Taint week
We’ve entered what I’ve come to think of as “editorial taint week,” the publishing industry perineum between Christmas and New Year’s Day. As mentioned before, we’re doing lighter posting both this week and next week, and our blogging sausage factory has slowed to a sputtering hum instead of it’s usual slamming thunderous hammering and splorting. We’re working on some perhaps ill-advised dev projects behind the scenes (who’s idea was it to upgrade the Tribe over New Year’s Eve? Oh right: mine), but for the most part things are pretty quiet.
Stay short, punchy, and natural: 7 ways to stay motivated to blog on your small business site
Small businesses looking to grow their website traffic (and who isn’t?) know that frequent, relevant content is one of the big ways to keep Google wanting more and thinking you are the shit. Seach engines go batty for content updates, and stagnation is a traffic killer. So what can you do to keep the pixels shaking? Blogging on your business site, natch!
Teach me to be AWESOME: How to write a DIY tutorial
At the Empire, we love to see how you do all the amazing things you do. Reader DIY submissions show us so much! We can all learn to cook vegan bacon cheeseburgers, turn coffee tables into chalkboard canvases, and make our own wax seals from buttons. Our DIY archives have a big bright rainbow of how-to-DIY posts, but many of us are hungry, like some kind of craft-zombies, for MOAR BRAINS… err…. MOAR DIYs!
Here’s the trick: sometimes we need just a bit of help teaching each other how to do the awesome things we do ourselves. Framing the steps into a process we can repeat with huge success is easy if we all put our teacher hats on. Here’s a great outline for teaching us all how to be YOUR kind of awesome – how to write a DIY tutorial.
Walking the line between self-revelation vs. self-indulgence
I was talking this morning with Cat Rocketship (editor of Offbeat Home), about the delicate balance that many of the Empire sites walk between first-person writing and, well, self-indulgence.