Providing people with valuable information has always been part of a good online marketing strategy. Some holds true for local businesses as well.

-Keith

Although I guess that wouldn’t be adequate for “hyper” blogging, real estate style, since, as I understand it a hyperblog should probably focus on smaller neighborhoods each having its own hyper-identity.

I readily admit this is all just theoretical for me. I think you’d have to be pretty motivated to do serious hyperblogging. I try to imagine my “clients” (two sons and a son in law) in the real estate business doing the leg work involved in serious hyperblogging – covering local school graduations and community fireworks displays, taking photos of local places and things, etc., etc. – and I just can’t see it happening. The payback is much too long term and much too indefinite. As you have said, other priorities come along and you end up not posting for a few weeks.

I’m still a believer, but it is probably unrealistic to think that people with little interest or experience in media, writing, photography, etc. would be good hyperbloggers – or bloggers of any kind, for that matter. Which of course leaves an opening for the professional hyperblogger. But is your typical real estate agent prepared to pay the price? I don’t know.

On your question about one blog versus four — if this were a single city with multiple neighborhoods, we’d probably have done it that way. But this is four separate cities and the cities here are very unique, very distinct, separated by rivers, etc. People in City A aren’t all that interested in the daily routine of stuff happening in City B. Certainly you’re right that managing one blog is easier than four, but in our case we felt it made sense to do this differently, and the results we have been able to measure (despite the failings mentioned above) tell me that we made the right decision. One blog for each city.

I’m not so sure about the “4 blogs for 4 different keyword sets” thing. One of the strengths of blogs is that they can cover a wide range of keywords because of categories and tags. The most valuable searches find individual posts with specific keywords in the titles, tags, etc. and for those it doesn’t matter what blog they are found in.

In fact one would think a larger blog with more content, focused on a region, would do better. From the get go it has a larger pool of potential readers, therefore potentially more traffic, and ultimately more “authority”. This would be shared with all the posts, if I am correct.

In other words, a blog focusing on a specific city could include “hyper” sections for neighbourhoods and kill many birds with one stone.

Have you gained any user generated content from your Hyper local blogs?