Occasionally, you’ll still see comments by newspaper traditionalists advocating radical measures (government support, etc.) to save newspapers, based on the claim that only newspapers do original reporting. There was an element of that inherent in the recent Pew Report, for example, that attempted to analyze news coverage in Baltimore. (More on that in a bit.)
We believe there’s a false assumption there—that only newspapers are doing original reporting, or are the only ones capable of it. We think that’s wrong: independent journalists, publishing digitally on entrepreneurial local sites, are doing important original reporting, as well.
We were reminded of that the other day with this story by the Broward Bulldog, breaking news of a $170 million Ponzi scheme in South Florida (one of three or four uncovered there in the past year). Notice that the story didn’t break in the dominant local traditional media in South Florida: the Miami Herald, Palm Beach Post or Sun-Sentinel. It was broken by an independent site.
The story came from spadework by Dan Christensen, editor and publisher of the Broward Bulldog. Dan is a longtime investigative reporter at the Sun-Sentinel, the Daily Business Review and most recently the Miami Herald. He left the Herald last year in one of the buyout waves, and launched the Bulldog, a non-profit site dedicated to public-interest reporting. He’s held in such regard in South Florida journalism circles that the Sun-Sentinel didn’t chase the story itself—it used a content-sharing arrangement with Christensen to simply pick up the story, complete with byline and link to the Bulldog, for its own editions.
Christensen’s Bulldog is a sterling example of the emerging local-news ecosystem—a passionate, highly skilled independent digging out stuff that other media miss. It’s hardly an isolated example. Jan Schaffer’s J-Lab and Outside.in, among others, are tracking the rise of literally thousands of sites focused on community journalism, launched by laid-off pros or just people who worried that their community wasn’t getting covered the way it used to.
Want some more examples? In Baltimore, Fern Shen’s excellent BaltimoreBrew.com regularly breaks news that only later shows up in the much-diminished Baltimore Sun. In Virginia, the AnnandaleVA blog, written by Ellie Ashford, is tracking stories about major local real estate developments that have eluded The Washington Post and even community newspapers.
This is why we’re so bullish about the potential for entrepreneurial journalism startups to fill the increasingly gaping holes in local coverage. These replacements aren’t all here yet—Clay Shirky is on to something when he talks about the threat of a journalistic Dark Age while a new news ecosystem coalesces. But there already are myriad examples of news sites filling the gaps. Last June, GrowthSpur’s Mark Potts detailed how a raft of entrepreneurial sites in Baltimore—including Baltimore Brew—are providing a new layer of local coverage in that city (in spite of what the Pew Report would have you believe). That pattern is being repeated elsewhere, with some cities now seeing dozens and even hundreds of community sites joining the fray.
Our charge at GrowthSpur is to help to provide a business model—including local ad-sales networks, tools and training—to support these local news startups, and that’s what we’re working hard at. Seeing great work like the above examples from Dan, Fern and Ellie gives us optimism that we’re on to something, that there’s a new local news ecosystem being born. That’s exciting news for anyone who cherishes journalism.
You’ve launched your site, your friends and family and neighbors know all about it, and now it’s time to sit back and watch it grow. Right?
Wrong.
Getting the word out about your site may be the most important—and hardest—thing you have to do to make your local site a success. It’s not as simple as telling a few people and maybe sticking up a few handbills. And it’s easy to get lulled into thinking that since everybody you know is talking about your site and telling you how much they love it, you’ve got an audience. Not true. You have to be constantly thinking of ways to publicize and market your site.
There are many ways to get the word out, and you should be doing every one you can think of. Here are five marketing and promotion ideas from the GrowthSpur team that you might try:
- Be Everywhere—You should be a ubiquitous presence in your community, showing up at local meetings, getting a booth at local festivals, even standing outside the local supermarket buttonholing passersby and handing out flyers promoting your site. Lawn signs, door hangars, flyers stuck under windshield wipes—these may seem obnoxious, but they’re a way to get the word out. You really can’t do too much.
- Practice Promiscuous Link Love—Be sure that your site is included on every blogroll of blogs and media sites in your area (and be sure to link back!). This doesn’t just help get you direct clicks from those sites; it also can improve your standing on Google and other standings, which favor sites that receive a lot of links. Needless to say, also use Facebook, Twitter and other social tools to distribute link to your site and to specific posts and features.
- Get Your Advertisers to Advertise You—If you have advertisers, ask them to promote you with a sign in their window, a link on their site, a special event, whatever. (Don’t have advertisers? Get in touch with us. GrowthSpur is here to help you find advertisers and revenue.)
- Hold Office Hours—Set yourself up in a local coffee shop or similar public place at a fixed time for a couple of hours each week. Promote your appearance on your site; put up a sign with your site’s name and logo on the table in front of you. And then interact with anybody who comes by. Talk to them about your site, find out what they think is important, invite them to visit you online. This personalizes your site for your audience, by making you a bit of a local celebrity.
- Think Outside the Box—Not just any box. This is one of our all-time favorites. TribLocal, a network of sites in suburban Chicago, promoted itself by purchasing thousands of pizza boxes with the TribLocal logo and URL, and distributed them to local pizza places for use in delivering pies to their customers. The pizza places loved it—free supplies! It wasn’t cheap (it helped that TribLocal is owned by the Chicago Tribune), but it was a great idea. Think of other useful giveaways like that to get your site’s name out to the community.
Bonus: Be patient. Your traffic is not going to grow exponentially overnight. In fact, it’s likely to seem pretty weak at first—you’ll be measuring traffic in tens of pages a day. Our experience is that it can take a year or two to ramp a site up to anything resembling critical mass, and often it takes an external event—a big local story or event like a storm or fire—to get your audience to realize that you’re there and providing great local coverage. Don’t give up. Keep plugging away. Do everything you can to get the word out. Building traffic is a long, slow, arduous process. To riff on the famous “Field of Dreams” maxim: If you build it, will they come? Only if you tell them you’ve built it—and keep telling them, over and over.
Time for our plug: Part of GrowthSpur’s training for partner sites includes lots of good ideas for building an audience. Let us show you how!
We’d love to hear your ideas for site promotion. What’s worked for you? Add your best marketing tricks to the comments and share them with other sites.
GrowthSpur’s Dave Chase, who owns and operates the very successful local site SunValleyOnline, recently upgraded the site’s content management system. In this post, adapted from Online Journalism Review, Dave discusses that transition and the criteria SunValleyOnline used in choosing its new platform. His experiences complement our earlier post that explains that you don’t need to spend big bucks to build a site.
One of the biggest early decisions a hyperlocal site entrepreneur makes is what Content Management System (CMS) they will use. This decision is similar to picking a spouse: You are going to live with your decision day and night for a long, long time. Also, similar to choosing a spouse, each person has different criteria. I will share the criteria I used for my hyperlocal site (www.sunvalleyonline.com) so that you can consider them and prioritize them based upon your needs. Think through these criteria, or your “spousal” choice may leave you feeling like Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in The War of the Roses.
Before I get into that, I will share my experience and scenario which gives you some perspective on my situation. I’m a tech industry veteran (about 25 years), though my hands-on coding experience is ancient (roughly 20 years ago). But as a non-technical person goes, I’m reasonably technical—though I’ve been on the business and editorial side of Web properties the last 15 years.
Part of my background includes being part of the early team at early local network Microsoft Sidewalk, starting in 1995. At Sidewalk, I ran a team that supported the city sites, and about half the cities reported through me. So I’ve been working with CMSs in the local arena for nearly 15 years. SunValleyOnline (SVO) has been around for about 5 years and was built on a proprietary platform that hasn’t changed in years. We are in the final stages of the transition from the old to the new site. SVO has been self-sustaining for a couple years with a small team of three people. We rely on a mix of community and staff contributions. I have personally blogged for several years and have used blogs built on Blogger and mostly WordPress. (While there’s lots of merit in WordPress and the ecosystem built around it, I felt it came up short on the criteria I established for SunValleyOnline).
Here are the criteria I used in choosing a new platform for SunValleyOnline, with a brief explanation of each. While everyone will have somewhat different criteria, I listed the items in priority order from most to least important based upon my experience and needs.
- No Developer Required: In my opinion, it is no longer necessary for 98 percent of sites to have a Web developer on staff. Fortunately, there are many off-the-shelf solutions that don’t require an in-house technologist. There may be occasional needs where a developer can be contracted to do specific work, but at the early stages of a site’s development, I think a site should be focused on doing things other than custom development. As long as your CMS has the ability to be extended and expanded later, you can defer bringing on a technologist and save yourself money. Of course, there are hyperlocal sites founded by people with technology skills, and they can certainly take advantage of that, but it’s not a requirement to get off the ground.
- Easy to Monetize: Most sites are limited to generating revenue using standard display ads. While that is the right place to start, this is a highly dynamic sector and thus it should be easy to expand your revenue base with other ad types, whether it is turning standard display ads into video ads or incorporating high-quality ad networks. It should be as easy as “copy and paste” to add these capabilities to your site.
- Open: It should be very easy to add and delete modules to a page or the entire site, such as social media features, inbound RSS feeds (i.e., pulling in a news feed from another site), and widgets of all types from weather to Flickr slideshows to polls to various monetizable elements from any number of third parties.
- Community Generated Content: It should be very easy for members of your community to contribute articles, pictures, video, classifieds, reviews, etc. The CMS should give you the ability to determine whether a specific user is able to post directly to the site or whether the contribution should go into a publication queue for review/approval. It should also allow your community to submit articles via e-mail. Among other things, this can allow them to e-mail pictures and video from their smartphones, which can be critical when there are breaking news events in your community. The CMS we picked has nailed this part. It gives someone who might be witnessing a breaking story the opportunity to submit stories to the site, including pictures (and mapping those pics). What’s more, once the article is posted, you can update it via e-mail replies from the e-mail confirmation the CMS sends when the article posts. This may be the coolest single feature the platform we chose provides.
- Off-The-Shelf Cross-Promotion: It must be easy to add features that help internal site promotion. Having features sprinkled through as site such as Most Viewed Pages, Recent Comments, Highly Rated articles and so on are very helpful at increasing the time people spend exploring your site.
- Outbound RSS: Just as you can and should pull inbound RSS feeds from complementary sites, you should also make various outbound RSS feeds available so that others can pull in your content to their pages. A CMS should automatically create a range of RSS feeds (e.g., Top Headlines, department and author specific feeds, etc.).
- Design Templates and Flexibility: CMSs usually come with pre-built templates, as well as the ability to customize the look and feel. If you don’t like the pre-built templates you can preview, ensure that the process to change the site design is straightforward. (Side note: I have, unfortunately, heard of designers charging sites thousands of dollars for a WordPress template when a few hundred dollars should get you a solid design.)
- Pictures and Video: Not only should it be easy to embed code that pulls in photos and video from sites such as Flickr and YouTube, the platform should allow you and your community contributors to upload directly to your site. Allowing users to rate photos and videos is another way to increase engagement with your community, which is vital for your success.
- Integration with Social Media: Your CMS should enable you to easily integrate with Facebook (and Facebook Connect) as well as Twitter. This includes enabling you to automatically post items to your accounts on the Social Networks, including shortening URLs (i.e., using a tool such as bit.ly). It also should be easy for your users to send articles, photos, etc. to the major social tools (Digg, StumbleUpon). Don’t forget e-mail—still the most popular way to share an article. “Send to a Friend” should be baked into the system.
- Analytics: Not only should it be easy to add third-party tracking tools such as Google Analytics and Quantcast to a site, there should also be the ability to measure success and reward contributors based upon how well read one’s contributions are.
- Events: A community-powered Events Calendar is a great way to connect with the community. Not only should a CMS have this capability, it should allow your community to easily submit events. The system should allow for plotting of the events on a map and have the basics of an Events Calendar such as support for recurring (i.e., multi-day) events.
- Classifieds: While craigslist has made it to many communities, it doesn’t work well today for hyperlocal. If you are only interested in garage sales in your immediate neighborhood, for instance, craigslist can be unwieldy. Thus, there is an opportunity to fill a niche where the big boys aren’t servicing your community very well. Naturally, having features you expect in articles (maps, photos, etc.) is important for classifieds as well.
- Maps: The importance of maps/location continues to increase with the popularity of smartphones. A smart CMS will be able to recognize a photo or Tweet having a GPS coordinate appended to it. This gives your community another way to navigate your content (via location) and becomes more important as mobile consumption increases.
- Mobile: Another item that I expect to rapidly grow in importance is mobile. A CMS that allows for your site to be easily consumed on various mobile platforms will be a big asset. At the moment, mobile requires a lot of custom development, but this should change in the relatively near future.
- Search Engine Dashboard: Not a common feature yet but one we expect to become more prevalent. Sites such as the Huffington Post are very sophisticated in analyzing search trends to drive headline selection, tagging and how visibility of articles is raised or lowered based upon search term frequency.
At the risk of sounding like a sales pitch, I was very impressed with the flexibility and extensibility of the Neighborlogs platform we chose. It met nearly all the criteria listed above. Progressively, I’m learning the platform more and more and finding more slick things it can do. If I had to summarize why it’s a great fit, is because it is purpose-built for the hyperlocal space, whereas WordPress, Drupal, Django and other options are great general-purpose systems but not geared specifically towards hyperlocal sites. Like WordPress and the others, you can’t beat the price (free). Neighborlogs currently charges only a revenue share on the self-serve ads that are purchased through their advertising tool.
To provide a bit of balance, let me share some areas of constructive criticism for Neighborlogs. The platform developers are running their own hyperlocal site and local network and are very busy. They aren’t always quick to respond, though it’s certainly better than WordPress, where you just have a developer community and no dedicated team to support you unless you hire your own team. There are a few items that are not perfect in how Neighborlogs pulls in RSS feeds and the accompanying social media features. Their ad system isn’t as robust as some of the ad servers out there, but the shortcomings weren’t dealbreakers for us. Being a relatively new company and platform, there’s always the risk that Neighborlogs wont survive, but, as good of a job as they have done, I think others will discover the benefits themselves.
Overall, I’d encourage people to clearly define their own criteria. My criteria aren’t applicable to everyone. Establishing your own will greatly increase the chances you’ll be happy long-term. I encourage others to share their experiences, good or bad, with various CMSs they have used. I also welcome feedback on our new site. What works for you and what doesn’t?
We had so much response to our first two introductory webinars last week that we’ve scheduled another, at 3 p.m. Eastern/2p Central/1p Mountain/Noon Pacific, Thursday, Jan. 21. Drop us a note at info@growthspur.com if you’re interested in participating.
The webinar is a chance for you to hear how we work with local community site operators to turn their great content into sustainable businesses. The webinars have been fascinating for us as well, beyond the chance to interact with smart folks. We’ve heard questions and wrinkles that we hadn’t heard before, which is always helpful as we refine our ideas. But more to the point, they’ve served to confirm that we’re onto something. There’s real growth in the number and type of local sites seeking to supplement (and replace) declining traditional media—and terrific folks who will be able to succeed and turn them into money-making businesses if they just get a little help.
That’s what we do at GrowthSpur, supplying tools, training and local ad-sales networks to support local sites. So if you want to learn more, send us a note with a bit of information about you and your local site to info (AT) growthspur (DOT) com. Incidentally, if you miss the Webinar, not to worry—we’ll make an archived version available.
Want to Start a Local Site? It’s Easy. And Cheap. (Don’t Let Anybody Tell You Otherwise)
The conversation usually begins like this: ”I want to start a local news site/niche site/community blog.”
We get this a lot. Helping local sites is our business, after all. But the conversation often goes as predictably as a bad summer action flick, right down to the multiple-choice bits of dialogue:
Well, we say, you should just go ahead and start that local-news startup/niche site/personal blog.
“No, you don’t understand,” comes the response. “I know nothing about the technology. Where do I find a designer/tech coder/webmaster? And I don’t have much money! How can I afford all this?!” Or they say, “I’ve budgeted $5,000/$15,000/$25,000 to build the site; there’s a hot-shot local programmer/Web designer who is going to build it for me with all sorts of bells and whistles.”
Hold on. It’s really not that hard to start. And it certainly doesn’t have to be that expensive. In fact, you can start a perfectly good, fully featured site for nothing, with no programming skills, in just a few hours.
The secret is do to it using free (or nearly free) tools. You don’t need to hire anyone. You don’t need to buy any software. You certainly don’t need to spend a lot of money. You don’t even need a technical person—though if you want some technical help, there are some excellent online forums with people who will answer your questions for nothing.
This is the magic of templated and open-source content management and blog platforms, which have transformed publishing on the Web in the past few years. Free, or nearly free, these systems today outperform the content-management systems that companies routinely spent $1 million a year on a few years back.
Which systems? Check out blog platforms such as WordPress or Movable Type (aka TypePad), or more slightly sophisticated publishing software such as Drupal or Joomla. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, but any of them will probably fill your needs—and one of them definitely can.
Once you pick one of these platforms, look through the free and low-cost designs—called “themes”—that are readily available for each. There are thousands of them, and most can be easily adapted and modified to look unique. Snazzy add-ons like calendars, maps, video players and many more are all available.
This means you can launch a solid-looking site for free, or just a few bucks a month. If you want to tweak it to look even better, you can either do it yourself (with the help of those online forum friends we mentioned)—or hire someone for just a few hundred bucks. In other words, you do not need to spend tens of thousands on something that is custom-built.
Want specifics? Plenty of free advice and tutorials for launching a site are available online. Try starting at J-Lab’s J-Learning “Newspaper in a Box” site. Or click one of the tools links above and take a test drive. (Warning: Sales pitch coming.) We don’t do content-management systems at GrowthSpur, but we do offer guidance and step-by-step instructions for creating successful sites in our “cookbook,” the site operations and training manual that we’re making available only to our partners. We’ll also providing a pile of other tools, training and services to make a simple local site into a business. Drop us a note at info@growthspur.com to find out more. (End pitch.)
Want to get going as a local publisher? Just dive in. It’s really not that hard to get started.
Robert Niles, at Online Journalism Review, has a brilliant post about how journalism today requires community organization skills. This is essential reading for anybody running—or thinking about starting—a local site. As Robert says, journalism is no longer about simply reporting the news; it’s about reaching out to the audience, creating a sense of community, listening to what people are talking about, and helping to facilitate the conversation.
The first step in community organizing is to listen. By inviting guests posters on to your site, you show that you are willing to not only listen to other voices in your online community, but to amplify them. That takes you into the second step in community organizing, building relationships. … Start by participating in other, established online communities, such as Huffington Post. Get to know people there, listen, then find a voice within that community and start building relationships. That experience will help in organizing one’s own community, and might help recruit a few readers and participants to that new community, as well.
Robert also makes a point that underlies why GrowthSpur is trying to help local sites turn themselves into successful businesses:
You’ll need that community for more than an audience. You’ll need customers, too – the people who will write the checks that keep you working. You’ll have to organize that community as well.
This is one of the most important posts about the changes in the practice of modern journalism—made possible by the powerful communication tools of the Internet—we’ve read in a long time. It’s worth spending some time with. He concludes:
Know what you’re doing online. Embrace community organizing; create value for a community… and only you will find a community that will value you.
We’ve gotten a ton of inquiries about how GrowthSpur can help local sites make money, and we’re already hard at work with our first sites. If you’re a local site operator and want to know more about how GrowthSpur can help you monetize your business, we’re holding a series of informational Webinars in early January. Drop us a note at info_at_growthspur.com and we’ll send you more information about how to participate. We’re looking forward to talking with you!
Digital media pioneer—and GrowthSpur senior advisor—Jeff Jarvis has an interesting post in his Guardian column describing some of the findings of a study by his New Business Models for News Project at CUNY. Upshot:
Some hyperlocal bloggers, serving markets of about 50,000 people, are bringing in up to $200,000 a year in advertising. These are sustainable businesses and we believe they are critical elements of the future of local news.
Moreover, the CUNY research shows that these early success stories probably won’t be outliers:
After three years, we project that a blogger could hire editorial staff and advertising help – citizen salespeople who help support the citizen journalists – and net $148,000 out of $332,000 revenue. That’s a conservative estimate when you consider that a community weekly paper in such a town probably earns between $2m-$5m.
GrowthSpur’s assumptions are similar. We believe that a combination of local ad networks, smart tools and good sales training can make local community sites into good revenue generators, at $100,000 or more per year. CUNY’s projections are higher, but we erred on the conservative side. That said, we don’t have any quibble with the CUNY estimates.
For the thousands of hyperlocal sites and local blogs already in existence—and the thousands more to come—we believe that there’s a viable business. You just have to know where to find it. GrowthSpur is here to help.
There’s a good essay—accompanied by vibrant comments—at MediaPost about the perceived evils of online advertising networks. It’s entitled “Ad Networks are for Idiots—And Here’s The Math to Prove It,” and that gives you a pretty good idea of its argument.
Indeed, most ads placed on sites by online networks are pretty crappy (“Lose Weight in 30 Days!”), and pay equally lousy revenue to site operators. As MediaPost reports, remnant ads that flood sites from ad networks pay a 27-cent CPM (cost per thousand), while ads sold directly by premium sites bring in more than average CPMs of more than $20. That’s a huge difference.
We’re watching the debate over networks with great interest at GrowthSpur, because a big part of what we’re doing is building ad networks for local sites. But the networks we’re building are nothing like the networks described by MediaPost.
Rather than pushing lowest-common-denominator national ads into local sites, GrowthSpur’s networks will ties together groups of sites in specific local markets. Those sites will sell ads themselves to local businesses who want to reach readers on all of sites in a local network. So instead of generic “Thin Thighs in 30 Days!” ads, a GrowthSpur partner can sell an ad to Joe’s Pizza that will run on multiple local sites serving actual local customers that Joe’s Pizza wants to reach. Big difference: Local ads, sold to local advertisers, by local sites, for local audiences.
In other words, rather than taking tawdry, generic network ads that pay pennies, sites in our local networks will be getting highly relevant ads from local businesses. They’ll be selling ads to businesses they know well and deal with regularly. And they’ll be able to offer advertisers broader local audiences via these local networks—and get a whole lot more than 27 cents for their efforts. We think that’s a win for everybody involved.
Local ad networks are just part of the GrowthSpur program. We’re also starting to work with local sites on providing tools and training to help them make money. But with ad networks being lambasted in articles like the one in MediaPost, we thought it was worth pointing out why the local networks GrowthSpur is assembling are different and better. A lot better.
We’ve been thrilled and humbled by the response we’ve gotten to the announcement of GrowthSpur. We’re being flooded with inquiries from sites looking for our help (please keep ‘em coming!), and we’re going to sort through them and prioritize them as quickly as we can. We’re planning to create a variety of programs to work with sites of different types and sizes, and we’ll have information on that here as it develops. We’re also hearing from vendors interested in working with sites that are GrowthSpur partners, and we’ll be setting up those relationships, too, as part of our offerings to sites.
GrowthSpur has also received some very flattering press, blog and analyst mentions, which we greatly appreciate. Three particularly detailed and thoughtful write-ups: Jon Fine in BusinessWeek, Greg Sterling in Screenwerk and Peter Krasilovsky in the Kelsey Group’s blog. They help us more fully explain what we’re trying to do, and raise good issues, as well, that we’re working hard to deal with to help make local blogs more successful. That’s why GrowthSpur exists.
Finally, we’ll be using this blog to periodically talk about smart strategies for growing local traffic and revenue, and to feature local sites that are doing particularly good work. And we’ll keep you posted on our progress. Please watch this space!
