In your face.....Mommy Bloggers!

Not to be outdone by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece yesterday on the stress of running a successful blog (The Blogger Mom, In Your Face). In typical WSJ fashion, it’s a more interesting and insightful take. This one’s about a blogging mommy who’s making about $500,000 per year from blogging about her family. Not too bad.

Raw honesty and a no-holds-barred writing style uncommon to parenting blogs have made 32-year-old Heather Armstrong the nation’s top-ranked parenting blogger. Dooce.com (rhymes with moose), in which Armstrong blogs about everything “from potty-training to postpartum depression,” receives 4 million page views each month and stays well within the Technorati top 100 blogs. Armstrong has learned some hard lessons over the years about what to blog (her 4-year-old daughter Leta and her dog Chuck) and what not to (her parents’ religious views and her own sex life), but continues to keep her readers rapt and active, often receiving hundreds of comments on a single blog posting.

As I always say, blogging's not my full-time job (right!), but there's hope! Just think: You too can be the next stay-at-home blogging sensation! Your spouse can quit work as your blog rockets up the Technorati rankings and you rake in the ad revenues of upwards of $40,000 a month!

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 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 atrociousness, humility and raw honesty that also feed her bond with readers, making her dominant in an emerging Web sector Mr. Blackshaw calls "The Power Mom."


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. Score!" Last week, another popular blogger on parenting, Boston writer Steve Almond, quit his BabyDaddy blog on Babble.com, citing "angry and aggrieved" responses to his writings.


Behind her hip façade, Ms. Armstrong feels similar pain. She says she has sought therapy to cope with vitriolic posts. "The hate mail will invariably happen, and when it does your entire world will crumble around your ears," she says. In one example, she says a person she thought was a friend posted a comment saying she "wanted to punch me in the face because she hated me so much." She adds she can understand why "famous people turn to drugs or commit suicide."



Hey, who disabled my comment moderation!


No, wait, Dr. Phil, yo, can you fit me in?!!


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