Content Idea: Local Flu Shot Information
This is one of those I totally didn’t expect this, but it’s cool! kind of discoveries, and I think it’s worth passing along at this time of year.
About a month ago, I wrote almost identical blog posts about flu shots on three of our four hyperlocal blogs. You can see them here:
- Richland flu shots, which currently ranks #1 on Google
- Kennewick flu shots, which also ranks #1 on Google
- Pasco flu shots, which currently ranks #3
I didn’t think much of those posts at the time, especially since there’s almost no substance there — just some date, cost, and location information. So you can imagine my surprise when I was looking at Google Analytics for those three blogs and saw all kinds of flu-related keywords bringing search engine traffic to the blogs. Have a look:
(click for larger version)
These posts didn’t bring in a ton of new traffic, but I’m not gonna complain about any unexpected new visitors we get. Are you? I guess the lesson here, which should’ve been obvious before I looked at our analytics, is that people are searching for local health information on the web. As a local blogger, you’re in position to give it to them.
What to do: Check your local County Health Department web site, or call them, to find out if there are any planned flu shots coming up in your area. Blog about it. And, if you get some new search engine traffic, leave me a note in the comments. 
Hyperlocal Content Idea: Political Interviews
Quick post to remind folks in the U.S. that right now offers a golden opportunity to get some great hyperlocal content on your blog(s) by interviewing the winning (and maybe even the losing) candidates from this week’s elections. Catch the winners soon while they’re still basking in the glow of winning the election, and anxious to please/reach out to their constituents.
- Ask your new city councilperson about fitting in, about local issues like traffic, crime, or whatever else matters.
- Ask your new school board member about educational funding, standardized testing, etc.
- Ask your returning county commissioner what s/he still hopes to accomplish after so many years in office.
The opportunities are endless. And now’s the time to jump on them. (Actually, local political interviews would have been a great idea pre-election, too, and I would’ve written this sooner, except I’ve been fighting the flu on and off for about two weeks and am just now getting back to full speed.)
Your Turn: Did you do any local election interviews on your hyperlocal blog? Or did you create any political content? How’d it turn out?
outside.in Launches Blogger Map Widget
Let’s continue the “adding maps to your hyperlocal blog” theme on HyperlocalBlogger.com, which is almost all I’ve been writing about lately, it seems.
The latest entry into this arena is outside.in, which today launched StoryMaps, a widget that maps the locations you’ve been writing about recently on your local blog.
To use StoryMaps, you’ll obviously need an outside.in account and to connect your blog into their system. After that, you can choose from one of the three pre-set widget sizes, or make a custom-sized widget that fits your local blog perfectly.
In their announcement, outside.in points out one unique feature of this widget: blog posts will no longer only be accessible in chronological order when someone visits your blog:
It’s about letting users view content in a way that makes sense to them – organized around the places each post is written about. So they not only see a current post about that place, but links to all previous posts about that location as well. That translates to a better, more full reading experience for them — and to more pageviews for the blogger.
Here, again, is the full announcement on outside.in’s blog: New Navigation & Promotion Tool for Local Sites.
MapMyPage: Great Idea, Poor Execution
Adding a map to your hyperlocal blog posts can be a great way to add extra information and context for readers. A few weeks ago, I wrote about 8 WordPress plugins that add mapping capabilities for those of us who use WordPress.
There’s a new service that brings mapping to a hyperlocal blog regardless of the platform; it’s called MapMyPage. It’s a beta product, so we know it’s still in development. I recently tested it out on our Richland Real Estate Blog. Here’s how it works, in the form of a Pros/Cons review.
MapMyPage: Pros
Installation: Installing MapMyPage is brain-dead simple, especially compared to some of the plug-ins I wrote about earlier. It’s as easy as placing a 3-4 line code snippet in the HEAD section of your blog template. If you can cut-and-paste, you can install MapMyPage.
Generally unintrusive: You’ll see some screenshots below, and I’m not sure you’ll agree with me on this. I think the implementation is mostly unintrusive. MapMyPage places a small globe into your post anywhere it recognizes a location. As the web site explains, it doesn’t underline the location or even add a globe to a location that’s linked, because it doesn’t want to interfere with the styling of your blog.
Here’s the original blog post about the upcoming Richland City Fair (link opens in a new window so you can get back easily), and here’s a screenshot of how it looked with MapMyPage installed:
Unfortunately, from the testing I did, that’s about where the Pros end. Let’s look at the problems I found.
MapMyPage: Cons
In the screenshot above, you see that the phrase “Richland City Hall” has a globe next to it — the tool recognized that as a specific location that can be mapped. But have a look at what happens when you click on the globe and the map pops-up above the blog post:
It points toward the city of Richland, Mississippi; I’m blogging about Richland, Washington. The two other Richland references in the blog post were also mapped to Mississippi. That alone is a deal-breaker for any hyperlocal blogger; you obviously can’t use a mapping tool that maps to the wrong location.
I gave it another try on a blog post (opens in new window) where specific addresses are mentioned. Here’s how it looked:
I marked three problems in the screenshot above:
- “Riverton” may be a city name somewhere, but in this case, it’s the name of a facility. There’s nothing I can do to remove that globe.
- It didn’t recognize the street addresses in the last bullet item about a new pizza restaurant.
- It did add a globe inside the reference to 1800 Bellerive Drive, which I thought was a step in the right direction … until I clicked the link and saw that, instead of recognizing the street address, it recognized Bellerive as a city in France. See below…
The MapMyPage web site shows a couple examples of exact addresses being correctly mapped, but in both cases the addresses include the full city, state, and zip code. That may be what’s needed for MapMyPage to get the geo-targeting right; but, there’s no way I’m going to start adding “Richland, WA, 99352″ to every street address I mention; it’s too awkward and redundant on a Richland blog.
Final Thoughts
I’m glad to see new tools and services that can make hyperlocal blogging an easier and more enjoyable thing for bloggers and readers. MapMyPage is a great idea, but comes up far short on execution. In my brief install, there were too many mapping mistakes to accept.
MapMyPage is still in “beta”, and hopefully will continue to develop and improve its geo-targeting before its actual launch. Some extra control for “power users” would be helpful, too — perhaps a way to preview and edit/remove the globes it places in my post before I publish.
Content Source: School ‘Key Communicator’ Networks
As a hyperlocal blogger, you know that one of your primary jobs is keeping up with (and sharing) local news and information that interests your readers. But how do you know what interests your readers? If your hometown is like mine, you may have a combination of scientists, stay-at-home moms, engineers, business people, farmers, and so forth reading your blogs — a real hodge-podge slice of local life.
Well, no matter how diverse your readership is, there’s a good chance many of them have some connection to your local school system. They may have children going to school, or nephews/nieces, or live near a teacher, or even live near a school. There’s a good chance a lot of your readership is interested in local school news.
That’s where a new trend in education comes into play:
School District “Key Communicator” Networks
Many school districts across the country are forming what they call “Key Communicator” networks. Their goal is to do a better job informing the public what’s going on with schools, the district, education programs, and so forth. The Oregon School Boards Association has a very detailed explanation of these networks and why school districts should create them. Look how they describe who “key communicators” are:
Key communicators are adults and students who talk to and are believed by many people in the community. They may or may not be in positions of authority or officially recognized leaders.
They may be barbers, beauticians and bartenders. They are frequently dentists, gas station owners, firefighters, post office clerks and news agency owners.
They may as well say “They are hyperlocal bloggers,” right? That’s almost a perfect description of local bloggers.
What This Means to Hyperlocal Bloggers
This is a new concept in the education system. From a Google search for ["key communicator" school district], I see a lot of districts that are starting these networks — but obviously there are many not doing it, too.
I recently signed up for the Key Communicator network at the school district where we live. So far I’ve received two emails, both of which seemed more like a newsletter telling me the latest district news, recapping the school board meeting, etc. There’s been no one-to-one communication and no efforts to “get the pulse” of the community (as suggested by the Oregon School Boards Assn. page linked above). But it’s new, and maybe those things will come later.
For now, being part of the network has
- helped me follow school district news, and
- given me some ideas for blog content.
As a hyperlocal blogger, I consider both of those to be Good Things. So …
Your “To Do” Item
Visit the web site(s) of your local school district(s) and poke around for information about a Key Communicator Network. It might be in the NEWS section, or maybe in the ABOUT section of their site. If you can’t find anything, look for contact information (many districts have a Communications Director) and send an email (or make a call) asking if they have such a network. If they don’t know what you’re talking about, give them that Oregon School Boards link above!
Do that for each district in the area that your local blog covers. If you can find and join these networks, you should find that you’ve discovered a good, new source of hyperlocal content.
Your Turn: Let me know if your local district(s) has one of these networks, and have you found them beneficial to your local blogging?
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.
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:
- Post regularly so we train the crawlers to start visiting the blogs consistently.
- 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:
- Traditional media: In order to write successfully about your local area, you have to know what’s happening. We read the local paper and watch local news nearly every day.
- Local RSS feeds: On a very related note, our local paper and two of our local TV stations offer news via RSS. Both Cari and I subscribe to all the feeds they offer — news, sports, business news, breaking news … you name it. You can also find local news for your town via Topix.com and the RSS feeds offered there.
- City publications: Once a month, West Richland sends us a utility bill that also includes a two-sided community news bulletin telling us about upcoming events, planned city construction, and other news. Even though we don’t live in Richland, the city sends us a guide to their summer entertainment/community services. From that, we learned about Richland’s “Live at Five” concert schedule and other things happening in the community.
- City & local web sites: These are another place to learn about what’s going on locally. Most city sites will have a section devoted to upcoming events, for example. And, just between you and me, these other local web sites are sometimes very poorly SEO’d, so it’s not difficult to overcome the natural authority they should have and get traffic on searches for local news and events.
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:
You’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:
- Local minor league baseball game: My son and I went to watch the local team play, and it just so happened that our team’s pitcher that night was the recent #1 draft pick of the Colorado Rockies — a future MLB star. I shot some video of him pitching and posted it on YouTube, then wrote a blog post talking about one of the joys of minor league baseball, the chance to see future MLB stars up close.
- Community event: The biggest annual event in my hometown involves thousands of motorcycles, a hot dog dinner, live music, and more. People come from all over the state, and attendance usually surpasses the actual city population. The whole family attended this year. I shot some photos and posted them on Flickr, then wrote a quick blog post that talked about the experience and linked to the photos.
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.
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