Hyperlocal Blogging: Successes and Failures So Far
by Matt on Aug 29, 2008 in Blogging
This is Part Five of a series on Starting a Hyperlocal Blog. Please visit that page for links to the full series of articles.
How do you measure the success of your blog? There are lots of ways to do it: number of feed readers, number of comments, unique visitors, page views, and many more. This is something I’m still wrestling with on our four hyperlocal blogs: What should we consider a success? The end goal is to help Cari’s real estate business, but it’s often difficult to directly tie a client/closing to a blog. When Cari asks how her clients found her, one of the most common recent answers is, “You’re all over the Internet.”
Love the sentiment, and it tells me we’re doing something right … but what?!? Measuring the successes and failures of four new local blogs has been very frustrating. But measure we must. Unless you’re blogging without a purpose (some people do), you simply must know what’s working and what’s not.
My wife and I don’t consider ourselves experts on hyperlocal blogging. We’re still learning with each passing month. We’re still trying new content ideas, new marketing and outreach ideas. And the blogs are so new, I hesitate to draw any solid conclusions pro or con to what we’ve done. But I do think we’ve had a few successes to go along with several failures.
Our Successes
1.) Acquiring clients. I mentioned this briefly above: Cari has had 4-5 prospects/clients call her, and when she asks how they found her, they’ve said, “You’re all over the Internet.” Unless they can give us a more specific answer, I have to assume some of that is related to finding the blogs when using Google, Yahoo, or MSN Live search. Which leads to….
2.) Occasionally strong rankings for [cityname real estate] keywords. All four blogs have solid rankings in Yahoo for their primary keywords. All four have bounced in and out of Google’s upper echelon, which is no surprise. Volatility in Google is quite common for new sites. Each spot the blogs have high in the rankings is one spot a competing real estate agent doesn’t have.
3.) The baseball links. I mentioned the story in yesterday’s article about shooting some minor league baseball video and turning it into a few links to one of the local blogs. I want to do more of that when possible.
4.) Getting blog traffic by targeting keywords related to local news and local events. This has been one of the real revelations for me from our experiment: It’s often quite easy to get traffic by writing about things happening around town because people are actually searching for anything and everything under the sun. Let me explain with this example:
In late May, I wrote a post previewing a popular West Richland event called Hogs and Dogs. (Don’t laugh.) The event would happen on June 19. I didn’t think much of that blog post until I checked our Google Analytics in late June:
We weren’t breaking any traffic records before the event, but still … that spike shows a tenfold spike in traffic on the day before and the day of the event. And the majority of that was Google referral traffic. What were the keywords that drove all that traffic? Have a look:
That’s just the top ten. Get this: The top 22 keywords driving traffic were all related to Hogs and Dogs. The main takeaway for me here is that people are actively searching for hyperlocal information and content.
We’ve seen smaller spikes from writing about other local news and events on our four blogs. People want local content, and I count situations like this, where we gave them what they wanted (even if it didn’t lead to a real estate transaction) a success.
Our Failures
There are many. Some more important than others, but they all bother me to some degree. In no particular order:
1.) Having to use a .net domain for Pasco. It would be so much easier to be able to say all four blogs are “cityname real estate .com”.
2.) Missing local events. We didn’t attend the two biggest events in the Tri-Cities each year: Hydroplane races on the Columbia Fair, and the Benton-Franklin Fair. Ugh. Some local journalists we are.
3.) Not writing frequently enough. We’ve had some stretches of 2-3 weeks without a post on one of the blogs. That doesn’t help from either a user or a search engine perspective.
4.) Cari being too busy to write much real estate content. This is a nice problem to have, but it still means the blogs are not as good and well-rounded as they should be.
(These next three are all related.)
5.) Not connecting with local people enough. Chatting with the Tri-Cities Flickr group has been good and enjoyable, but there are other ways we can be seeking out and connecting with local people, both online and offline.
6.) Not connecting with local bloggers. One of the primary rules of starting a blog is to get active in your blog community. We’ve done jacksquat on this point, and it shows in our lack of traffic, poor diversity of inbound links, and so forth.
7.) Not promoting the blogs offline hard enough. I have several ideas for this, like creating separate MOO mini-cards for each blog, so that we can give them out at local school/PTO events, at ballgames, and so forth.
Like any small business or small biz blogger, many of these failures are about one thing: time. Cari’s super busy with real estate, PTO, and being a mom. I’m busy with work, my U2 sites, my blogs, and being a dad. I’d like to find time to turn these failures into successes.
Final Thoughts
Most of us are new to hyperlocal blogging — or, at least to using hyperlocal blogs as a business tool. It’s such a young niche that we all get to write our own paths to success, and learn from each other along the way. As I said in the first post this week, my hope is that you’d learn something from seeing how we launched our local blogs — even if you learn to do things differently!
I know this much: Writing this series has been educational for me. It’s forced me to step back and think about why we made certain decisions and analyze the impact of those decisions. It’s forced me to take a Big Picture look at what we’ve done right, and where we’ve fallen short. I think we’ll be better local bloggers moving forward. I hope you will be, too.
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11 Responses to “Hyperlocal Blogging: Successes and Failures So Far”
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[...] Monday: Planning A Hyperlocal Blog Strategy Tuesday: Setting Up a Hyperlocal Blog (or Four) Wednesday: Content Development for Our Hyperlocal Blogs Thursday: Marketing A Hyperlocal Blog Friday: Hyperlocal Blogging: Successes and Failures So Far [...]
Congratulations on the conclusion of this great series, Matt. Your honesty and transparency about the challenges inherent in starting a hyperlocal blog are what I have valued most in this series. It helps to set reasonable expectations for success and I think for newcomers to see that even an old-hand like yourself has to struggle a bit with this will be very reassuring.
You’ve given some really excellent tips. Thanks, Matt!
Miriam
Thanks so much, Miriam. “Struggle” is the right word — that’s what we’re doing right now, but hopefully we’ll get things going in the right direction soon.
[...] Hyperlocal Blogging: Successes and Failures So Far [...]
[...] Hyperlocal Blogging: Successes and Failures So Far [...]
[...] part five of my Starting A Hyperlocal Blog series, I mentioned that one of our failures was the local of [...]
I have really enjoyed your series and it has been helpful to me. I too have been working on my hyper-local site for about a month and a half now. I’m starting to get a little traffic and have just found myself on page 14 of Google for my main keyword. I should steadily climb and my traffic should increase. Just today I used your suggestion and found a Flickr group for my hometown. On my site, I have a “Photo of the Day” feature and hopefully this group will take advantage of it. Feel free to contact me and I would be glad to share any of my successes with you. I’m going to go heavy on video and multimedia on my site. I already have a paid offline job as a result of one of my videos on the site. Our local University has also contacted me and inquired about advertising on the site. Good luck with yours. I subscribed to keep up with you also.
Steve
I love that “photo of the day” idea, Steve — very smart. How many members are in the local Flickr group? Ours is still kinda small, and some of the photogs I’ve approached about using photos are hesitant because there’s an underlying commercial nature to our blogs … trying to promote my wife’s real estate business.
Steve – I’d welcome a guest blog post from you (and anyone else reading this) here on Hyperlocal Blogger about your experiences starting a local blog, successes, failures, tips, you name it.
There are only about 10 members, but it’s a start. I joined the group and sent a group message as to what I wanted to do. I went ahead and posted one of my own photos to the group so they would see that I was serious.
I’m also a real estate agent but our market has been so bad, I needed to find other sources of income. if you look at the top of my site, you will see a button “Ask an Agent”. This will eventually feature a local real estate expert answering questions with a lead capture system. Once my site and traffic grows, this section will hopefully generate one source of income for me. A realtor will have to pay me for sponsorship of this section. In return for sponsorship, I will feature the agent and will most likely produce at least one video per month of the agent’s choosing.
[...] events that happen every year. (I talk a bit more about the success of our event-based posts in part five of the hyperlocal blogging series from last year.) Of course, if these are annual events, we end up [...]
I just read the entire series and it is enlightening. Thanks for sharing!
I have a customer in the Real Estate business in Puerto Vallarta (Mexico) who will really benefit from your insights about hyperlocal blogging.