What Happens To Your Blog If You Move Away?
(This is a guest post from Ed Walker, a journalist with Media Wales in Cardiff, Wales, UK who setup and still runs the community news site, Blog Preston, for Preston, Lancashire, UK.)
Hyperlocal blogs are all about location and are generally run by people who live in the area they seek to serve. But what happens when you’ve built up a local blog and move away from the area?
I don’t think many of us would stay in an area just to keep up a local blog. We have relationships, job opportunities or other reasons for moving to pastures new. Building up a hyperlocal site takes time and dedication; you build a community around your content and, to a certain extent, yourself, but what if you’re not there?
I started up Blog Preston to act as a hub of community news, views and information in January 2009 for Preston, Lancashire, UK. I’d had the idea for a while but finally sat down one cold Sunday afternoon and got it started.
In November of 2009 I was offered a job in a different part of the country, and being 23, ambitious and wanting to further my career, I had to take it. But what about the hyperlocal site I’d created and had decent traffic coming to? It seemed such a shame to let it become tumbleweed in a Google search.
Throughout the time of Blog Preston I’d always been keen on getting guest contributors and giving them the chance to air their views about local issues. So, I turned to the community I’d built up to find someone who could take on the day-to-day running of the site.
Step forward the lovely Lisa who took on the task of filling the blog with content. She brought a whole new perspective to the role as I moved to Cardiff, but I still kept in touch and kept a watchful eye behind the scenes on how the site was doing.
I found myself impressed by the content Lisa was producing and the different angle and direction she was taking. As a parent and living in a different part of Preston she had a different take on things. And this was good. It brought a new direction and energy to the site, not to mention a new audience.
However, after five great months she had a change in circumstances and couldn’t commit the time to continue with the site. I spent a few weeks wondering what to do with Blog Preston. I’d tried with someone else and found myself back again without anyone to manage the site. Should I just give up and accept it wouldn’t be kept going?
Enter Andy Halls and Joseph Stashko, two budding student journalists at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston. I studied there myself and had come into contact with Andy and Jo after they wanted to setup a hyperlocal site called MyPreston. I gambled: I offered them the chance to join forces – using the established name of Blog Preston – and in return they would take over editorial of the site.
It’s been a hit. With more people on board we’re able to produce more content, and their fantastic live blogging of the general and local election results in Preston brought us national praise. Having them running the show frees me up to focus on long-term opportunities and the potential to monetise the site. I’ve always been able to spend time working with my web designer friend to improve the look of the site.
But, I come back to that winter’s day in January 2009 when I set up that site. Often hyperlocal sites are a one-person band, but keep an eye on what you’re going to do in the future. Who would run your site while you went on holiday? What if you had to move away? Once you have a successful site, people start to expect content and you will feel like you have a duty to keep going. Make sure you’ve got a plan for your hyperlocal sites in the future – even if you’re not around.
Google Offers a Topic Page Plugin … Skip It
How’s this for a koinkydink: Just when we’ve been talking a lot about topic pages for local blogs, Google announces a set of Wordpress plugins for what it calls “Living Story pages.”
That’s the same thing as what the rest of us call a topic page — a single URL where all information about an ongoing story/event/etc. lives permanently. But here’s the thing: skip Google’s plugins. Ignore it. Pretend it doesn’t exist.
Why?
Because it’s too freaking complicated. Seriously, just look at the documentation. It’s a guaranteed winner for Most Complicated and Convoluted Wordpress Extension Ever.
It’s not just one plugin; it’s four plugins. And you have to install and activate them in a certain order.
It doesn’t work unless you also install the Living Stories Wordpress theme. Yep, good luck with that. Can’t imagine there’s gonna be a lot of adoption with that requirement.
I like what Michael Gray said earlier on Twitter:
That says it all….
Update: Topic Page Experiment
It’s been two weeks since I posted here on HLB about creating permanent topic pages for our hyperlocal blogs — an attempt to solve the problem of old blog posts getting search traffic for current information. Time to share a quick update with some good news. Have a look:
As you can see, our topic page about the local Hogs & Dogs event is already showing up on searches for one of the primary terms, hogs and dogs west richland. Over time, I’d like to see those two results flipped — the topic page getting priority with the old post indented. We’ll see if and when that happens.
How Much Do You Care About SEO?
A question for my fellow hyperlocal bloggers:
How much do you care about SEO in relation to your hyperlocal blog?
By that, I mean:
- Have you done any basic blog SEO?
- Do you have any SEO-related plugins (if you use Wordpress) or other SEO tools?
- Do you use them regularly?
- Do you write headlines or article text with SEO/keywords in mind?
- Do you track where your blog traffic comes from, specifically how much comes from search engines?
One reason I ask is that I’m thinking about doing an SEO for hyperlocal bloggers post/series. I’ve been an SEO much, much longer than I’ve been a hyperlocal blogger, so content like that would be right up my alley.
The second reason I’m asking is this interesting post at the Online Journalism Review by Robert Niles:
Student journalists need to learn SEO more than they need AP style
Needless to say, considering my background in SEO, I agree with that idea 100%. This part, especially, I think is good advice about where SEO fits in with journalism/hyperlocal blogging:
“…most SEO techniques reduce to providing clear, concise writing that stays on topic – that frequently references the key words and phrases that an article’s supposed to be about. That’s good advice for any writer looking to attract readers in a competitive environment. Unfortunately, in print journalism, with readers too long delivered through local monopoly, too many reporters and headline writers became more focused on being clever than clear.”
So, I’ll ask again: How much do you care about SEO in relation to your hyperlocal blog? Comments are open!
(via MediaGazer)
New Hyperlocal Experiment: Topic Pages
You may have heard of the phrase “topic pages” already — it’s a fairly popular idea these days in journalism circles. The idea behind a topic page is that, rather than have multiple articles or posts about the same thing all competing with one another for attention, you collate them on a single “topic page.” For examples, see how the New York Times has created dozens of topic pages.
The goal is that the topic page becomes the authoritative resource for information about the topic. And generally, by “authoritative,” we mean it’s the page that earns and holds most of your search rankings about that topic, and the page that you can always refer people to when they need information. They’re kinda like Category pages, but not quite. I’ll explain the problem I hope a topic page will solve for one of our blogs, and show how we’ve setup our first topic page below.
What Problem Does a Topic Page Solve?
Primarily, it solves the problem that — for some topics — your hyperlocal blog might have lots of great information spread across multiple articles. Secondarily, some of those articles may be old or outdated and it becomes a challenge to keep them updated for new searchers who land on them via Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.
My Specific Problem
In West Richland, there’s an annual event called Hogs & Dogs that attracts more people to the city than we have residents. It’s that big. We’ve been covering it since our blog launched in 2008, and we now have more than a dozen posts about Hogs & Dogs — some from 2008, some from 2009, and some from this year.
People come to this event from all over the Pacific Northwest, and they find our blog after searching online for information. But sometimes they hit a 2008 post, sometimes a 2009 post, and rarely a current post because the new content doesn’t always rank as well as the older stuff. So, we’re forced to go back and try to update all the old posts with links to the new content, like this:
That doesn’t really scale. You can’t keep going back and updating all the old posts (the ones that get search traffic) with links to all the new posts. So, our hopeful solution is the topic page.
Creating a Topic Page
Here’s how we’re doing this:
1.) Not a post, but a page. Rather than create a new blog post, we’ve created a Wordpress Page. You can see it here: Hogs & Dogs. It’s somewhat bare right now, but we’ll add more content about the event as we get it. The theme we’re using (Canvas by Woo Themes – aff) allows us to create pages without having them show up in the page navigation, which is nice.
2.) Permanent URL. Although the content will be updated each year, Hogs & Dogs information will always be available at the same URL: http://westrichlandrealestateblog.com/hogs-dogs/.
3.) SEO & human-optimized content. We’ve created this page primarily for human visitors, but with the understanding that most of them will find it via search engines. The keyword is in the URL. I’ve optimized the page title. And we mention “west richland” and “hogs and dogs” several times in the page content.
4.) Evergreen, easy-to-update content. The page title says “2010″ but I can update that easily when the 2011 event rolls around. The page also lists date and time info, plus this year’s big raffle prize. All of that is evergreen content that I can easily trade out next year.
5.) Link to it often. No doubt we’ll be writing new blog posts as the event gets closer, but each new post will also link to this topic page and position it as the ultimate resource about the event.
Final Thoughts
The Hogs & Dogs event doesn’t happen until June, and even though people are already searching for information now — search traffic won’t really spike until the week before the event. We basically have about two months to get this page ranking for the terms that people use on the main search engines. I’ll let you know how it goes after the event has come and gone. If it works, we’ll be doing more of these on all our hyperlocal blogs.
Your turn: Are you using topic pages on your blog/site? Are they working? If you’re not, is it something you’d consider creating? Comments are open, as always.
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UPDATE, APRIL 26: For an update on this, please see Update: Topic Page Experiment.
4 Tips for Small Businesses with Hyperlocal Blogs
As I type this, Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends is hosting an Intuit webinar called Get Fiercely Local Customers Close to You. (You can see the Twitter conversation on the #IntuitSMB hashtag.)
Anita invited me to share some tips for small business with local blogs — tips that answered this question/topic:
How to use a blog to enhance loyalty with existing local customers
That was a tough assignment because I wanted to customize my advice depending on the type of small business, and maybe even its location. But I eventually shared this list of four specific strategies/tactics that I think could apply to a lot of small businesses with hyperlocal blogs in any location.
1. Blog = Community Kiosk
Think of your business blog as the community kiosk, the place where locals go to find out what’s really happening around town — not just what’s happening at your business/store/office. You will create loyalty by becoming a trusted resource for local information.
2. Open Your Blog to Others
Don’t think of it as your blog; think of it as the community’s blog. Yes, you’ll share company news and information on occasion, but to create real local loyalty, you need to do more. You need to open up your blog to others.
Let your blog be the voice of community groups that don’t get attention from traditional media. Invite and publish guest posts from non-profits, local organizations, event organizers, etc. They’ll tell others about what you’ve done and become evangelists for you and your blog.
3. Be Visible Offline
I’ve written before about how posts on local events are some of the most popular content my wife and I write on our local blogs. What I suggest is this: Write about local events before they happen, but also attend events and then blog about them afterwards with photos. Show people what they missed. Be their eyes and ears at local parades, community concerts, etc. If you can’t blog about a big local event, find someone to be a guest blogger for you. (See #2 above.)
4. Avoid Negativity/Controversy
All this talk about being a community resource is fine and good, but it’s still a business blog that you’re running. You don’t have to blog about everything going on in town and risk alienating potential customers. I’d avoid politics on a hyperlocal business blog. I’d avoid being too critical of local groups, organizations, other businesses, and really just about anyone. You don’t have to be the town’s cheerleader who presents everything as Super-Duper Awesome, but you should skip the controversial stuff if you’re trying to build loyal local customers.
Your turn: I don’t know how many local business bloggers read this, but if you’re one, I’d love to get your thoughts on these tips — as well as your own tips for successful hyperlocal business blogging.
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