From Blog to Empire: An Interview with Ariel Meadow Stallings
Over on the Skimlinks blog, they just published an interview with me about growing your blog, monetization, coworking, and the future of the Empire.
Hate-reads and how for-profit sites work
Let’s say you don’t like an ad-supported website. I mean, REALLY dislike it so much that you feel compelled to regularly read it, but also wish it would stop existing. (This is often called hate-reading.) Here’s what NOT to do…
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…