See it, click it: the follow up
This post I wrote six months ago may be the most important thing I’ve written all year. After we stopped publishing new posts on Offbeat Families in September. Then traffic and revenue then went UP… and it’s all because of shares on Facebook. Content recency is OUT. Content relevancy is IN.
Fucking basil: blowing your goddamn mind
I recently compared the traffic for Offbeat Home & Life with Offbeat Families, and was amazed to see that Offbeat Home & Life has not only caught up to Offbeat Families — but surpassed its traffic pretty significantly with over double the visits.
And you know what’s responsible for most of those visits? FUCKING BASIL.
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.