Category Archive

Business development

How to slowly kill a website you love

Last week on Offbeat Home & Life, we published a sponsored post about gender-neutral baby clothes, angled toward the gifts market. Within a couple hours, several readers commented on Facebook and the post itself that the products featured were out of their budgets — which I totally understand and respect. I’m less understanding toward readers feeling the need to post insulting comments when they can’t afford a product.

Does reading via RSS “rob” pageviews from a publisher?

I’m a religious follower via Feedly, but only click through if I want to comment. How does something like Feedly count in the Offbeat Empire’s pageviews, etc.? Am I essentially robbing you of a pageview by reading the full article in my reader?

SEO guest post inquiries: the best and the worst

Every morning I wake up to several “can I write a guest post for your site?” emails from writers working for SEO companies. See, there’s this whole weird corner of SEO that’s all about barfing out (usually questionable) guest post content for blogs, in exchange for links in the body of the post. It’s not something I ever EVER do (you want links from the Empire, you buy advertising, the end), but the inquiries just keep coming… sometimes as many as 5 or 6 overnight. (It’s always overnight, because the writers are non-US based.)

This morning I had two SEO guest post inquiries, and they illustrate the best and the worst I’ve seen in a long time…

Don’t be that guy: why wedding vendors shouldn’t publicly rant about work

Every once and while, a wedding vendor will perhaps forget that Offbeat Bride isn’t an industry publication. Every once and a while, we’ll get ranting, vitriolic comments from vendors about how stupid brides are, how little couples understand about what vendors do, how this one time this one couple did this totally awful thing, how they want to strangled a certain mother of the bride, etc etc etc.

But wedding industry friends, for the good of your business: don’t be that guy.