Heather B. Armstrong, listed by Forbes as one of the Most
Influential Women in Media ,
took her Dooce.com blog from an everyday way to keep up with family and friends
to a multi-million dollar conversation with readers from all over the world.
She shares everyday experiences, stories and sarcasm and gets paid tens of
thousands of dollars each month to do so. She is a complete inspiration as she
gets paid to be herself – a complete and total dream job. She is like Kim
Kardashian, but with a Miley Cyrus haircut.
Heather Armstrong, Dooce.com
I was first introduced to Dooce.com through a chain of other
bloggers. Finding a blog worth reading is not always an easy task. This
particular blogger had started her own family and, as a journalist by trade,
curious about boundaries on the Internet. Knowing that her children would soon
be a great focus in her own life, she found inspiration and comfort knowing
that others felt the same challenge knowing when posts turn to exploitation.
She credited Dooce.com with the words of wisdom she had been looking for. After
clicking the link to the “blurbodoocery” (as it is sometimes referred), the
love for Heather Armstrong’s prose was instantaneous.
After reading her mini biography in the “About” section of
Dooce as well as one of her first books, It
Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed
Margarita. Her book focused on her post-partum depression and time getting
psychiatric help. Armstrong credits the support of readers from her blog as a
tipping point to seek recovery. Heather’s mission is to live by the idea of
sharing your life candidly and remaining open and honest about who she has
become.
Starting as a web designer, she made the blessed mistake of
blogging her negative opinions about her coworkers and boss. Once they saw
these posts, she was immediately fired. Armstrong never let this bring her
down. She took her blogging to the next level and soon was selling enough
advertising on her site that her husband was able to quit his day job and do
the technical maintenance on her site.
Through the years, the mission of Dooce.com evolved into itself. Heather
Armstrong made a career (and more-than-comfortable salary) simply by being herself
and never being ashamed of that. On top of her blog posts, her site includes
regularly posted pictures, a social forum and an online store. She also includes
an additional page on her site highlighting the hate mail she finds most
hilarious. Armstrong has made it a mission to share the positives,
the struggles, the heartbreak and the laughter in hopes of bringing comfort to
readers going through similar times.
Outside of her books, television appearances and social
media shares, Dooce.com has opened itself up to the most social of services on
the site to date. Around 2009, the Dooce
site branched to the Dooce Community, a forum for all readers to ask questions,
give answers and rally around online friendships. In her mission to continue
being an outlet for many, Armstrong opened her site to messages for all.
With over one million followers on Twitter and almost
250,000 unique visitors to her site each month, Dooce.com is one of the most
successful blog sites perceived by many as a fun, entertaining way to interact
with others and intimately get to know an otherwise complete stranger, the one
Ms. Heather Armstrong.
