How NOT to pitch a nontraditional wedding blogger a story about engagement rings
As the publisher of a highly-trafficked wedding blog, of course I get a lot of public relations pitches every day. What’s most remarkable about these pitches is how completely and comically off some of them can be. Here’s my big guidance for public relations folks: if you’re pitching a publication, it’s worth taking five minutes to familiarize yourself with that publication’s focus.
Is the name of the Offbeat Bride Tribe “problematic and frankly racist”?
Since monthly readership of the Offbeat Empire sites is over 300,000 people, it’s to be expected that we’d receive a fair number of reader complaints. Sometimes, these complaints are truly educational (I had no idea that the Society of Professional Journalists had voted to replace the phrase “illegal immigrant” with “undocumented immigrant” until a reader emailed me about it) and other times they’re ludicrous (Offbeat Bride’s hilarious “motherfuckergate” comes to mind here). I’ve written about this before, but this last week I had a especially challenging reader complaint.
How I engineered a viral post
Recently, a post I wrote about cell phones at weddings went WAY viral, getting shared 43,000 times in one day. It wasn’t an accident. Here’s how I did it.
Sneaky-deep public relations
Because I have a background in copywriting and marketing, I’ve been known to accidentally hawk products on my blog … like when I once wrote on my personal blog about how I strangely love the crappy Olive Garden salads, and several people commented that now they wanted to try one. I was like “But wait! […]