This crushing silence: shit I do to recover from a Big Meaty Project
A colleague posted recently about dealing with “the period of quiet after the (lovely) storm.” As entrepreneurs and small business folk, we work ourselves into a lather reaching big goals we set out for ourselves and … then what?
Rather than hijack Meg’s comments with a longwinded response, I thought I’d collect my thoughts here. And so I present to you: Shit I do when I’m recovering from a major project!
Why do we discourage blog comments on Facebook?
All the Offbeat Empire blogs have corresponding Facebook Fan Pages. Each Page has a feed of posts links that are syndicated from each blog. It’s not the entire post, it’s just a link to the post on the main blog. This means that if you like reading Offbeat Bride’s blog and fan us on Facebook, you’ll see a link to new Offbeat Bride posts from your Facebook newsfeed.
This is all awesome.
However, what’s LESS awesome is that we can’t turn comments off for these syndicated posts.
Wait, you’re saying. Aren’t comments a good thing? Why aren’t you thankful for the comments people are posting on Facebook? Why would you want less comments? OMG SO MANY REASONS.
When is it cultural appropriation and when is it just kids playing dress-up?
Last week we ran a sponsored post for a family photographer that featured this image of two children playing dress-up, one of them in a Native American head-dress.
The photo struck several readers as objectionable. Let’s talk about why, and what it might mean.
5 ways we optimize old blog posts into super sticky landing pages
Web overlords often refer to “landing page optimization” when they talk about making users into “conversions.” The user is converted when they sign up for the email newsletter, buys the product, drinks the Kool-Aid, etc.
While blogging has its crossovers, what the Offbeat Empire wants our landing pages to do is get readers deeeeeper into the sites. We want to show them what we’ve got, what differentiates us from similar blogs, and secondarily, to get them engaged with our various communication and social media touch points. Web publishing loves something sticky.
The strategy we’re working on these days is to find older blog posts that are organically getting major traffic and, assuming that many of these readers are new to us, introduce them to the site and get them clicking on links. One example of this kind of “landing page” blog post is “Wedding invitation wording that won’t make you barf,” something Ariel originally wrote back in 2007 that still gets 47,000 unique hits a month.
Here’s how we try to get readers to stick around…