Comparing how posts perform with different readerships
We have some general guidelines about what fits on each Offbeat Empire blog, but there’s definitely some overlap and wiggle room. Newlywed stuff generally goes on Home & Life (but sometimes goes on Bride), reproductive health generally goes on Families (but sometimes goes on Home & Life), and child-free stuff generally goes on Families (even though it’s very much about NOT having children). Anything meta (business, community, tech) goes here on Offbeat Empire, but sometimes we also post on the sites related to the meta-issue.
But sometimes there are some posts that stump us…
See it, click it: getting over my RSS/old school blogger brain
I’ve talked a lot about my love of RSS. RSS is the outgrowth of a content logic that’s very much in-line with my old school blogger brain: show me all the posts, with the most recent at the top. I started blogging in 2000 (aww, look!), and that’s just how my brain works: the most recent stuff is the most important. When it comes to how I think about content, it’s basically the homepage of a blog. Most recent = most important, and then everything else is listed beneath in descending order of recency. That’s how I read everything. That’s how I think about everything. That’s how my editorial brain works.
I’ve become increasingly aware however that, thanks to the popularity of Facebook and Pinterest, that’s not how many Offbeat Empire readers think about content. These two social media tools are changing the way my readers learn about our posts, and as I adapt to the shift, it’s changing the way I think about social media broadcasting and my editorial strategy.
Flickr, Pinterest, and Instagram: my strong feels, as both a user and a publisher
I have some strong feels about photo hosting online, my friends. Over the last decade, I’ve watched the landscape of photo hosting websites shift, from a time when there was nothing decent, to a time when there was something amazingly awesome (Flickr!), to a time when there were tons of options, to time when there are a few front-runners (Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram) none of which work as well as the tools we used back when I got married in 2004.
This post is long. This post is probably overly emotional considering we’re talking about web apps and photo hosting. But man… photos are my memories, and as a publisher, photos are part of my business model. So let’s get out our hankies and our rallying fists in the air and talk this shit over.
The agony of using Facebook to follow blogs
Despite the fact that every blog post published by the Offbeat Empire is linked on our Facebook pages, we all know Facebook has its own ideas about what to show you. Let’s talk about how to see more of our posts on Facebook…