Meet Offbeat Bride’s newest header character: Fierce
It’s been a year since we introduced a new character to Offbeat Bride’s header, so it’s high time that I introduce you to the newest lady to grace the top of our pages. We call her FIERCE, and you’ll be seeing her in rotation of the header of Offbeat Bride starting tomorrow.
Offbeat Families traffic 6 months later: it’s all about scandal, sex, and sadness
Here are the site analytics for Offbeat Families, six months after we ceased publication. This traffic is mostly Facebook-driven, and the sad truth is that the posts that seem to do best over there are always the most Jerry Springer-ish…
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…