Blog Explosion dot NET

Believe it or not, I’m actually getting traffic from Google for my local niche site!  It’s not much, but that tells me it’s working.  I haven’t done anything on the offline marketing department yet, as I want to get more on my site before I do.  Looking at my keywords I’m getting traffic from it’s a wonder that I get anything, as I’m going up against the local paper and tv sites, along with some radio stations ranked above me.

My main problem is that I’m being picky about what I write about.  I don’t rehash the crime stories.  I try to focus on events (concerts, theater, etc) community annoucements, and generally things that affect the average person (weather).  I hope to actually get time to follow some sports or get my idea to partner with the high schools going so they can write for me.

I’m amazed to find at least 10 referals from google per day! One or two are from restaurant reviews, some are store review, a couple weather and the rest events. I’ve got rankings on first page of results for 3 different posts. I’m pretty confident that this is just the begining!

Great news about your local niche sites.

As for topics to write about, this is a tough one as you could write about anything in your local area.  Restaurants, stores, people, sports, etc.  You want to cover areas that aren’t mainstream media, so I agree that you should stay away, or limit the coverage of murders, shootings, etc. that the big media is all over.  One topic you might think about is the human side of those types of stories.  

Let’s say that a family looses everything in a tragic fire.  The media will cover it for a day or two, then it’s gone.  Help that family out by talking to them about things they need, support them by asking for help, etc.  This will increase your popularity as it usually isn’t something the main stream media does. 

Hey guys, I’m getting respectable traffic from the big G too. For the month of Jan I had 1,561 visits, 157 from Google. That’s 10.06%, I’m not complaining!

 BTW, my best source, by FAR, was local forums! Collectively they represented 40% of my traffic in Jan.

Later,

Thom 

Thom,

That is some great traffic stats! Thanks for the heads up on the local forums. 

I wish you all great success with this!

Denise 

Het Thom, congrats on the traffic!

It’s good to hear some of us are attracting it from the big G especially for local niches. 

Mine is gonna take a little time to break in there as there is a ton of competition, but hey, that just makes it more of a challenge! 

Hi all,  Congrats on everyone’s success so far!

I’ve been getting a decent amount of SE traffic also.  I created my first post on January 20 and since then I’ve gotten 327 SE hits.  I need to work on the social aspect now…

As of right now, search engines are accounting for about 26% of my traffic … would be even higher had a few of my early posts not been stumbled.

The really cool part is, most of the traffic is for very specific long-tail terms that I know were underserved … because I couldn’t find the information when I search for it in the past.

I’m still trying to figure out exactly how to make money from this local blog.  But in the mean time, getting emails with sincere words of thanks for the information I’ve shared is almost as satisifying.

Todd

Todd your local niche blog looks great! Love the picture idea. You are at least showing a page rank of 0 now. That was prety quick. I have no page rank yet but I have had to put in extra hours at work and do not post as often as I should. I have today off and working on my local niche is my main priority.

Actually, PR0 is bad … probably means I’ve done something to displease  Google.  This domain name is about 7 years old (although it wasn’t really being used much the past couple of years).  At some point, I expect it to rank pretty well … like everything else though, I’m sure it will take some time.

Todd 

Todd,

I have a few old domain names ranging from 2 to 6 years old, and most of them when I got them are PR 0.  It just takes some time and traffic for google to recognize them again.

Once you get some content going on them and get some traffic, G should pick up on it and give you a rank.  They just updated the rankings in January, so the next one will probably be late March to April sometime.

Hi Elliot,

Yes, I believe you are right.  It looks like it takes Google at least 3 or 4 months to learn to "trust" a site enough to assign PR.  My main blog is on a domain name that I just bought and started using in mid October.  In the update that just happened, it’s now PR3.  I didn’t start posting regularly on Alohateam.com until January … so, I expect that by April or May, that one should be at least PR3 as well.

Basically it just takes time.

Talk to you again soon,

Todd