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.
My Pinterest drinking game
Go to Pinterest’s general weddings page ONE DRINK: When I see a pin from Offbeat Bride TWO DRINKS: When I see something that makes me want to write a WTF post Surely there are more rules. Help me?
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…