretto, co-founder of 5minutesformom.com, another popular site. Mr. Blackshaw adds, "It's kind of like 'Mom meets 'The Truman Show'...Everybody is watching" constantly....

Ms. Armstrong intended to quit blogging after her daughter was born in 2004 and be a stay-at-home mom for a while. But as she fell into a severe postpartum depression, she found blogging a valuable outlet and an antidote to the isolation she felt. "Immediately I realized that writing things down and sharing it with people was getting me through the day," she says. A warm response from "this community of mothers" reading her posts "lifted me up and gave me the courage" to check into a hospital for four days and get treatment, she says. It was at the urging of her husband, a former Web creative director, that she made the transition from blogger to breadwinner in 2005.

These days, her posts are more sanguine, on topics ranging from tiffs with her mother over global warming to a freak fish found in a Utah pond. And her old plan -- of going back to work as a Web designer -- is history. Hassles notwithstanding , she says, "Now I think, 'Wow, I'm so glad I stuck with this.' "