Throughout the reading I was impressed with Matt McGee's attempts to explain the success, and failure of his four hyperlocal blogs. He started them with his wife with the intentions of boosting her real estate business. It was a trail and error system that led to some success, but I think ultimately more failure in the end.
It was interesting to read firsthand accounts from someone who has tried, on his own, to start a hyperlocal blog. He wasn't just someone behind a desk researching all the strategies, and debating what may or may not work. He's a man that got out there, actually tried it, and is now explaining where he thinks he's gone wrong. In order to make future attempts more successful.
McGee had lots of strengths and weaknesses in his blogs. I think some of the weaknesses were that he bit off more than he could chew. He started four separate blog sites when at the end of the article he admits he barley has time for any of them.
5 Steps to Starting A Hyperlocal Blog...
Also, Matt McGee says he thought that having four different sites that
are high quality and look different would help individualize the site.
Making them look less spammy. If he had all four blogs working together
he might have been able to generate more traffic and a better
reputation for himself and his wife.
Although McGee strongly argues that he never thought twice about his domain names and naming them, city-name real estate.com, I would have to disagree with him. He has his domain names suggest one thing, but his blog is a completely different site. I feel like people might feel ticked by this and get annoyed.
I agree that the readership would identify more with a city-based domain names, but saying it's about real estate and only having stories about local events, local news, and other stories not relating to real estate gives a false impression of the website.
I don't think everything Matt McGee did was wrong though, I think he had a lot of strong and creative ideas as well. I think one of the smartest things that he and his wife did was they set up their blog in order to better there business. They had something invested in this blog and a reason to want it to succeed.
In the article Web Revenue Strategy for Hyper-Locale Media, Shields Bialasik interviewed hyper-local expert Mel Taylor who says, "At the end of the day, journalists will be best served by acting entrepreneurially, and understanding the basic tactics of online sales."
Another strong idea McGee had was reporting and targeting local interesting stories, he wrote about things people wanted to hear about. I think that if post stories that are popular business and popularity will inevitably follow.
I think a great way for our class to market our blog is to take McGee's advice when he says that you need to connect online with local residents to spread the word about your blog. I think a way for us to do that is going on sites like yelp.com. It's easy to find people who have very strong opinions about local businesses in their neighborhood.
If we targeted the people who are blogging mainly about the Gold Coast we can assume that they live in that area, and we can also assume that they like their opinions heard. I think that might be an excellent way to attract local bloggers to Gold Coast Now at the end of the quarter.
The Top 5 Lessons I Learned from Matt McGee's story are:
1) Simple, user friendly, & SEO friendly sites will attract the most users.
2) Getting search spiders to recognize your site frequently makes a huge difference in the traffic you create to your site.
3)Knowing what's happening in your community makes all the difference, it's the key to the blogs success.
4) Writing frequently will help in both a user and search engine perspective.
5) Making connections with local people on more than just an internet level will help your blogs success tremendously.
Although McGee strongly argues that he never thought twice about his domain names and naming them, city-name real estate.com, I would have to disagree with him. He has his domain names suggest one thing, but his blog is a completely different site. I feel like people might feel ticked by this and get annoyed.
I agree that the readership would identify more with a city-based domain names, but saying it's about real estate and only having stories about local events, local news, and other stories not relating to real estate gives a false impression of the website.
I don't think everything Matt McGee did was wrong though, I think he had a lot of strong and creative ideas as well. I think one of the smartest things that he and his wife did was they set up their blog in order to better there business. They had something invested in this blog and a reason to want it to succeed.
In the article Web Revenue Strategy for Hyper-Locale Media, Shields Bialasik interviewed hyper-local expert Mel Taylor who says, "At the end of the day, journalists will be best served by acting entrepreneurially, and understanding the basic tactics of online sales."
Another strong idea McGee had was reporting and targeting local interesting stories, he wrote about things people wanted to hear about. I think that if post stories that are popular business and popularity will inevitably follow.
I think a great way for our class to market our blog is to take McGee's advice when he says that you need to connect online with local residents to spread the word about your blog. I think a way for us to do that is going on sites like yelp.com. It's easy to find people who have very strong opinions about local businesses in their neighborhood.
If we targeted the people who are blogging mainly about the Gold Coast we can assume that they live in that area, and we can also assume that they like their opinions heard. I think that might be an excellent way to attract local bloggers to Gold Coast Now at the end of the quarter.
The Top 5 Lessons I Learned from Matt McGee's story are:
1) Simple, user friendly, & SEO friendly sites will attract the most users.
2) Getting search spiders to recognize your site frequently makes a huge difference in the traffic you create to your site.
3)Knowing what's happening in your community makes all the difference, it's the key to the blogs success.
4) Writing frequently will help in both a user and search engine perspective.
5) Making connections with local people on more than just an internet level will help your blogs success tremendously.
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