Pasadena News Site To Launch Hyperlocal, Online TV Channel
by Matt on Jul 29, 2010 in Industry | Leave a Comment
Pasadena Now, a news site that’s been covering its southern California hometown for seven years, is getting ready to launch a hyperlocal, online TV channel that will offer 16 hours of programming daily, seven days a week. James Macpherson, who publishes Pasadena Now with Candice Merrill, tells me that the channel is scheduled to launch on August 20th and the goal is to equal the viewing experience that locals are used to from watching television.
“The key, in my opinion, to hyperlocal video being successful will be to offer original programming which is streamed,” he said in a recent email conversation. “Protocols and appearance must mirror network TV standards to the greatest extent possible, in order to gain the public’s acceptance. The look and feel must mirror ‘real TV.’”
Macpherson says Pasadena Now will initially feature pre-existing content. By the six-month mark, the plan is that the bulk of programming will be new content. The video channel’s home page currently advertises a weekday, 6:00 pm newscast and a 7:00 am morning talk show. Both are planned to debut in October. Macpherson says the channel will also live stream community events. All of this will be done with a team of 7-9 videographers.
For now, Pasadena Now hasn’t tried to sell advertisers on the concept, but Macpherson has a plan and says he’s “not terribly worried” about finding advertisers.
“Our objective is to create specialty audiences. For example, to work with the Pasadena Humane Society to produce a weekly ‘Pasadena Pet Channel.’ We won’t charge the PHSSPCA, but we will require that they must promote each show with an email blast to their 5,000 members. We will then sell commercials to local pet stores and vets who can be guaranteed that the show’s audience will perfectly match their target audience.”
Macpherson’s math suggests that the channel — if it sells its entire commercial inventory — would bring in more than $13,000 per week: 12 commercials per hour (30-second spots) for 16 hours each day is 192 spots per day, or 1,344 commercials per week. If Pasadena Now charges $10 per spot, that’s $13,440 per week. Is it wishful thinking that every available spot will be sold in a given week? Probably, but Macpherson is confident.
“I am extremely optimistic. Our prices will be reasonable, our costs low, and let’s face it, most people love the idea of being on TV.”
Ongoing SEO Tactics for Hyperlocal Blogs
by Matt on Jul 26, 2010 in Blogging | 2 Comments
(This is the fourth of a five-part series about SEO for hyperlocal blogs/web sites. The final installment will be published next Monday.)
In the last article, we went through a list of SEO tactics that apply to a single blog post. In this article, we’ll cover a variety of SEO tactics that can boost your hyperlocal blog as a whole; these are things I recommend you do on an ongoing, regular basis to help search engines better understand the value and content of your blog and posts.
Internal Linking
I mentioned this at the end of the previous article, but there’s more you can do to boost the internal linking on your local blog. Here are a few:
Link Recap Posts
On my SEO blog, I do link recap posts every month. Here’s an example of a recent “Flashback” post where I link back to the best articles from the previous year. Other blogs do this more often; Lifehacker, for example, does weekly roundups linking back to their most popular posts (like this one), most popular downloads, and so forth.
Link recap posts are good for two reasons:
- They provide another in-article link to your previous posts. This encourages further spidering of your blog posts and gives them a little more internal “link juice.”
- They’re good for readers who may have missed your previous content for some reason.
Anything that’s good for readers and search engines is a win-win in my book.
Related Posts
Showing related posts on each of your articles serves essentially the same purpose as I described above regarding Link Recap Posts. When you reach the end of any articles here on Hyperlocal Blogger, you should see 1 to 4 related posts. Those are created by a WordPress plugin called Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
YARPP requires a little bit of setup at the start, and you should plan on tweaking the settings until it starts showing the best possible old posts. You can also customize the display, which is very cool.
Make a “Best Posts” Category
The main benefit here is actually for readers. When someone new comes to your blog, you can do them (and you) a big favor by giving them quick access to the best local content you’ve written. It’ll help them learn immediately what you’re capable of and why they should keep reading.
The SEO benefit here is, again, additional internal linking to your old posts. But much more than that, showcasing your best content increases the chance that others will link to your old posts. If you have an in-depth interview with a local official about an important neighborhood topic, the easier others can find that interview, the more likely they’ll be to link to it.
Link Building
In addition to writing great content, it’s smart to do what you can to acquire more inbound links (from other sites/blogs) on an ongoing basis. In the SEO world, link building is one of the many things that you don’t just do once and stop.
It’s impossible to sum up link building in just a couple paragraphs here. So let me link to a couple resources you should read for further information:
- The Ultimate Guide to Building the Perfect Link — This is an article I wrote in early 2007, but don’t let the age bother you. There’s a lot of explanation here about the different types of links (one-way, reciprocal, etc.) and which ones are most helpful for SEO.
- SEMMY Awards: Link Building — For three years, I’ve been organizing an annual awards for SEO-related content. This link points to the archives for the Link Building category, so you’ll find all kinds of great articles in there.
- (Now) 43 Local Blog Directories — I’ve been keeping this running list of local blog directories; these are places you can submit your blog for exposure and inbound links. In fact, you may want to browse the Promotion category here on Hyperlocal Blogger.
I’ll add this little piece of advice: If and when you find a blogger or web site owner in your area who’s very generous in giving out links, try to make friends with that person. It may help you get more links. (For example, now that I’ve been doing the “Hyperlocal News Roundup” posts for several months here on HLB, some readers have struck up email conversations with me, and those relationships are now at the point where they don’t mind emailing me links to their content for possible inclusion in my roundups.)
Analytics
An entire post … heck, an entire series of posts could be written about the importance of analytics to a hyperlocal blog (or any blog, for that matter). By using analytics, you’ll quickly learn how people search for local content and, when you know that, you’ll become a smarter and better writer who’s able to target content both for readers and search engines.
What analytics software to use?
There are several choices for web analytics, but Google Analytics is what I always recommend to clients and what I use on our own blogs. It’s free and it provides more than enough information for bloggers. Some bloggers like to use SiteMeter and Google Analytics together, because SiteMeter provides some extra data about specific visits.
What analytics to watch?
Here’s a very general answer: I would think that most bloggers would want to closely watch:
- How much traffic comes from search — if you’re doing SEO well, the traffic you get from search engines should rise consistently or, if it’s already high, should remain steady.
- What keywords drive traffic — I’m not exaggerating when I say that my approach to blogging has changed because of what I’ve learned about how people search and what they search for.
- How people search for local content — and more specifically, do they search using city names? Neighborhoods? Something else?
What to do with your analytics data
As I’ve suggested above, you can — you should — use your analytics data to drive some of your blog content. It should help you a) get ideas for new content, and b) give you ideas for modifying old content.
Topic Pages
One last item for this post about ongoing SEO, and it’s a reminder of something I wrote about previously: Topic Pages. These are useful when you find yourself blogging repeatedly about a single topic, like an annual event in your town. As I described in that previous post, the problem is that your old blog posts will be the ones that rank well in search engines and people will click through to your blog, only to land on outdated info. You can make a habit of manually linking from all of those old posts to the most current one, but that’s a lot of work.
A better idea is to create a Topic Page that uses a single URL every year, or every month, or however often the topic comes up. You update that Topic Page with all the new info, and then link to it as you write new blog posts about the event. Read the blog post I mentioned for more details about this powerful SEO tactic for local blogs.
Summary & Preview
SEO doesn’t begin and end when you write a blog post; it’s an ongoing process, and this article introduces some things you can do on a regular basis to continue growing your blog’s overall authority and trust.
Next week, I’ll stretch the definition of SEO a bit to include general blog/content promotion. As many great bloggers have learned, great content doesn’t get popular on its own; you have to promote it to increase visibility, attract links, and so forth. Look for that article next week.
In the meantime, if you have questions or comments about this article or the series in general, the comments are open.
Google’s Hyperlocal Video Thing – A Yawner
by Matt on Jul 25, 2010 in Industry | Leave a Comment
I joined in the excited buzz last month when word spread that Google was doing some kind of hyperlocal video/news project in the San Francisco area.
Turns out that Google’s plan isn’t as exciting as first thought. It’s actually kinda of a yawner.
Google announced on Thursday that the company is working with the local ABC TV station to power their “UReport” citizen video submission service:
ABC7 will use YouTube Direct to collect news footage from people in the San Francisco Bay Area. Residents of the Bay Area are invited to document the news and events happening where they live, work and play, and to submit those videos via YouTube Direct to the producers at ABC7. The team at ABC7 will feature newsworthy videos on television (Channel 7 in the Bay Area), on their website (ureport.abc7news.com), and on their YouTube channel (youtube.com/abc7news).
Like … really? That’s it? Terribly anti-climactic. Citizens are already posting news videos on YouTube every day. You’d think Google could come up with something more creative than this, y’know?
Hyperlocal News Roundup
by Matt on Jul 25, 2010 in Industry | Leave a Comment
There are some seriously great articles and blog posts in the list below. If you only have time to read a couple, I’d say you should focus on “How to Tell a Journalist from a Blogger” (and its lengthy comment section), along with Tim Berry’s “10 Blogging Tips. My 1,000th Post on This Blog.” (The Google Groups thread about low-cost marketing is also good.)
- Drilling Down – Where the Bloggers Are, New York Times
- Getting election expenses from your local elections office, Help Me Investigate Blog
- Keep your local blog buzzing with amazing content, agentgenius.com
- Low-Cost Marketing/Promotion Ideas for Hyperlocal Sites, Google Groups
- Should The East Village "Blog Mafia" Really Be Out To "Stop" The New York Times’ Hyperlocal Experiment?, www.businessinsider.com
- Well This Is Something New, www.gohyperlocal.com
- How to Tell a Journalist from a Blogger, jolieodell.wordpress.com
- 10 Blogging Tips. My 1,000th Post on This Blog, timberry.bplans.com
- AOL Patch and MainStreetConnect Expand Hyper-Local News, PBS
- Survey: Half of Journalists Think Their Offline Publications Will Eventually Fold, www.socialtimes.com
- The New Online Journalists #6: Conrad Quilty-Harper, onlinejournalismblog.com
- Writers Talk About Working the Hyper-Local Beat, PBS
Traditional Media are Funny
by Matt on Jul 23, 2010 in Industry | 1 Comment
It’s sometimes funny to watch/read the traditional media write about hyperlocal.
I’ve read TIME magazine’s article, Are Hyperlocals Replacing Traditional Newspapers?, a couple times now. It’s pretty good overall.
But I can’t not chuckle at the first paragraph on page two:
Most hyperlocal sites don’t have the budget for flashy graphics or searchable databases. Their content comes from observant neighbors (and local gadflies) who care about both large and small goings-on around town. Hyperlocal sites also frequently publish upbeat accounts of parades and high school sports, as well as information on which local vendors sell the best produce. Recent headlines on Record’s site noted a “mega-low” tide and an upcoming garden tour.
Hehehehe. It’s as if the writer is completely flummoxed over the possibility that people actually care about parades (BTW, have you ever attended a downbeat parade?), high school sports, local food/vendors, garden tours, and local weather conditions.
Funny.
By the way, the “Record” mentioned in that excerpt is frequent HLB commenter Tracy Record of the West Seattle Blog, who makes a few appearances in TIME’s article.
10 Qualities Great Hyperlocal Bloggers Have in Common
by Matt on Jul 21, 2010 in Blogging, Guest Posts | Leave a Comment
(This is a guest post from Esther Brown, who serves as the Community Manager at Outside.in, where she has the pleasure of interviewing hyperlocal bloggers for the company’s weekly ‘Bloggers We Love’ series. She can be reached at esther@outside.in or via Twitter: @outsidein or @estheribrown.)
When Matt suggested I write a guest post about “What Great Hyperlocal Bloggers Have in Common,” I was psyched: it’s always a pleasure to introduce a new audience to the amazing hyperlocal bloggers I get to interview each week for Outside.in’s ‘Bloggers We Love,’ series.
I was also stumped: I’ve interviewed bloggers from big cities and smaller towns and everywhere in between. They blog about everything from fashion to photography to politics, and each of them has a singular personality that shines through their online presence. To me, every single one of the ‘Bloggers We Love’ is unique: what could they have in common (beyond the obvious: they’re bloggers who’d love to have more hours in the day)? I began poring over my interview archives for commonalities, and I realized that it’s not all about what they do or where they come from, but rather it’s about who they are as people and how they choose to conduct themselves. They may be unique, but each of these dynamic characters share important character traits—and, while there are surely great hyperlocal bloggers who don’t exhibit one or more of these qualities, I’ve yet to meet one.
This one’s for all the hyperlocal bloggers out there who’ve demonstrated their greatness by showing us that…
10. They’re passionate. Tremendously passionate — they care deeply about their town, their subject matter and their readership. They value their community and respect it. They channel their passion into their blog, their personal relationships and all of their other, varied interests. Take Tasha Ball, for example, who’s fervent — evangelical, even — in her love for her hometown of Tulsa, OK. You can’t fake that kind of passion.
9. They’re dedicated. The hyperlocal bloggers I’ve come to know and love log some serious hours in the name of blogging — like Steve Sherron of the Monroe Scoop, who’ll spend hours editing video footage to get it just right. They’re hustlers: whether they’re blogging, organizing, hosting and attending events, Tweeting, posting updates to Facebook, adding photos to Flickr, you name it — they blog HARD.
8. They’re generous. They make a practice out of living generously, both online and off. They share the wealth when it comes to utilizing the social capital or publicity that their blog generates (like Jill Harrison of For the Love of Brooklyn who invites readers to contribute their photography to her site). They also share of themselves and their time, and they support and promote other bloggers by commenting on their blog posts, inviting them to guest post on their own blogs and tweeting about them.
7. They’re innovative. They’re always willing to try new things and step outside of their comfort zones. They like to pioneer new ways of doing things. Take Tessa Horehled of Atlanta’s Drive a Faster Car: for her, hyperlocal blogging meant skipping college and putting her career on the fast track. Creating your own possibilities in life? That’s innovative.
6. They’re omnipresent. They know how important it is to step away from the computer and get out from behind the keyboard. They don’t hide behind the anonymity that the Internet offers — rather, they use their blog and their online presence to build community and foster connections between people and things that matter to them. They understand the importance of networking and work to forge meaningful partnerships, both online and off. Like Christy Frink and Morgan Levy of Nashvillest, they’re accessible to their community, responding actively to their readers’ comments and interacting with them at local events.
5. They’re students. Top-notch hyperlocal bloggers —- like Liz Stambaugh of What’s to Eat, Baltimore? —- know that there’s always something else to learn, and they embrace this fact by constantly seeking out knowledge from their peers and mentors. They also don’t take themselves too seriously, and they ask for help when they need it.
4. They’re do-ers. They make things happen, get stuff done, execute -— like Jay Sears of My Rye, who rallied his community to secure a 4-way stop sign for his neighborhood. No matter what you call it, the fact is that great hyperlocal bloggers are the kinds of people you want on your team.
3. They’re fearless. They aren’t afraid to make a splash or write something that might raise a few eyebrows. Take Steve Shanafelt and the team at Spartanburg Spark: they ignited controversy by coming out against allowing concealed weapons on school property in their South Carolina city. Shanafelt and his team show us that hyperlocal bloggers worth their salt are willing to take a stand about the things that matter to them.
2. They’re valuable. Dana Freeman of Find and Go Seek in Burlington, Vermont, started her blog after realizing that there was a real dearth of family-friendly information available to parents in her area. The best hyperlocal bloggers listen to their community, pay attention to what it wants and needs, and provide content that fills the void.
1. They’re resilient. The most impressive hyperlocal bloggers I’ve gotten to know have responded to the challenges that they’ve encountered with ingenuity, bravery and aplomb. Take Corey Jackson of Downtown Lynn, for instance: when a local paper turned down his advertising dollars, he turned things around by getting others to write about the snub — and his traffic went through the roof.
Are there other qualities you think a great hyperlocal blogger should possess? Or, do you have suggestions for someone Outside.in should profile for our ‘Bloggers We Love’ series? Let me know in the comments. I’d love to hear from you.
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