It’s the brainchild of a couple guys named Nathan Heinrich and Aaron Donsbach, who grabbed all the ZIP code-based Twitter accounts they could get their hands on a couple years ago. (Guys: You missed 99302 for Pasco, Washington.) Here’s a look at one my local ZIP codes, twitter.com/99352:

(click for larger version)

TwitZip has partnered with Outside.in to get its hyperlocal news feeds running through each Twitter account. TwitZip’s home page says it has a partnership with Groupon to post local deals, and that local weather and government alerts are coming next.

TwitZip & Hyperlocal Blogging

On one hand, TwitZip competes with hyperlocal bloggers as a source of local news. But local news isn’t a zero-sum game, so I think it’s shortsighted to focus on that aspect of what TwitZip is doing. Instead, think of how TwitZip can help your hyperlocal blog. Here are four ways I can think of off the top of my head:

1. As a news source. The first thing I did was add all of the local TwitZip accounts to my Tri-Cities Twitter list. This is the list I monitor to keep track of what’s happening around town — it’s my Twitter news feed, and TwitZip will make it better.
2. As a distribution channel. (part 1) If TwitZip is getting content from Outside.in, here’s my millionth recommendation that you add your local blog to Outside.in’s system. That should get your blog content into TwitZip and could increase your Twitter exposure.
3. As a distribution channel. (part 2) TwitZip is setup to automatically retweet messages that are sent as @ replies to it from Twitter followers. In other words, follow your local ZIP code and then include an @ message to it and it’ll retweet your message. (Wonder how TwitZip will handle spam/junk that comes through via this method….)
4. As content for your blog. Beyond getting news tips (#1 above), you can take the RSS feed(s) from your local TwitZip accounts and add them to your hyperlocal newswire if you added one to your blog.

You can learn more about TwitZip via their web site, and also via this article last week on Silicon Prairie News.

Your turn: Is TwitZip something you’d use in conjunction with your local blog? What are your thoughts on it? Comments are open.

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

TwitZip: Twitter’s Unofficial Hyperlocal News Network

You choose one of 16 EveryBlock cities, type in a location, choose the types of content you’d like to see, and we give you HTML code you can copy and paste into your blog or site template.

You can show news at an exact address, a block-radius around an address, a specific neighborhood, or an entire ZIP code. You can tweak it to show just crime, or just crime and building permits, and so on. You can also choose exactly which media sources you’d like to display.

The widgets are available at www.everyblock.com/widget/, and once you get started, the “builder” tool is pretty simple:

(click for larger version)

The ability to customize the exact size (height and width) means you can put a widget pretty much anywhere you want on your blog.

ChicagoScanner.com is a site that uses the widget right on its home page. Scroll down a bit and you’ll see a widget showing news from a single zip code. My Ballard, one of the popular Seattle hyperlocal sites, has created a page called the Ballard Wire, which looks like this:

(click for larger version)

Seems to me that the only drawback is that EveryBlock only covers 16 cities. My little town isn’t one of them, and wouldn’t even be on the radar. If you’re in the same boat as me, feel free to check out my post from last year, How to Create a Local Newswire for your Blog.

If you’re in one of EveryBlock’s cities, this seems like something worth checking out. Let me know what you think of it and how you’re using it. Comments are open.

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

EveryBlock Launches Hyperlocal Content Widgets

• Content idea: search YouTube for locally relevant videos to post on your website
• Content idea – store opening times
• Content idea: planning applications

And many more. It seems that the best way to access all of these articles is to browse through the Quick Tips category. There are some other posts mixed in, but you’ll find a lot of “content idea” headlines, too. Nice work, TAL gang.

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

Great Content Ideas from Talk About Local

• local papers, radio, and TV news
• local blogs – see below
• official government data sources
• Weather Underground
• Flickr, Twitter, and other social sites/tools
• Yelp, Foursquare, and Gowalla
• real estate listings from Trulia
• etc.

Look at the Seattle or even the Spokane pages, and you’ll probably agree they make a pretty strong news and content hub for those cities. I might love Fwix if I lived there.

But I live in Tri-Cities, WA (Kennewick, Pasco, and Richland) and Fwix actually thinks we’re a suburb of Spokane, which is about 150 miles away. Oh, if the locals see that, no one will ever visit Fwix again. I’ve used this form to request that Fwix add my city, and stop listing us as a Spokane suburb.

Until that happens, I can’t use some of the cool stuff Fwix is offering. Like…

Fwix Widgets

Fwix recently started offering widgets that can be customized and embedded into any web site. Here’s the Spokane widget, for example:

I’ve customized that to NOT show status updates from Twitter, but it does show pretty much everything else: news, events, photos, reviews, weather, and deals. If you’re more of a programmer, you might prefer the Fwix API.

In addition to widgets, Fwix users can create custom feeds/pages made up only of the stuff you care about — sort of like how My Yahoo or iGoogle works.

How Can Fwix Help Your Hyperlocal Blog

Two ways I can think of immediately:

1. As a news dashboard for your own coverage. If Fwix has enough good content sources in your hometown, it should provide a good, daily snapshot of what’s going on around town and provide ideas/tips for things you can/should cover on your site, too.
2. As a potential traffic source. Local bloggers can submit to the Add Your Blog page. I’ve just submitted via this form within the last couple days, so I don’t know how soon submissions are processed, what kind of review process there is, and so forth. (And since Fwix doesn’t really cover my area, it may be a while before I find out.) But if Fwix grows, it could become a good opportunity for more exposure.

Your turn: Have you checked out Fwix? What are your thoughts? How’d it go when you submitted your blog? Comments are open.

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

Fwix Looks Cool, Unless You Live in a Small Town

Where does your content come from?

The 66 publishers said that nearly half of their content comes from paid staff members — either full-time or part-time staff. Volunteers and students make the next two largest content sources, at 27% and 8% respectively. “Content partners” also generate 8% of local news content, and user-generated content accounts for 7%.

Accomplishing goals?

This question caught my eye: The survey asked the local online publishers to list how important various goals/tasks are, and then to grade themselves on how well they’re meeting those goals. The biggest discrepancy between importance and success: operating a sustainable business. That’s probably not too surprising. Here’s the chart.

That’s just a teaser of what you’ll find in the full article. There are some interesting stories and quotes from the folks who run the hyperlocal news operations that were surveyed.

If you read it, the obvious question is: How does your news site compare?

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

How Does Your Online News Operation Compare?

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.

——–

UPDATE, APRIL 26: For an update on this, please see Update: Topic Page Experiment.

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

New Hyperlocal Experiment: Topic Pages

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.

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

4 Tips for Small Businesses with Hyperlocal Blogs

About six months ago, I decided to start a new hobby. I’ve always been a sports fan. I used to do a little sportscasting on a small radio station. And my Friday nights were free.

So I started a WordPress website, RepublicTigerSports.com, to keep track of the local high school football team. I hoped to stream some play-by-play of the football games, get a few friends to listen, and maybe snag a sponsor or two.

But coaches and parents for every sport — football, softball, volleyball, etc. — jumped on the idea. They started sending me scores and stats and photos, even when I wasn’t at their games. They spread the word among their friends and relatives. Soon, people knew they could get up-to-the minute scores and in-depth game summaries from the website, instead of waiting until the next day or the next week.

I used my iPhone to record video, and uploaded highlights while the game was still happening. I posted quick status updates to Twitter. I over-delivered for what a community this size expects for its local sports media coverage. And the community embraced it.

I should say that there are lots of places to find information on high school sports in this area. The Springfield News-Leader covers all of southwest Missouri. The Republic Monitor has excellent weekly coverage (and their sports reporter has been great to work with). A recently launched website covers high school sports for al of southwest Missouri. And yet another sports reporter has started a site that is focused on the Central Ozark Conference, the league in which Republic competes.

But I think a few key ingredients differentiate RepublicTigerSports.com from those outlets.

1. Over-kill
Six months ago, the Republic Tigers got occasional coverage in the Springfield News-Leader, weekly coverage in the Republic Monitor, and sporadic mention on one of the local TV stations. Now, local fans can get real-time scores, video highlights, audio play-by-play, mobile phone updates, high-quality photos, and more. It seems ridiculous, really — but it’s not that hard to do, if you get creative with some free online tools.

2. Hyper-hyperlocal
Even the weekly Republic Monitor must cover sports in some nearby smaller towns. It’s the nature of the newspaper business that they need to sell copies in those other communities. I had the luxury of building an audience from scratch. If it doesn’t happen in Republic, I don’t cover it. If it’s not sports, I don’t cover it. Focusing so narrowly has helped me tap into the passion of the community in a way that a regional site can’t. And it opens the door for a great fit with local business sponsors, some of whom have already signed up.

3. Free stuff
I wanted to give something to the community, because this is my hometown. And because this is a hobby, I haven’t felt like I need to monetize every single thing. If I snap a good action shot, I post it to Flickr and tell the player’s parents how to download the full-size photo, put it on a thumb drive, and take it to Wal-Mart to print it. If I get a video or play-by-play highlight, I email it around. I’ve given stuff away at every opportunity.

4. Social media
On a lark, I started a Facebook fan page for the site and emailed a few friends. Within a few weeks, it had several hundred fans. Now, that number is around 1,000. In a town of 14,000, that’s not too shabby.

In fact, the Facebook page is now the primary place where people see and interact with the content. Interaction with my audience on Facebook is off the charts. I get way more feedback on the Facebook page than on the website itself. And Facebook allows me to deliver updates right into the news feeds of fans, instead of waiting for them to come to the website.

I don’t know where this site is headed. But less than a year in, it’s far more popular than I expected. And I built it with a WordPress theme, an iPhone, a Facebook fan page, and a few free social media tools. I have a few generous sponsors who helped me buy a nice camera and pay for some bandwidth. And I’ll have enough left over for a gadget or two. All without really putting much effort into selling the site.

But the most important ingredient has been the passion of the community for local sports. Tapping into that community passion makes hyper-local sports a major opportunity for people who are willing to put in a little work and be creative.

If you have questions about how it’s worked in Republic, I’d love to hear from you. You can email me at david@republictigersports.com.

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

Hyperlocal Sports: Tapping Into Hometown Passion

You might be able to skip the scanner and listen online via the Radio Reference web site, a portal for all things related to emergency radio communications.

Radio Reference offers links to online feeds of hundreds of emergency radio frequencies across the U.S. and in dozens of other countries, too. You can see what’s available by starting at the site’s Live Audio page. You’ll land on a U.S. map, but there’s a “Country” dropdown on the left for folks elsewhere in the world.

In my home state of Washington, the map shows that live audio is available for most of the highly-populated areas of the state.

By the way, this is the audio source used in the Emergency Radio iPhone app that I wrote about last year here on HLB. So, whether you’re at home or out and about, you can keep up with what’s happening around town and make sure that your blog has the latest news at all times.

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

Skip the Scanner – Get Emergency Audio Online

So, if people are more interested in coupons, should your hyperlocal blog help them find what they’re looking for? If you think so, let me suggest CouponMap as probably the easiest way to add coupons to your blog. The site is primarily a coupon search engine, but it also offers a super-easy-to-embed widget that you should be able to add to your in about three minutes.

Here’s how it works…

Start on the CouponMap widget page, which looks like this:

You can center the map on any zip code, landmark, or street address. I started out by using my local zip codes, then moved the map around to see where the best concentration of coupons was. I chose an address in the center of that map and set it as my center point. You can customize height and width to fit your blog, and adjust the border of your map, too.

You’ll end up with about 10 lines of javascript code that can be embedded anywhere on your blog. I chose to make new blog pages, but you could put the map in your sidebar if you prefer. Here’s what the implementation looks like on our Kennewick real estate blog:

Each icon is a coupon; click it and the coupon detail pops up in the same way you’re familiar with from using Google Maps. The coupons I’ve found are coming from sites like Restaurant.com, Valpak.com, GoGrocery, and others. If you go to CouponMap.com, you can click “Coupon Providers” in the upper right to see more sources.

I’ve installed coupon pages on three of our four local blogs:

• Kennewick Coupons
• Richland Coupons
• Pasco Coupons

The fourth city, West Richland, doesn’t have enough of a retail base to justify adding the map. But these are small towns I’m dealing with. Take a look at the Seattle map I’ll embed below:

Pretty nice, isn’t it? I think adding a map like that on your blog can be a real valuable content addition.

What are your thoughts? Is this something you’d consider adding to your blog? Comments are open for your pros and/or cons.

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

CouponMap: Easy Way to Add Coupons to Your Blog