Rita, this is mom: Facebook comments are the worst

We all know I hate Facebook comments. Here’s just one example of why…

The Offbeat market, summed up

This web comic by Alexandra Dal (ᔥKate Or Die) pretty much summarizes a large chunk of the Offbeat Empire’s readership — I love my special snowflakes, because I totally am one. As I wrote last year in my post, Are Offbeat weddings trendy?…

Bootstrapping, Tribesmaids, and earning back a $10,000 investment

For those who aren’t familiar with internet start-up talk, “bootstrapping” refers to a business that doesn’t take on any investment capital. As Wikipedia explains, “Such startups fund the development of their company through internal cash flow and are cautious with their expenses.”

The Offbeat Empire is a bootstrapped company. I started it with money out of my own pocket, and have never taken on any investment dollars or venture capital. This means that by necessity, the Empire always has to function in the black — simply put, the company has to be profitable, because there is no other money other than the money coming in.

For the most part, I love bootstrapping…but sometimes it’s hard, and the Offbeat Bride Tribe’s migration earlier this year was one of those times.

My incredibly complex SEO strategy

Of Offbeat Bride’s 500,000 unique monthly users (“unique users” being an analytics term, although my users ARE very unique in a more general sense), about come to the site from a search engine.

So the question then becomes, what incredibly brilliant SEO strategy did I use to get traffic like this?

Here’s my answer…