by Pam
No, this isn't an answer to Reaching Broadly's latest post.
If you are a regular reader and
refresh your browser cache (Shift+F5 in most browsers) you will see a menu banner (they call it a
hat) appear across the top of our blog denoting the fact that we joined The
Active Times as a content provider.
As we had it explained to us, The
Active Times is an aggregation website dedicated to sports without balls. You
gotta love a female director who will just come right out and proudly announce
that as part of her pitch. She really didn't have to sell us since it seemed like a natural fit.
They don't want to control,
censor or change our content in any way and just want to link us to a larger
community of people living healthy outdoor lifestyles. They might have
advertising but we still do not. They might make money on their site but we still
do not. I went to their site and saw lots of interesting things I'd like to do,
see, and learn more about. As we understand it, nothing on our blog changes
except the addition of the menu at the top. Click on that and you're off to
Never Never Land and I think you might decide to make that trip often.
When I hovered over the "Water"
tab on their site, there was Canoe, Kayak, Surf and Gear. What? NO SAILING! That
just wouldn't do. The world of active outdoor lifestyle folks need to know
about the wonderful world of sailing so we said yes, please feel free to point
to our posts. They say that they have over one million visitors per month. That's
a lot of potential new sailors.
The director was telling us that she
will ping folks in The Active Times community through social media to engage
them. She'll ask things like, 'what's the temperature where you are?' or 'if
you could change places with your partner for a day, what would your day look
like?' I think I'll like the stimulating questions. We might choose to
add some 'how to get involved in the sport of sailing' posts and we might offer
more explanation on various terms but other than that, nothing should change.
So ... we just moved an old post up
(after this one). Ute from Germany has a follow up question on the main sheet
snag. Who can help?
Interesting. I was invited to join the Active Times Content Network too. I wasn't sure whether to accept or not. It is true that they have a lot of content about other outdoor activities that I was interested in. The director's email (I assume you got the same one) had lots of reasons why I should join but none of them really excited me much. So I declined the invitation. I will be interested to see what you think of it and whether other sailing bloggers join.
ReplyDeleteWe figured you had been invited. After all, it's pretty hard to find ImproperCourse without also finding ProperCourse. And, of course, ProperCourse is the best jumping off point to finding lots and lots of sailors.
DeleteI did some research on the company and the more I read, the more I liked and the more it seemed like a decent way to reach a bigger audience that would potentially be interested in sailing. Plus, my gut instinct said do it and there was no down side because we're not locked into anything. We can always break up with them by simply removing the menu and notifying them that we're going solo.
I hope more sailors join. Last year's America's Cup did get the attention of a lot of non-sailors. This is trying to do the same thing in a slightly more targeted way but costs way less. The folks behind this were also the folks behind digitizing Forbes. You might want to let the lady make her pitch.
Thanks for the explanation. By the way, I was recently asked which came first, Proper Course or Improper Course.
ReplyDelete