With the holidays just around the corner, you may be planning your trip home to see your family or maybe even a tropical getaway to escape the cold winter. While planning travel can be overwhelming (especially on a budget), we wanted to highlight some of our favorite travel sites to help you plan the smoothest - and hopefully most affordable trip possible! So, because time is money 🤑 let’s jump right in with some of our favorite travel sites to check out: 

Before you decide on which digital content strategy will work best for your brand and goals, it’s important to know as much as you can about your audience. Without doing the research and analyzing who your readers are, you can’t even begin to sort out important aspects of your strategy like messaging or how to retain those loyal followers. So to get started, let’s explore a few ways that you can begin to better understand your audience: 

Here at Disqus, we strive to make it easy for readers to engage with content or communities in a variety of ways. Voting on comments can work to increase engagement with your fellow commenters without adding an actual comment, making it easy for readers to interact with content with just a click. Previously, we hid how many downvotes a comment received and only displayed the total upvotes, but we believe that liking and disliking something is a big part of how we engage with content and communicate with each other. Our goal is to create more spaces for people with different opinions to have more constructive interactions. For that reason, (and after receiving some great feedback from our awesome Disqus community!) we decided to bring back displaying downvotes. 

As writers, digital publishers, marketers, and networkers, you’re constantly crafting your next blog post, composing upcoming newsletters, and brainstorming captivating social media captions. No matter what the project is, it’s always important to promote your work, making sure readers can relate to the content you're publishing. Digital publishers are regularly thinking about how they can convert their readers into subscribers or converting their audience into loyal, paying customers. Audiences today expect creative, educational, and even entertaining copy. Ignoring this demand would be a disservice to your hard work-- at the end of the day, writing effective copy is writing words that result in better conversions. Here are 5 common copywriting mistakes to avoid: 

As Disqus continues to grow and evolve, we want to take a pause and highlight some of the hardworking and very talented team members that make the company what it is today. This week, we chose to interview one of our incredibly skilled backend engineers to give you a sense of what it’s like to work here and how we like to operate. 🤓

Attracting readers to your site and getting them to regularly come back is no easy feat, especially in an environment that is constantly changing shape. Experimenting with new strategies, and adjusting existing ones when needed, is the best way to adapt to this evolving digital landscape. One of our major objectives at Disqus is to equip our publishers with all the tips, tools, and knowledge they need to accomplish that. This week, we decided to look at one of our favorite Disqus sites, Gothamist, as a source of strategy inspiration. ✨

Last year we released reactions to give publishers and commenters a new way to engage and since that time over 70 Million reactions have been posted globally! Today we are releasing an upgraded reactions feature, that provides more creative freedom for our Pro and Business publishers. They can customize their site reactions and we can’t wait to see the creative ways they use this feature to engage their communities. We’ll post some of our favorites on Instagram and Twitter in the coming weeks.

Although blogging has been around for more than two decades, there are still a number of misconceptions about this form of writing. From worries about qualifications to fears that the blogging trend itself is on the outs, these false impressions leave some people feeling apprehensive about the process. Today we are here to bust those myths and set the record straight! We gathered a handful of statements that we hear quite often and debunked them one by one to put any blogging unease to rest… so let’s straighten things out once and for all! 

Consistently creating original and valuable content is tricky. When you’re regularly publishing new articles, it can be challenging to brainstorm fresh and relevant topics. A reliable and consistent supply of content, however, is important to keep readers engaged, loyal, and invested in your site. This is not to say you need to churn out several pieces of content a day to keep your audience interested, but you do need to remain a dependable source of quality information. So what do you do when it’s time for a new post, but you’ve exhausted all of your recent thoughts and ideas? Interviewing experts within your industry is a great way to generate fresh, new content!  🙌

Calling all publishers looking to take their audience-building-efforts to the next level. We have the answer for you: live events!  🎉 If you’re a publisher just starting out, don’t hit the back button quite yet. While you may want to focus on establishing your online presence and nurturing an involved, on-site community first, live events are a useful strategy you can employ down the road, and it’s never too early to start planning!