Ep 070 – FaceBag with Special Guest Nora Schlesinger

Welcome back to Theory of Content! This week, Joshua Unseth is joined by Nora Schlesinger to answer even more of your Face bag questions, and of course, do some obligatory TOC Beanie Babies talk. 

Nora starts the episode off strong, talking about some COVID prevention theories. The two discuss the effectiveness of glasses all the way to the effectiveness of bunkers to prevent the virus. Joshua and Nora compare their swearing habits before getting to the down and dirty topic of… you guessed it: Beanie Babies. Joshua recounts how he would sell them as a kid, and (spoiler alert!) he made $600.

The Face bag section of today’s episode begins with a bit of feedback. Tamara emailed in about some comments made in previous episodes about blogging during the pandemic. She points out that while Joshua had said that the stay-at-home orders gave bloggers a lot of time to optimize their blogs, some blogs are not very easily able to flourish during COVID. For example, travel blogs took a substantial traffic hit last year. The hosts point out that this is very true, and that not all the advice given on this podcast can apply to each and every blogger. What is important to remember though is that bloggers must find ways to bring people to their site no matter the state of the world. Joshua advises to put out content that is about COVID and traveling. For instance, you could make a post about how to fly safely during the pandemic. Overall, what to take from this section is that TOC offers advice to the blanket profession of blogging. However, some niche content varies in audiences and advertisers, so take the advice given but adapt it to your needs.

Speaking of adapting, Nora begins talking about how to adapt your site for different social media sites. This all starts when the two get into the hot topic of the Clubhouse app. They talk about how they’ve noticed it pulling people away from daily life, but they also point out the benefits it can have for podcasters. Nora suggests that if you have the time, sure, check out new social media platforms for your site. However, if you don’t have the time, you have to plan out your business goals and see if a certain platform will truly benefit your business. Don’t just follow trends to follow them, make them work for you!

Lastly, Joshua and Nora take a question about mislinked pages. Nora outlines what high-intensity link building is, and Joshua talks how he is not a big fan of it. However, how he touches on reasonable ways to link building. Some of these involve reaching out to a site owner to change a mislinked page, just like Jessica did!

Thank you for tuning into Theory of Content this week! Be on the lookout for new episodes coming soon, and in the meantime check out last week’s episode with even more Face bag questions.

==================================

Tamara of we3travel.com

Welcome back, I was glad to see Theory of Content pop up in my podcast player this week. However, I have to provide a little feedback. I know Mediavine and Theory of Content have both been very focused on food and lifestyle blogs, but the discussion about how great 2020 was for bloggers was really tone deaf for other types of publishers. As a travel blogger, I have seen my traffic demolished in Spring 2020 and then slowly claw its way back to 40-50% of what it was pre-COVID. Revenue took additional hits with most travel sponsored campaigns drying up due to lack of budget and affiliate programs being shut down even for the few tours and hotels our visitors are booking.

And while Q4 is great for ad RPMs, not everyone sees a traffic surge in Q4. Most travel bloggers I know see an uptick in traffic that begins on December 26 and steadily increases to peak in July before it then dips dramatically. In a typical year I’ll make more in July than December, even with the difference in RPM, because of the signifi