Category Archive

Business development

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…

Tough love: are you making these marketing communication mistakes?

I LIKE MARKETING. Done correctly, I strongly believe that it can be helpful, useful information. Done poorly, it’s irritating. Done really poorly? It’s a form of assault.

My Empire work makes me a target for a lot of marketing campaigns from both small businesses and large corporations alike. Both make marketing mistakes. Here are a few that you can learn from…

Offbeat Bride’s year-over-year traffic: 80% more visitors in 2012!

Every month or so, I go into my Google Analytics and do some serious digging around to see how things are looking with the sites.

The big reveal today is that Offbeat Bride is KICKING ASS, with visits up 45%, visitors up 85%, and pageviews up 22%. All awesome (and all pointing to an impending increase in our ad rates).

But the most insane number to me is looking at referrals, ie websites that direct traffic to the site…