Making Money from a Local Blog
If you’re trying to make money from your hyperlocal blog, or just giving it some thought, let me encourage you to read Philip John’s recent post:
Getting serious about hyperlocal, part 3: Money, money, money!
He lists more than a dozen different ideas that can earn a local blog some revenue, and I’ll bet just reading the list will help you think of a couple more ways, too.
Four Reasons Why Your Local Blog Needs a Mailing List
I’m thinking about creating mailing lists for our local blogs. I haven’t fully thought-out the mechanism for creating and managing these lists. A Yahoo Group? Do it myself? Some other e-mail platform? But I have figured out the Why.
Four Reasons Why Your Local Blog Needs a Mailing List
1.) Everyone uses e-mail. Few use RSS. E-mail is the number one online activity among Internet users in general. I don’t have any stats on this, but RSS adoption is certainly way behind e-mail use. I feel like we, as bloggers, tend to put all our faith in RSS as the tool for pushing our content to readers. But e-mail seems like the smarter, safer choice. (The closest stat I could find about this was from Pew Research earlier this year, which showed that 91% of online adults use e-mail, but only 32% read blogs. It’s in the third chart from the bottom. Not specifically RSS, but perhaps close. )
2.) People don’t want to learn RSS. On one of our local blogs, I set up a WordPress page about RSS. (See the Richland blog.) I purposely left such a page off the other blogs to see if the Richland blog would get more RSS subscribers from the tutorial being there; it hasn’t. Over time, all of our local blogs have had generally similar subscriber counts. You don’t have to teach people to use e-mail.
3.) E-mail is more ubiquitous. No matter where people go, their e-mail can go with them. You don’t need a smartphone to have e-mail on your phone; any web-enabled phone will do. Thanks to webmail services, you can check personal e-mail while at the office. It’s everywhere. Again, I don’t have any stats on this, but it seems safe to assume people don’t check RSS nearly as often as they check e-mail.
4.) E-mail is easier to share. Sure, Google Reader and other RSS tools offer sharing/bookmarking features. But again, is there anything easier than hitting the FORWARD button on your e-mail software and sending it to a friend or neighbor? Don’t think so. And even if sharing RSS feed item was easier, how many neighbors would be able to get it? Not nearly as many.
What Have Others Said?
Consider these two quotes from earlier this year about e-mail and local information:
1.) In Reason magazine, Jesse Walker wrote:
I’ve lived in two Baltimore neighborhoods, one in the city proper and one just outside the urban boundary in Towson. In both cases I learned almost immediately about every substantial local crime that had been reported to the cops—not by reading the police blotter, but by checking my email. Through the same lists, we were kept abreast of subjects involving everything from upcoming block parties to an effort to build a community swimming pool. And if we needed anything from a babyitter to a handyman, the lists were an instant source of informed advice.
2.) At SXSWi, Steven Johnson of Outside.in said this:
“Five years from now, if someone gets mugged within a half-mile of my house, and I don’t get an e-mail alert about it within half an hour, it’ll be a sign that something is broken.”
Your turn: Do you agree? Disagree? Maybe you already have a mailing list associated with your blog? If so, tell us what you use and how it’s working for you. If not, would you consider adding one? Comments are open. Go ahead and make this post better.
What do you know about blogging & the law?
I bet this is an area many hyperlocal bloggers could use some more education and information. I know I could, and my local blogs are about as vanilla as they get.
Dan Slee writes a good post, Six things a hyperlocal blogger really should know about the law. It’s UK-themed with mentions and links to UK resources, but the bigger point is pretty clear, I think:
“At some point I’m convinced someone will lose their house in the not too distant future over an internet blog post. It’s potentially that serious.”
Dan also makes a good suggestion about local bloggers coming together to either find or create some great legal resources for the hyperlocal community as a whole.
Is anyone aware of any such resources that are US-based? Do you worry about getting in trouble legally when writing blog posts? Comments are open.
Hyperlocal News Roundup
I’ve been a bookmarking madman lately while going through RSS feeds and Twitter and such. Here are some of the hyperlocally-oriented articles and news stories that caught my eye. Maybe they’ll catch yours, too.
- The Miami Herald newspaper is setting up its own small network of hyperlocal sites. They’ll cover five neighborhoods to begin with with local residents/organizations providing content. Rick Hirsch, senior editor/multimedia, says: “They can use our content management system and publish photos, stories, have community forums and have control over advertising inventory. And they keep what they sell.”
- Jeff Jarvis recently led a “hypercamp” discussing local news and hyperlocal publishing, and Peter Krasolivsky provides a recap on the Kelsey Group blog.
- On the Be Vocal blog, Hannah Waldram recently published How to make your local blog user-friendly.
- Fwix recently announced a new service called AdWire that aims to help local bloggers make some money. AdWire is essentially a widget that can be placed on a local blog — it has local news headlines and local ads, and the blogger gets some of the money when visitors click on the ads. The Wall Street Journal writes it up here, and you can go direct to Fwix for more information.
That’s all for now. If you found (or wrote) some good hyperlocal stuff that others should know about, feel free to leave a comment.
What Hyperlocal Content Works for You?
I’m curious: On your local blog/web site, what type(s) of content work the best for you? What draws the most traffic or comments or whatever you use to measure success?
Not too long ago I was reading this Peter Krasilovsky blog post that talks about AOL and, more specifically, the hyperlocal Patch.com project that AOL is doing. In particular, these comments from Patch.com President Warren Webster caught my eye — he’s talking about the hyperlocal content they find to be most interesting to readers.
“Police and fire information is very popular,” and “government news inspires a lot of debate,” he said. Webster was surprised, however, that weddings and obituaries aren’t more popular at this point — perhaps because users aren’t yet conditioned to get that information from a local online site. School sports have been more promising.
I’m surprised to see him mention police and fire information, but that’s probably because Cari and I very rarely post content like that on our hyperlocal blogs. So, I have no evidence in our analytics to tell me whether or not it’s popular. In my experience, our most popular blog posts have mostly been about upcoming local events.
What about you? What kind of content has worked best on your local blogs?
More on Hyperlocal Blogging & Your Geography
Long time readers of this blog (and I think there are a few of you) may recall the blog post I wrote early this year in which I listed some pros and cons of Big City vs. Small Town blogging. Sound familiar?
Well, just last week, Mark Coddington posted his thoughts on that same issue — is it easier to be a local blogger in a big, bustling metropolis or in a small, tight-knit community? He compares what’s going on in Seattle’s hyperlocal blog scene with what he sees at home in Nebraska:
There’s tons of hyperlocal journalism going on in the 16 counties of rural Nebraska that I cover, too, but none of it falls under this definition, and I’ve rarely seen this style of hyperlocal news discussed when we talk about the future of journalism.
Most of this journalism is being done by small-town weekly (and sometimes daily) newspapers, almost all of which have been doing hyperlocal journalism since decades before it became a buzzword. They’ve been writing about new businesses, scanner reports, local zoning meetings, birth announcements and even who’s-hanging-out-with-whom gossip for a small, dedicated audience long enough to become an inextricable, essential part of the towns they’re in. Sounds like hyperlocal done right, no?
It’s a good piece and don’t miss the comments, too, for added discussion about big city vs. smalll town hyperlocal blogging/journalism.
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