Continuing with local blogging week (Discovery channel has Shark Week after all!) I wanted to get everyone up to speed on this “hyperlocal blogging” boom that’s going on, starting with some resources on what hyperlocal means.
Background
Hyperlocal blogging is the process of providing content for a specific geographic area. Most commonly these are blogs for cities and towns with enough population to attract local advertisers who want to get in front of local web surfers.
“Hyperlocal is going to be a huge, huge market,” says Mark Josephson, CEO of the hyperlocal aggregator Outside.in. “Local advertisers are not online in a major way yet — like they’re going to be.” -FastCompany
Wikipedia definition of Hyperlocal
The term “hyperlocal” is sometimes used to refer to news coverage of community-level events. Typical mainstream media do not cover topics with narrow interest like street repair or local health inspection results, and instead focus on regional, national, and global concerns and trends. Hyperlocal media has created a niche for themselves by only covering narrow-interest stories related to a specific region, city, or neighborhood. The increased usage of digital media devices (e.g. photo and video cameras, audio recorders), blogs, new media, and participation in social media, has made hyperlocal media content cheaper to produce and distribute. Despite its apparent antithesis to mainstream media outlets, hyperlocal media may draw the interest of mainstream media to increase dwindling advertising dollars coming in to their media sites. -Wikipedia
What’s the big deal?
There is a massive profit potential in attracting local businesses to web advertising. All the low-hanging fruit has been picked. All the “daring” local businesses have come on the web themselves and played around with web advertising to generate foot traffic in their stores. The first wave of local advertising is over and over saturated with competition.
The second wave is hitting now with web development and SEO firms going offline to pull the more timid local businesses onto the web by helping them understand the potential and take their fear or hesitation away. It’s harder than targeted the relative handful of offline businesses who are already online, which is precisely why the industry is set to boom over the next few years.
Enterprising networks and individual sites are working harder to show offline businesses how to market themselves online in order to get more business, and every day more and more local businesses are coming online with simple sites and advertising on hyperlocal blogs to get traffic.
Articles and Information on the Hyperlocal Trend
- “Hyperlocal Websites Deliver News Without Newspapers” -New York Times, April 12 2009
- Hyperlocal 101 – great site featuring hyperlocal tools and information of all kinds.
- “The Rise of Hyperlocal Information” – Read Write Web, 2007 Dated, but gives some perspective on how far back the term “hyperlocal” goes and when people started talking about it.
- WIRED Magazine’s “Dispatches from the Hyperlocal Future” -Posted in 2017
- “Future of online news may be ‘hyperlocal‘” – CNN, May 5 2009
- “Hyperlocal bloggers making $100,000 – $200,000 per year” according to Jeff Jarvis in “Local News Blogs: “No Journalistic Value” from Hyperlocal Blogger
Why am I writing about local blogging and hyperlocal news, anyway?
Because I have a hyperlocal blog network that needs bloggers! And I have a passion for the hyperlocal movement because it is a former sleeping giant that has yet to fully awake. And that means a lot of people stand to make a lot of money by having their hands in the local blogging world. The time is now.
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Stay tuned for tips on getting geo targeted traffic even if your blog isn’t geo-specific!
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