If you’re like me, part of your day involves going to different gossip and blog sites to get the latest on your favorite celebrities. With bloggers such as Perez Hilton making a reported $20 million a year, the gossip blog game can be a very lucrative and successful business. One of my favorite sites, that I visit daily, is theybf.com run by fellow Empress, Natasha Eubanks. I interviewed Natasha to get some insight on what it takes to run such a successful site and how she stands out among her peers making theybf.com one of the top destinations for black celebrity gossip.

_____

JSM: How did you get started with your site theybf.com?

Natasha: About three years ago, I used to read other peoples blogs and gossip magazines such as In Touch, People and Us Weekly. They weren’t focusing on black celebrities and I was thinking there has to be people who want gossip on the urban culture. So, I emailed different owners of blogs and asked them to start covering more black celebrities other than just Beyonce. I would get no response so I just decided to do it myself.

JSM: What sets you a part from other blogs?

Natasha: I don’t know, lol, I mean I was out before a lot of other blogs, so I’m not doing anything to purposely set myself a part. There were only a couple of blogs out when I started that focused hard on just celebrity gossip. It’s nothing that I purposely do where I say I need to set myself a apart from other people, I’ve been doing this from day one. I’m not hiding anything, this isn’t a job necessarily for me, I don’t work for anybody, I’m just speaking my mind. I think a lot of blogs don’t really speak their minds, they just will post a picture and say one funny line but with me it’s like I’m having a conversation. I put my personality into it, where a lot of blogs don’t.

JSM: I was on your site today and I saw that you posted a review on a movie and there were some people who responded with negative comments. How hard is it for you not to respond to somebody who disagrees with you or pisses you off?

Natasha: It’s really hard, when I first started I thought I was creating a service to people. I wanted to offer something to people that they would like. So now, I’m having difficulty with this change over, now that I’m the enemy. I’m kind of confused about how that switchover even happened. I mean I still feel like I’m just a regular chick off the street, I’m just like you, just like everybody else. People I meet or people close to me are like you can not respond to anybody because they are looking at you differently now, like you’re just not a regular chick anymore, so you cant just keep responding to everyone because that is just going to make it worse. So every now and then if its someone asking me a question or saying something flat out wrong and I happen to read it that day, I’ll answer it. But 98% of the time I can’t respond so I just don’t read all of my comments.

JSM:So what is a typical day for you like? How much time do you spend on your blog?

Natasha: I spend all day on my blog, lol, especially now since I’ve switched to a new blog format. I’ve upped my number of posts a day to about 4 or 5 and it doesn’t sound like a lot of posts because most bloggers post about 15 or 25 stories a day but they are doing one story per post. But the thing is, I do very long posts and I do at least 30 to 40 images in each post. So just think about posting so many images 4 to 5 times a day, that’s a lot of work. So It takes me a long time with this new format, I have to change the images myself; I have to tweak the resolution, tweak the size of the pictures, its very time consuming.

JSM: Do you know of any celebrities that read your blog?

Natasha: Yeah, lol.

JSM: Any names you can give?

Natasha: Honestly, to tell you the truth any celebrity trying to get on the A list, trying to get out there or cares about their image, reads my site and not just my site but all of the gossip sites. They might say they don’t, but they do because their publicists and managers email me daily. People that I know of so far that read it are Mya, Queen Latifah, Kimora Lee Simmons, Damon Dash, Usher and Kanye West. Kanye West put me up as one of his favorite blogs on his site and I was ecstatic because I was like “wow Kanye reads my blog!”

JSM: How did you get your blog out there? There are so many people right now who have blogs or sites that are tying to get noticed. Would you say that it was a certain interview or connection that pushed you to the next level?

Natasha: I think it was concoction of things, like I said, I was one of the first ones that did it, so I had an advantage. If your one of the first, people are always going to come to you as a source of information. I never paid for any advertisements, everything has been strictly word of mouth. I wish I knew how I got all of these readers because I’m always trying to get more and more. I know at the beginning, I was doing a lot of link exchanges which is the most important way of getting traffic. I used to exchange links with anyone that had a gossip site and not just black sites but all types of sites. Radio DJ’s would find out about my site through other sites and start talking about it on their radio shows which would get me more traffic.

JSM: I know a little while ago, Omarosa had a problem with you because of something you posted about her. Do you get that a lot, where a celebrity or publicist writes you and wants you to take something down?

Natasha: Oh yes, people contact me all the time to take stuff down, but I don’t. I don’t work for anybody, so I don’t have to take anything down unless I want to or if its an actual legal reason, so celebrities can get mad all they want because at the end of they day, I’m just posting my own opinion. Every now and then if something is really personal or involving a kid and I see that it is more detrimental than it is good then I might take it down, but that very rarely happens. And if a celebrity does get mad at something then they don’t understand the celebrity game. If you want to be on the A list, you better beg bloggers to talk about you.

JSM: So what is the future of YBF? Next steps?

Natasha: I have my business incorporated, Young Black & Fabulous LLC and I am expanding into several different things but I’ll just let the world see it when it comes out rather than talk about it in detail. I am going to have some spin off sites, a YBF shop where people can buy YBF gear, a radio show. I’m in talks to do a lot of stuff so look out for it all.

 

_____

Check out more articles like this on www.empressmag.com and www.empress-socialclub.com