Favorite comments: altered jeans & duct-taped babies

Another week, another wave of hilarious, insightful, fabulous commenting across the Offbeat Empire blogs. In this morning’s staff video conference, we discussed how one of the upsides of the shift toward people being too lazy to comment anywhere except Facebook is that the quality of blog comments on our posts has generally shifted upward. For the most part, folks who want to snark or leave a crappy drive-by comment are too lazy to click through to the post, type their names and email, and then type their comment. The snarkers seem be self-selecting to stay on Facebook, which is fine by us. The result is that the folks who ARE invested in the comment communities on the Offbeat Empire sites have a (generally) safe haven to have (generally) valuable conversations. It’s honestly kind of amazing.

So gather close, my little offbeatlings, as I run through a selection of the Empire staff’s favorite comments this week.

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.

Things I wish I had known when starting out: finances & taxes

A reader said: “Would you consider doing an article about the financial and/or tax aspect of being self employed? Or maybe a ‘Things I wish I had known when starting out’ type article?” Here’s my advice…