How would you promote a website/blog that focuses on local events. I know there is Facebook. Any other outposts that should be used?
Interesting question. The first thing that you can try, as you pointed out, is to find social networking sites and web 2.0 services that allow you to filter users by region or city.
Facebook is one of them, but you could also try Craigslist, for example. Why not post an ad saying that you are looking for readers, and in exchange you offer some engaging and interesting content?
Other services that you could try include LinkedIn, Squidoo, HubPages and so on.
If you have a marketing budget, PPC advertising would be a great way to get highly targeted traffic. With Google AdWords you would be able to specify not only the keywords that you wanted to bid for, but also to what geographical regions your ads should be showed.
Another channel that you could explore is the local Internet. That is, all the blogs, websites and online companies that focus exclusively on your region. Once you have identified those websites (Google is your friend here), it is just a matter of approaching them to see in what ways you can collaborate to increase everyone’s traffic and exposure. Banner exchanges, link exchanges, cross reviews, you just need to get creative.
As a computer consultant in a small to medium size town, I found that having a large list of local residents to email the blog info really helped. I had about 300 client’s emails and dropped a mass email encouraging them to check it out. Within a few days I had hundreds of local hits and a decent ‘buzz’ going around town about the site.
The key with this scenario, though, is having those you are emailing, trust the sender. Otherwise they will assume it’s spam. So if there was anyway for you to get a hold of local emails and present to them in such a way that feels like it’s worth the time to read the email, you might be able to get a head start. Because without that initial push, you’ll find it hard to get much of a useful ranking in Google for local searches. At least that was my own personal experience.
Finally, offline marketing can be a good investment for very local websites. Suppose you have a blog about the news of a really small city (say 20,000 people). Getting an ad on the Sunday edition of the local newspaper could yield good results, and it shouldn’t cost that much.
Interesting question. The first thing that you can try, as you pointed out, is to find social networking sites and web 2.0 services that allow you to filter users by region or city.
Facebook is one of them, but you could also try Craigslist, for example. Why not post an ad saying that you are looking for readers, and in exchange you offer some engaging and interesting content?
Other services that you could try include LinkedIn, Squidoo, HubPages and so on.
If you have a marketing budget, PPC advertising would be a great way to get highly targeted traffic. With Google AdWords you would be able to specify not only the keywords that you wanted to bid for, but also to what geographical regions your ads should be showed.
Another channel that you could explore is the local Internet. That is, all the blogs, websites and online companies that focus exclusively on your region. Once you have identified those websites (Google is your friend here), it is just a matter of approaching them to see in what ways you can collaborate to increase everyone’s traffic and exposure. Banner exchanges, link exchanges, cross reviews, you just need to get creative.
As a computer consultant in a small to medium size town, I found that having a large list of local residents to email the blog info really helped. I had about 300 client’s emails and dropped a mass email encouraging them to check it out. Within a few days I had hundreds of local hits and a decent ‘buzz’ going around town about the site.
The key with this scenario, though, is having those you are emailing, trust the sender. Otherwise they will assume it’s spam. So if there was anyway for you to get a hold of local emails and present to them in such a way that feels like it’s worth the time to read the email, you might be able to get a head start. Because without that initial push, you’ll find it hard to get much of a useful ranking in Google for local searches. At least that was my own personal experience.
Finally, offline marketing can be a good investment for very local websites. Suppose you have a blog about the news of a really small city (say 20,000 people). Getting an ad on the Sunday edition of the local newspaper could yield good results, and it shouldn’t cost that much.
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