Promoting Local Blogs Offline: MOO Cards
One thing that separates us local bloggers from many other bloggers is that we absolutely must promote our local blogs offline, in our local communities. If you expect to grow a local blog with nothing but online promotions, I think you’ll be disappointed with your growth rate.
In part five of my Starting A Hyperlocal Blog series, I mentioned that one of our failures was the local of offline promotion of our four hyperlocal blogs. Now, a couple months later, we’ve finally taken the first step toward changing that:
These are MOO Business Cards, made from a selection of my own Tri-Cities photos already posted on Flickr. Awesome.
(They’re printed by Moo.com over in England. We ordered them nine days ago and they arrived today. I’m such a fan that the link in the previous paragraph is an affiliate link. The printing is top-notch and the card paper stock is higher quality than any business card I’ve ever touched. I ordered 50 cards for $22; you can get 200 for $70.)
When Cari and I attend local events going forward, we’ll have these cards with us to give out to people we meet. I’d like to think the local photography will catch someone’s eye and hold their interest; these cards should be conversation pieces. And the local blog promotion happens on the back side of each card:
We made the decision to promote all four local blogs on each card. I don’t know yet if that’s the right way to do it. Part of me wonders if we should promote each blog on the back of separate cards; i.e., show the West Richland Real Estate Blog URL only on the back of cards with photos of West Richland. Maybe we’ll do that with the next batch of MOO business cards. I think having all four on each card will be okay because the Tri-Cities is small enough that what happens in Pasco is also interesting to people in Kennewick, and so forth.
Those details aside, I’m excited to start sharing these cards with others in our area and seeing if it helps promote our local blogs. I’ll report any good stories in future blog posts.
Your Turn: How do you promote your local blog offline? Do you have business cards, or do you use other methods?
Going Hyperlocal on Facebook
Last month on my Small Business Search Marketing blog, I included Facebook in a post about social sites for local networking … but William Perrin, a hyperlocal publisher over in England, takes the idea a lot further with concrete examples of how to use Facebook to build hyperlocal communities:
These Facebook groups can work powerfully with hyper or ultra local sites to cross over content and messages. I set up I Love Kings Cross as an experimental sideline to my Kings Cross community site. The 160 odd people in the Facebook group are about 75% different to the 140-odd people who sign up to my Feedburner emails from the community site.
That’s an interesting idea to me. I’ve joined the requisite local network groups on Facebook, and have installed the “Neighborhoods” app to try to find other locals (hasn’t worked), but I’ve never given any thought to setting up Facebook groups to cross-promote my hyperlocal blogs. That may be a better way to connect with local people than to wait for them to install the right Facebook apps.
William’s article is a good read. Here’s the link: Facebook and hyperlocal voice.
Submit Your Blog to EveryBlock.com
EveryBlock is a very interesting player in the hyperlocal space, and one that I’ll be watching in the future. If you blog locally about the cities that EveryBlock covers, it’s also a site that you should submit your content to for possible distribution. (more on that in a bit)
Where many hyperlocal sites focus on town-level or city-level news, EveryBlock focuses on what its name suggests: every block, every street corner in the cities where it’s available. Of course, you begin at a city page, like this one for Seattle:
See that “Explore the City” section in the upper right? You can dig into the site by neighborhood, zip code, or … get this … street. And no matter which path you choose, you might eventually land on this phenomenal content page for the 700 – 798 block of 5th Avenue North. Look at all the hyperlocal content on this page:
- nearby news articles & blog posts
- nearby fire dispatch calls
- nearby building permits
- nearby photos
- nearby liquor license actions
- nearby business reviews (from Yelp and/or Menuism)
- etc.
Amazing, isn’t it? EveryBlock has developed relationships with government agencies to tap into their databases (for restaurant inspection results, building permits, crimes, etc.). They tap into newspaper and blog content that specifically references streets, intersections, and addresses. They get local photos from Flickr’s geo-tagging system, local classifieds from Craigslist, and much more.
I recently traded emails with the founder, Adrian Holovaty, and asked him if he considers local portals like Topix.com or MapQuest as the competition:
I wouldn’t necessarily say we’re competing directly with Topix or the MapQuest Local site — only tangentially. We’re a bit more granular, in that we give news at the *block* level, or the neighborhood level, as opposed to the city level. Our closest competitors, per se, are mashups, such as crime lookups, that display specific information on maps. We’re pulling everything together in one place.
If you’re a hyperlocal blogger, the question you want answered is this:
How To Submit Your Local Blog to EveryBlock
EveryBlock does rely heavily on hyperlocal blogs in the cities the site covers. Here’s a list of EveryBlock’s Seattle news sources, and you’ll see plenty of local blogs included.
Here’s what Adrian said about getting your local blog on their radar:
Local bloggers can just drop us a quick e-mail for inclusion in our indexing process. We look for local blogs that write about specific locations, like neighborhoods, local schools/parks/restaurants/businesses, real estate, etc. Our goal is to point people at anything and everything that’s being written about in their immediate geographic area.
The email address to use is info [at] everyblock [dot] com.
If you’re curious to learn more about EveryBlock, their about page is the best place to start. Fascinating web site, I say — a great example of what hyperlocal is and can become.
MapQuest Wants Your Local Content
Local bloggers, MapQuest is looking for local content — I highly suggest you give it to them. 
Here’s the scoop: MapQuest has just launched MapQuest Local, which is essentially a local start page filled with news, events, gas prices, business listings and recommendations, weather (and more) about your hometown. You can customize your own local page to show the content you want in the layout you want.
One of the big problems with efforts like this is that they work well in big cities, but fall apart when you get to smaller towns where there’s not as much data, activity, content, and so forth. But I can report that the page for Richland, Washington — not exactly a booming metropolis — looks pretty good:
That’s a pretty full page of content; only the “City’s Best” widget comes up empty. I’m impressed. This is probably the most compelling general local content experience on the web right now.
I’m curious: How does the start page for your hometown look?
Meanwhile, we’re local bloggers and we want our content to get exposure on sites like this. Right now, MapQuest is pulling data from sources like its AOL partners, Topix (news), Flickr (photos), and so forth. But, as they explained today on the MapQuest blog, they also want to bring in additional local content:
“…we’ll be opening up MapQuest to enable you to expose your content and drive traffic directly back to your site.
If you want access to the 12th largest web site audience in the US - an audience who comes to with an interest in one or more explicit locations - bring us your feeds! Bring us your location relevant content. Bring us useful information both general and niche.”
There’s a simple sign-up form here. All they require is a name, email address, and the URL you’re submitting. You can also provide your RSS feed URL and some additional information. They also start talking about APIs, which, when I submitted our Richland blog, prompted me to include a message like this:
Guys, PLEASE, PLEASE, don’t require APIs to submit content to MapQuest Local. There are thousands of great local blogs out there written by people who know their hometowns, but have no clue what an API is.
If you’re inclined to include that message when you submit, feel free — copy and paste it exactly as is, or write something similar in your own words. Either way, just get over there and tell them about your local blog today!
More coverage:
- Mike Boland: New Local Portal on the Scene: A Conversation with MapQuest
- Greg Sterling: MapQuest Builds New ‘Local Platform’
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.
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:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pa3Z9L6WmeQ
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.)
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:
- The idea that inbound links must always be on-topic is overplayed in SEO circles. Does an on-topic link help? Of course it does. But should a local real estate agent turn down a link from, say, ESPN.com simply because it’s a sports site, not a real estate site? Of course not! If some big sports site wants to link to our baseball blog post and video, we’re all in favor of that. These Rockies’ blogs don’t compare to ESPN.com, of course, but they’re quality blogs/sites in their niche, and that’s a Good Thing where linkbuilding is concerned.
- In the real estate industry, link patterns are generally of pretty low quality. A lot of real estate linkbuilding involves reciprocal links, low-quality directory links, etc. An editorial, one-way link from an off-topic blog will probably count for more than those low-level link trades other agents are doing.
- This is especially true in a smaller area like ours, where so many real estate sites are poorly optimized and get few, if any, links.
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:
- 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.
- Placeblogger - This is a more traditional directory for hyperlocal blogs.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
- Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter might also offer ways to find people near you; TwitterLocal is a good place to start.
- 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.
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