Hyperlocal Blogging: Successes and Failures So Far

This is Part Five of a series on Starting a Hyperlocal Blog. Please visit that page for links to the full series of articles.

How do you measure the success of your blog? There are lots of ways to do it: number of feed readers, number of comments, unique visitors, page views, and many more. This is something I’m still wrestling with on our four hyperlocal blogs: What should we consider a success? The end goal is to help Cari’s real estate business, but it’s often difficult to directly tie a client/closing to a blog. When Cari asks how her clients found her, one of the most common recent answers is, “You’re all over the Internet.”

Love the sentiment, and it tells me we’re doing something right … but what?!? Measuring the successes and failures of four new local blogs has been very frustrating. But measure we must. Unless you’re blogging without a purpose (some people do), you simply must know what’s working and what’s not.

success and failures

My wife and I don’t consider ourselves experts on hyperlocal blogging. We’re still learning with each passing month. We’re still trying new content ideas, new marketing and outreach ideas. And the blogs are so new, I hesitate to draw any solid conclusions pro or con to what we’ve done. But I do think we’ve had a few successes to go along with several failures.

Our Successes

1.) Acquiring clients. I mentioned this briefly above: Cari has had 4-5 prospects/clients call her, and when she asks how they found her, they’ve said, “You’re all over the Internet.” Unless they can give us a more specific answer, I have to assume some of that is related to finding the blogs when using Google, Yahoo, or MSN Live search. Which leads to….

2.) Occasionally strong rankings for [cityname real estate] keywords. All four blogs have solid rankings in Yahoo for their primary keywords. All four have bounced in and out of Google’s upper echelon, which is no surprise. Volatility in Google is quite common for new sites. Each spot the blogs have high in the rankings is one spot a competing real estate agent doesn’t have.

3.) The baseball links. I mentioned the story in yesterday’s article about shooting some minor league baseball video and turning it into a few links to one of the local blogs. I want to do more of that when possible.

4.) Getting blog traffic by targeting keywords related to local news and local events. This has been one of the real revelations for me from our experiment: It’s often quite easy to get traffic by writing about things happening around town because people are actually searching for anything and everything under the sun. Let me explain with this example:

In late May, I wrote a post previewing a popular West Richland event called Hogs and Dogs. (Don’t laugh.) The event would happen on June 19. I didn’t think much of that blog post until I checked our Google Analytics in late June:

analytics screenshot

We weren’t breaking any traffic records before the event, but still … that spike shows a tenfold spike in traffic on the day before and the day of the event. And the majority of that was Google referral traffic. What were the keywords that drove all that traffic? Have a look:

keywords screenshot

That’s just the top ten. Get this: The top 22 keywords driving traffic were all related to Hogs and Dogs. The main takeaway for me here is that people are actively searching for hyperlocal information and content.

We’ve seen smaller spikes from writing about other local news and events on our four blogs. People want local content, and I count situations like this, where we gave them what they wanted (even if it didn’t lead to a real estate transaction) a success.

Our Failures

There are many. Some more important than others, but they all bother me to some degree. In no particular order:

1.) Having to use a .net domain for Pasco. It would be so much easier to be able to say all four blogs are “cityname real estate .com”.

2.) Missing local events. We didn’t attend the two biggest events in the Tri-Cities each year: Hydroplane races on the Columbia Fair, and the Benton-Franklin Fair. Ugh. Some local journalists we are.

3.) Not writing frequently enough. We’ve had some stretches of 2-3 weeks without a post on one of the blogs. That doesn’t help from either a user or a search engine perspective.

4.) Cari being too busy to write much real estate content. This is a nice problem to have, but it still means the blogs are not as good and well-rounded as they should be.

(These next three are all related.)

5.) Not connecting with local people enough. Chatting with the Tri-Cities Flickr group has been good and enjoyable, but there are other ways we can be seeking out and connecting with local people, both online and offline.

6.) Not connecting with local bloggers. One of the primary rules of starting a blog is to get active in your blog community. We’ve done jacksquat on this point, and it shows in our lack of traffic, poor diversity of inbound links, and so forth.

7.) Not promoting the blogs offline hard enough. I have several ideas for this, like creating separate MOO mini-cards for each blog, so that we can give them out at local school/PTO events, at ballgames, and so forth.

Like any small business or small biz blogger, many of these failures are about one thing: time. Cari’s super busy with real estate, PTO, and being a mom. I’m busy with work, my U2 sites, my blogs, and being a dad. I’d like to find time to turn these failures into successes.

Final Thoughts

Most of us are new to hyperlocal blogging — or, at least to using hyperlocal blogs as a business tool. It’s such a young niche that we all get to write our own paths to success, and learn from each other along the way. As I said in the first post this week, my hope is that you’d learn something from seeing how we launched our local blogs — even if you learn to do things differently!

I know this much: Writing this series has been educational for me. It’s forced me to step back and think about why we made certain decisions and analyze the impact of those decisions. It’s forced me to take a Big Picture look at what we’ve done right, and where we’ve fallen short. I think we’ll be better local bloggers moving forward. I hope you will be, too.

August 29, 2008 | Filed Under Blogging | 11 Comments 

Marketing A Hyperlocal Blog

This is Part Four of a series on Starting a Hyperlocal Blog. Please visit that page for links to the full series of articles.

Marketing any blog involves getting active in the blogosphere, leaving quality comments on other blogs in your niche, and basically sticking your neck out for other bloggers and blog readers to see it. If you’re a hyperlocal blogger in Seattle, for example, that approach will probably work well because there are several local blogs covering the city. But if you’re blogging alone in your hometown (as we practically are), those tactics won’t work. In smaller geographic areas, you’ll have to get more creative to get exposure for your hyperlocal blog. This is the situation I’ll address here.

content marketing

Traditional Online Marketing

Our only direct linkbuilding effort to date was somewhat successful. In the previous article, I mentioned taking my son to the minor league ballpark and seeing the #1 draft pick of the Colorado Rockies pitch. I made a short video collage of him pitching, uploaded it to YouTube, and then blogged about it on our Pasco blog.

But I didn’t stop there. As a baseball fan, I know that every team has several active bloggers. I also knew that the Colorado Rockies’ bloggers and their readers have probably never seen the top draft pick pitch. You can see where this is going: I searched Google for [colorado rockies blog] and sent emails to about 8-10 bloggers:

Hi Michael,

My name’s Matt and I live up in Tri-Cities, Washington — home of the Class A Dust Devils.

If you think your readers would be interested, I made a short video (45 seconds) from Christian Friedrich’s pro debut back on the 10th. It’s not all that exciting, just pitch after pitch. It’s on YouTube and you can embed it in your blog:

If you use it, I would appreciate the favor of a credit link back to the original blog post where the video is being used:

http://pascorealestateblog.net/dust-devil-stadium/

Thanks,
Matt

It worked! Within a couple days, our Pasco blog received three inbound links from quality baseball blogs. Here’s what one looked like. (My name is the link.)

screenshot

If you’re into SEO, you might scoff at this. “Wait, those links are off-topic. They won’t help you much at all.” I would strongly disagree with you for a few reasons:

Off-topic or not, I was pleased to get those links to our Pasco real estate blog. Beyond that effort, I’ve recently been focusing on some simple directory listings. Here are a couple we’ve used:

  1. Outside.in – This isn’t really a directory in the traditional sense; it’s a mashup of local blog and local news content; it’s not very popular in our area, but has many users in larger cities. Popular or not, we’ve listed all four of our hyperlocal blogs, so anyone local who does use the site should see our posts.
  2. Placeblogger – This is a more traditional directory for hyperlocal blogs.
  3. BlogsbyCity.com – We’re still waiting to be added to this one.

As time allows, I’m still on the hunt for more quality blog directories where our hyperlocal blogs should be listed.

But linkbuilding is just one aspect of marketing a blog. There are other opportunities out there for hyperlocal bloggers.

Tell the (Local) World About Your Local Blog

As a local blogger, you obviously want local people to know about and read your blog. Duh. You could do that by standing on a busy street corner with a big sign showing your URL. You could take a more traditional route by advertising your blog in the local paper, sponsoring local events, passing out flyers outside the nearest shopping mall, or even putting up signs on the announcements board at the local grocery store. We haven’t tried any of those ideas, but some of them might actually work!

One thing we have done with a modicum of success is connect with local people online. A great place to do this is the Freecycle.org mailing list system. Freecycle is a collection of local mailing lists where people give away their unwanted items for free. The “Freecycle Tri-Cities” list currently has almost 2,200 subscribers. And like many Freecycle lists, it has two related mailing lists — “Trading Tri-Cities”, where people buy and sell items locally, and “Get Connected Tri-Cities,” where local people share ideas, recommendations, and other information with one another.

Earlier this summer, someone on the local Get Connected list asked a question: Does anyone know the schedule of free movies that are playing at the Kennewick movie theater? It just so happens that we had written a blog post detailing the free movie schedule at the Kennewick theater. So I replied to that person’s email, saying, “I wrote a blog post with the full schedule. Here’s a link to what you’re looking for: (URL).” That simple email brought a few dozen new visitors to our blog, and we added a couple RSS subscribers shortly thereafter. Small victories count. :)

Looking for places to connect online with local residents can be a great way to spread the word about your blog.

  1. Start with the Freecycle.org site, and then look to see if your local Freecycle list has “sister lists” similar to the ones I described above.
  2. You might also check to see if your local newspaper has a forum or blogs where you can comment and discuss things with other local people (and be sure to include your blog URL in a non-spammy way for exposure).
  3. Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter might also offer ways to find people near you; TwitterLocal is a good place to start.
  4. Flickr has tens of thousands of groups, many of which are location-based. I’m active in the Tri-Cities, WA, group and have posted links to our blog posts in the group discussions when appropriate.

I have several more ideas for promoting our hyperlocal blogs, but haven’t had time to follow-through and put those plans into place. I consider that one of our failures with these four blogs, which is what we’ll discuss in Part Five: successes and failures so far.

August 28, 2008 | Filed Under Promotion | 6 Comments 

Content Development for Our Hyperlocal Blogs

This is Part Three of a series on Starting a Hyperlocal Blog. Please visit that page for links to the full series of articles.

With a plan in place, domains purchased, hosting taken care of, and blog designs selected, the next focus is content. In part three of this series, it’s time to talk about going public. This is about the birth of the blog that Joe Q. Public can see. But early on, we weren’t concerned that much with Joe Q. Public.

content development

Stage One: Serve the Search Spiders

When launching a blog where you can expect to have an immediate audience of readers, your first priority is obviously to serve the readers you’ll have from day one. A good example might be a new company blog attached to a popular corporate web site. Or even the launch of this blog, HyperlocalBlogger.com. I had a feeling that I’d have at least a small audience from the start due to advertising the blog on Small Business SEM.

But things were different with the launch of our four hyperlocal real estate blogs. We knew that human traffic would be low or non-existent to our four hyperlocal blogs, so our initial focus was not on serving human visitors, but on serving search engine spiders. Here was our plan:

  1. Post regularly so we train the crawlers to start visiting the blogs consistently.
  2. Frequently use our primary keywords to teach the crawlers what the blogs are about.

On No. 2 above, the goal is to overcome what I think is the primary mistake of many local/vertical combo sites and blogs: Focusing too much on the vertical aspect (in this case, real estate) and not enough on the local aspect (the cities). Although the ultimate goal is to help grow a real estate business, it’s a mistake to think that tons of local people want to read about real estate. They don’t; targeting a local audience demands that we write as much (or more) about local events, local news, local businesses, and so forth, as we do about real estate.

How’d We Do?

Search spiders were quick to find and crawl all four blogs, and the semi-regular posting schedule (we aimed for 1-2 posts per week on each blog at the start) helped ensure the spiders kept coming back. But, there were a couple occasions where some posts were not spidered and indexed as quickly as we would’ve liked; that suggests we could’ve done better by posting more often in the early stages. Plus, the fact that we had very few inbound links didn’t help to speed up the crawling and indexing early on.

Stage Two: Serve Our Neighbors

Once we had the spiders’ attention, it was time to focus on human visitors — namely, on finding some. That requires content that our neighbors would want to read. Here are a few of the places we find local content:

This list is really just the beginning; you can find local content on Flickr (local photos/photographers to feature and blog about) and YouTube (maybe someone shot video at a local event you couldn’t attend), for example, and probably lots of places I haven’t thought of yet. And speaking of attending local events, this is a great time to let you know:

press credentialYou’re Now a Local Journalist, and Local Events are a Great Source of Content

When you become a local blogger, you essentially become a source of local news, information, and opinion. To do that successfully, you must get out in the community and cover what’s going on. I’m not suggesting you have to go to journalism school or try to become Joe PrivateEye; it’s much simpler than that. You just have to show up at local events, take some photos and/or video, and then write a blog post about the event (embedding and/or linking to your photos and video). Be sure to know the rules of public photography/videography if you plan to do either when you’re at local events.

Here are two examples from our hyperlocal blogs:

See? Writing and producing local content isn’t too difficult. But it’s only part of the equation; the next step is to market that content. That’s coming up in Part Four of this series.

(press credential image courtesy fd’s Flickr Toys)
August 27, 2008 | Filed Under Content | 7 Comments 

Setting Up a Hyperlocal Blog (or Four)

This is Part Two of a series on Starting a Hyperlocal Blog. Please visit that page for links to the full series of articles.

In Part One, we discussed the planning and strategy behind starting our hyperlocal blogs — primarily the decision to do four blogs instead of one. Though it would quadruple our workload, we believe it was the right road to take. With our decision made, it was time to get to work — time to set up each blog.

setting up a local blog

Before you can think about writing content, you have several important decisions to make. This is true for the one-blog hyperlocal blogger, but even more important for our situation. Here’s an overview of the steps we took on the way to creating four hyperlocal blogs.

Choosing a Local Blog Domain

Selecting a domain is always important, and I believe even more so in our situation. Should we use domains that help market the “McGee” name to boost Cari’s visibility? Should we use keyword-based domains that might appeal to the community more? We chose the latter:

Here’s why we chose the keyword-based domains that target our primary keywords: [richland real estate], [kennewick real estate], [pasco real estate], and [west richland real estate].

  1. Our target readership would identify much more easily with city-based domains than with McGee-based domains.
  2. We want the domain names to reflect the content. We’re not writing about “McGee” stuff, we’re writing about city stuff.
  3. With few other local blogs in our area, I assumed our blogs wouldn’t easily attract links. I wanted to make the most out of any links we get. Having the keyword in the name and URL should guarantee at least some good anchor text when we do get links.

I was able to score the .com domains for Richland, Kennewick, and West Richland. The Pasco .com domain belongs to someone in Florida (they have a Pasco County), and my attempts to buy the domain from him have been unsuccessful so far. This remains a thorn in our side.

Blog Hosting

As I mentioned in Planning a Hyperlocal Blog Strategy, there was never any thought given to hosting these blogs under different accounts or at different hosts. Our intentions are to build high-quality, individual destination blogs that should have no trouble surviving a manual review or attempt to classify this as a small network of blogs. While all four blogs link occasionally to Cari’s main real estate site, they very rarely link to each other. All four domains are currently hosted with the same company, in one account on the same IP range. I expect no problems with this.

Blog Design

If you clicked the links above, you saw that we’re using four different blog designs. Here’s why:

These are local blogs, and we’re hoping to appeal to a different demographic than I do here on HyperlocalBlogger.com, so there’s no need for huge RSS buttons, MyBlogLog widgets, and the other content widgets you often see on business blogs. These are hometown blogs. The designs are simple and there’s very little to distract readers from the content.

With our domains chosen, hosting in place, and design templates in order, the next step was to take the blog’s public. And to start focusing on local content….

Coming in Part Three: Content Development for Hyperlocal Blogs.

August 26, 2008 | Filed Under Blogging | 8 Comments 

Planning A Hyperlocal Blog Strategy

This is Part One of a series on Starting a Hyperlocal Blog.

There are countless reasons why people blog. When my wife, Cari, and I recently launched four new hyperlocal blogs, our reason was simple: to help Cari’s real estate career by positioning her as an expert on our local area. Our goals are business-oriented, and that colors all the decisions we’ve made in planning and executing on a hyperlocal blogging strategy. If you’re starting a hyperlocal blog for other reasons, read on to learn about our experiences, but realize that your goals are different, and your decisions may need to be different, too, as you get started.

Planning Your Strategy

Background

My wife has been blogging about Tri-Cities real estate since December, 2006. By most metrics, the blog is struggling: Traffic isn’t great, subscribers are few, inbound links are hard to come by, and so forth.

But — and this is what matters most — blogging has led directly to at least three clients and closings that we know of, and indirectly to several others. Those commissions mean the blog is a success in the only metric that counts: Revenue created.

On the other hand, a few closings from 18 months of blogging doesn’t seem all that great. We want to do better. I can SEO the daylights out of her main Web site, but unless I’m ready to start going gray/black, it won’t matter much in the real estate industry. So, we came up with a different plan.

Local Blog: Our Plan “A”

I’m a big believer that blogs are about as powerful an SEO tool as you’ll find right now, so our plan began with a blog. We would both write posts on this blog:

In doing so, we figured we’d cover both bases: the local (Tri-Cities) and the vertical (real estate). Cari would be able to write for both local house hunters and for the linkerati in the real estate industry. I’d be able to write for local residents, and maybe come up with some locally-flavored articles to attract readers, comments, links, and the like. But we quickly ran into several problems.

The Challenges

We live in an area called the Tri-Cities. But you won’t find “Tri-Cities” on a map of Washington. You’ll find the cities of Kennewick, Richland, and Pasco on the map. And you’ll also find the suburbs, like West Richland, Finley, Burbank, and Benton City.

map screenshot

SEO would be easier if, as has been proposed and rejected on a couple occasions, the Tri-Cities combined to form a single city. We’d have far fewer keywords to target! As it stands now, though, house hunters are searching for [richland real estate], [kennewick real estate], [pasco real estate], and [west richland real estate], not to mention [richland homes], [kennewick homes], etc., etc. West Richland is the biggest and fastest-growing of the suburbs. Oh, and when a home buyer isn’t too particular about which city s/he is moving to, s/he’ll also search for [tri-cities real estate]. As you can see, we have to target several geographic terms.

Plan “B”: Multiple Local Blogs

I decided it would be unrealistic to create one blog and expect it to serve such a diverse audience while targeting multiple cities, keyword sets, and so forth. Trying to build a “Tri-Cities real estate blog” would be like someone on the other side of the state starting a “Puget Sound real estate blog”, or someone in California starting a “Bay Area real estate blog.”

That wouldn’t work. SEO, and local search in particular, begins with specific keyword targeting. So, we had to put that into practice in Plan B:

I put the word “quality” in italics there because it’s easy to brush this off as more real estate spam: Here’s another real estate agent making multiple spammy sites that are just going to interlink and clog up the SERPs. Nope. As you’ll see soon in our discussion of tactics, creating quality is at the core of the whole effort. We’re not hosting the three domains on separate IP ranges to avoid the appearance of spam. Our assumption is that the blogs will be so good we don’t have to worry about looking spammy.

Plan B essentially quadruples our work load, with four new blogs to write instead of one. But facts are facts: There are no shortcuts when it comes to SEO success. Commitment and patience are foundational elements of longterm online success, and we’d have to slog through the tough work like everyone else.

Coming in Part Two: Putting the plan into action.

August 25, 2008 | Filed Under Blogging | 21 Comments 

Starting a Hyperlocal Blog: The Series

Blogging and local search are two hot items in online marketing, and that makes perfect sense: Blogging is a natural way for a business owner to introduce him/herself to potential clients while simultaneously showing knowledge and expertise of the local area.

This is especially true in the real estate industry. The Washington Post recently wrote about the growing trend of real estate agents using blogs to connect with potential clients. The article hit home at Casa McGee: My wife is a Tri-Cities real estate agent, and we recently started four new hyperlocal blogs for that exact purpose.

Starting a Hyperlocal Blog

Beginning today, I’ll be publishing a five-part series about our experience. The road we’ve taken may not be right for you, and sometimes I’m not certain it’s been right for us. We’re headed in a new direction, trying to navigate all the twists and turns and bumps in the road. My hope is that you’ll learn from our experience, even if that means learning that you should do things differently. :)

Monday: Planning A Hyperlocal Blog Strategy
Tuesday: Setting Up a Hyperlocal Blog (or Four)
Wednesday: Content Development for Our Hyperlocal Blogs
Thursday: Marketing A Hyperlocal Blog
Friday: Hyperlocal Blogging: Successes and Failures So Far

Enjoy the series, and please share your thoughts at any point along the way!

(photo: Highway 240, near Richland, Washington, by Matt McGee)
August 25, 2008 | Filed Under Blogging, MY BEST POSTS | 24 Comments 

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