Latest Posts

If I submit my wedding to you, do I risk getting mocked online?

“I can see myself submitting content to Offbeat Home and Life… However, with the recent hateful post on another site regarding a lovely wedding featured on Offbeat Bride, I’m a little afraid to submit ANYTHING…”

Submissions we don’t ever accept

It’s unofficial “let’s talk about submissions!” week here on the Offbeat Empire! While I generally prefer to focus on the positive (e.g. here the kind of submissions we love!), I thought it might be useful to share a few kinds of submissions that we never ever accept… and a few of the reasons why. This is becoming extra pertinent because it’s wedding season and we’re getting a LOT of inquiries from business websites about commercial guestposts.

So while we LOVE getting guestpost submissions, here are a few of the guestposts that always get declined…

Teach me to be AWESOME: How to write a DIY tutorial

At the Empire, we love to see how you do all the amazing things you do. Reader DIY submissions show us so much! We can all learn to cook vegan bacon cheeseburgers, turn coffee tables into chalkboard canvases, and make our own wax seals from buttons. Our DIY archives have a big bright rainbow of how-to-DIY posts, but many of us are hungry, like some kind of craft-zombies, for MOAR BRAINS… err…. MOAR DIYs!

Here’s the trick: sometimes we need just a bit of help teaching each other how to do the awesome things we do ourselves. Framing the steps into a process we can repeat with huge success is easy if we all put our teacher hats on. Here’s a great outline for teaching us all how to be YOUR kind of awesome – how to write a DIY tutorial.

Why the Offbeat Empire usually ignores current events

At least once a month, some sort of big “hard news” story will intersect with an Offbeat Empire site, and I’ll get emails about it. Mark Zuckerberg gets married. A terrible school shooting happens. A state will have a marriage equality vote or ruling. And most often, the Offbeat Empire sites will ignore it. Not always, of course. I did a quick post about Mark Zuckerberg’s wedding because I liked the message it sent about a wealthy couple making the choice for a simple wedding. We did a brief post on Offbeat Families about the Newtown, CT shootings because several readers begged us to.

But for the most part we don’t touch hard news stories, and here are a few of the reasons why…