Local Newspaper Reprints Blog Post

After the last week of rants concerning some roadblocks a group in the local Farmington area were trying to put up for Big River Telephone moving to the area I have to give a thanks to the Farmington Press and Daily Journal newspapers.

Last week I discussed my feelings on the topic on both my radio show and then made a post on my blog, typically I do not talk local government or topics on here but in this case I felt it important to use whatever voice I had to help.

Last week MyMoInfo.com posted a news story with excerpts from my show concerning Big River Telephone and this week the Farmington Press and Daily Journal reprinted my blog post. I appreciate them taking the space (a full page outside of the ads) to print my opinion on the topic.

Big River Telephone President, Kevin Cantwell, presents his plan in a city council meeting this evening and will lay out the plans for development of the building they are looking to acquire and what jobs (and economic development) it will bring to the area. Should be interesting, I am sure the opposition will be there but the very large majority can see the value in helping bring quality jobs to the area and see the BIGGER picture in what development of technology related jobs can do to an area such as this.

Few Website Visitors To Rural Newspaper Websites

Tonight I decided to do some competitive analysis comparing traffic to certain towns and areas in Missouri to the competing newspaper website in the area.

I had done this for a few towns before but this time I did so on a larger scale, I cannot say I looked at every newspaper site but enough where I could spot trends in data enough where I felt comfortable making certain assumptions.

Well, a couple things were made real clear:

• Sites that had RSS feeds and were open to syndication had more traffic than those that did not, this makes sense to me but knowing how the media industry feels about that it does not surprise me that many do not offer RSS feeds.
• In the cases that it was evident they were doing other things to promote the site (i.e .promoting it in their own paper...) there was more traffic.

Without a doubt as rural broadband stimulus pushed broadband deeper into the rural areas these newspaper companies are going to falter fast, right now the rural papers are the only ones holding steady but from talking to small businesses the desperation is even starting to be felt in the small areas.

To give you an idea of how low the traffic stats are, a really large portion of the sites had Alexa rankings of 20 million to 10 million, the next larger amount was between 7 to 5 million. VERY few had Alexa rankings below 1 million. The ones that did were major cities.

To be honest I am not a fan of Alexa rankings since I have enough sites to see how the data can be skewed, but in a case like this where the user base is pretty non-tech savvy the rankings cannot be gamed, makes for a cleaner set of data, but still not perfect, but fine for this test.

Now, what may not be clear is that many of these newspapers cover more than one county, so it is not like the customer base is only 5 thousand people.

One thing I did find is the sites that have taken the time to form community/social interactions on the site are fairing much better.

If these sites cannot figure out how to bring more than a few visitors to their site a day they will not be able to keep advertisers, it is obvious they are fighting the battle to keep the status quo and if they do not figure something out quick they may be gone faster than we expected.

It may sound like I look forward to that, I do not, as much as I am building a business to take advantage of the shift it is actually a bit sad to see an industry fall apart because they refused to innovate and I do think their will be some quality journalism that suffers because of this.

One interesting note is I found one local newspaper in a town of less than 9000 that had an Alexa below 300K but then one in a town of over 30K that had an Alexa around 7 million. Seems if you have a plan and the community gets behind it you can get traction. Small town or not people are online and broadband is coming fast.

How Social Media Helps Website Marketing

One of the things I was curious to see was how much traffic I could get to my new Hyperlocal SEO site that I launched a few days back. As with any new site getting awareness and traffic to it can be a challenge unless you are putting an advertising budget in place.

With this site though I thought it would be a valuable tool to see what having an established blog along with Twitter and Facebook could do. As someone who has seen the benefits of what it can do for a site like this one and what I have witnessed on even small business sites in rural Missouri I knew social media can have quite the impact.

In reality I was hoping for something in the range of 50 visitors or so would be a good start for the first few days then build up links from there and continue to use Twitter and Facebook to promote new posts.

Well, I was wrong, WAY wrong.

Here is the number of visits per day:

Jan 18th (launch day, partial day) - 239

Jan 19th - 246

Jan 20th (partial, data as of 6:30 or so CST) - 155

Do you think that could of happened without the power of social media, and in this case I can see that Twitter was the larger portion of that?

The answer is no, to launch a new site in such a competitive niche as local search would of been a long process. I cannot wait to see what happens as new writers come on board.  A special thanks to George Pickering again for his commitment to contributing to the site, just wait until the blog gets put into the mix at TargetAudience.com which will have real small business owners reading it daily in their feed, nice name George is working with there, cannot wait to see how that goes!

Yellow Pages 90 Percent Discount, Really?

Just a quick post to show you how the beginning of the year is going for the Yellow Page print business. So far in the first half of January I have had 3 customers tell me they have pulled their complete PRINT Yellow Page budget and a few more tell me that if they were in multiple Yellow Page (i.e. Yellowbook, etc) they have brought it down to one.

Well, today one of our really great customers came by to tell us something a bit interesting and I am sure if any of you have current Yellow Page spend and have not committed one way or the other for this years budget you will have happening soon, he got a call from his account manager stating they are offering a 90 PERCENT DISCOUNT for this year if he commits now.

He still said no.

I am not sure what different regions are being offered this type of discount or what level of customer, but WOW.  Aggressive.

Do you have any similar stories?

HyperlocalSEO.com Launches Today – Want to Write A Guest Blog Post?

I wanted to do a quick announcement concerning the "soft launch" of HyperlocalSEO.com. I had been contemplating launching a separate blog focused more on local seo and local search in general but wanted to make sure that I could put in the time necessary.

Well, the great news is thanks to George Pickering from LocalExperts.com I have a solid partner in this new blog who will be doing posts as well. George is a true success story in the development of geo targeted niche sites that generate real business for his customers.

Between the two of us plus a some articles some of my team will be doing I expect this blog to do quite well and provide valuable information to small businesses looking to grow their business online and take advantage of local search growth and the trend towards more hyperlocal content.

One of the problems with launching my initial blog on BruceMarler.com is I could not really have multiple writers on the site, with the launch of HyperlocalSEO.com I envision overtime having a group of contributors that all benefit from the successful site and I will just be one small piece of it.

There may not be much up there right now but look for tons more coming soon.

If you have interest in the local seo or geo targeted search market and would like to do a guest blog post or be an author on the site shoot me a message.