Update: Hedon Blog and HU12 websites

THE HU12 family of websites have continued to grow and develop.

The main website - and adopted parent of the others is HU12. This has become the site which features the more 'news' and controversial items that will interest those living in the HU12 post code and wider Holderness area. It is not an hyperlocal site - more of a local news aggregator - and aims to post material which will have a particular interest to those involved in the business, public and voluntary sectors.

The Hedon Blog continues to build a bigger local audience month-upon-month. Predominantly (my stats tell me) this consists of people logging on from the Karoo network and I assume this is largely a Hedon, HU12, Hull and East Yorkshire audience.

In May the Blog covered the General Election from a Hyperlocal perspective - and attracted lots of newer visitors from those following the hustings. I am particularly pleased that candidates from all the major parties submitted material for the Blog.

The biggest recent development is the decision to try and generate more income from the family of websites using direct advertising, Google Adsense, Amazon (Real Example: ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income) and other Blog Services. The reality, is that unless the websites pay for themselves and my time, then daily work on them will have to cease. Unfortunately passion alone, for everything hyperlocal and community, does not pay the bills!

New Hedon Blogger site evolution.

ONE OF THE KEY ISSUES facing Hperlocal news gathering websites is making the activity sustainable - i.e. making it pay. This does not necessarily mean making a profit but in my case means not running at a loss!

In the case of the Hedon Blog then I was faced with the most likely prospect of migrating from wordpress.com to the self-hosted wordpress.org. This article .com v .org shows the difference between the two open source alternatives - one crucial difference is that .com does not allow the placing of advertising links on its platform.

Wordpress.org would allow me to run adverts on the Hedon Blog but I would have lost a valuable part of one of the unique selling points of wordpress.com i.e. it's free, fairly easy to use and quick to set up; any community group can quickly set up a blog/website and get their 'voice' online. 

I had originally discounted Blogger as an option because you cannot construct websites with pages as is the case with Wordpress and their standard themes were a bit limiting. However, on closer inspection - and inspired by the Coconut Grove Grapevine - then I have started constructing a Blogger-based alternative. I have used a free-to-use professional theme from Ourblogtemplates.com which allows me to increase the number of columns and offer different options for the placing of adverts. It is early days of construction but the basic outline of the site is available to view here at HU12.net. I have also purchased the domain name hu12.net.

Having built up a community or readers and participants at The Hedon Blog, then any migration to a new site will have to be done carefully and sensitively over a set period of time. Initial thoughts on this are that I would keep the Blog as the community website featuring voluntary and community sector events, meetings and activities. All other news would feature on HU12.

An exciting - but scary - period of development opens up over the next few weeks!

Hedon Blog: New Year food for thoughts

Following analysing the Hedon Blog's popular posts and my favourites of 2009 then I conclude that I need to maintain a variety of content in 2010 to keep readers coming back. The very local stuff such as the post about the free bus service to the ASDA needs to be married with more nationally searchable material such as the Swine flu article. Of course on the rare occasions when Hedon provides the source of a topical news story, then the Blog can come into its own in providing a useful informative service as with the Amy Black report.

The Hedon Blog is non-party-political. But it is not apolitical as its support for the HOTI campaign shows. Therefore the Blog is perfectly placed for providing a unique local service during the 2010 general election campaign. It can provide a platform for debate and discussion and ensure that the political parties consider Hedon and its interests during their election campaigns. It can report from the 'front-line' of meetings and canvassing. It can even conduct its own straw polls of Hedon opinion and report directly from the count on election night.

During 2010 then I need to look at income generating opportunities, particularly to cover promotional costs. These might come through migrating to a paid-for service over at Wordpress.org or Typepad or setting up a seperate 'white/yellow' pages site for Hedon. I favour the latter, because the winning formula with wordpress.com is the fact that it is free, simple to use, and readily available for any community to use. Indeed even an ex-Editor of newspaper has opted to use the dot.com version in establishing his hyperlocal site The Harbourne Mile! On a personal note then my own income generation needs a kick-start also in 2010 (sic).

Hedon Blog Promotion - A Success?

The Hedon Blog attempted some offline publicity last week. Five thousand flyers were circulated to addresses in the HU12 post code area which includes all the 3,500 households in Hedon. The leaflets were copied by local printers Green Print for £120.00 and distributed by the Holderness Advertiser for £115.00 - a significant investment in publicity!

So was this exercise successful? 

On the face of it the exercise only caused a blip in hits on the site. The day before the leaflet then the internal Wordpress Stats Counter marked 113 views. On the two days of the leaflet delivery then 254 and 350 hits were recorded respectively on the Wednesday and Thursday . On the Friday views were only 162 and 104 on the Saturday.

The top posts on the busiest day were: Hedon Online 24 views, Hedon Christmas Lights 22, and the What's On page 20.

Comments on the site picked up with eight new submissions (disregarding spam and my own replies) and the Facebook Page picked up seven new fans. Two new issues were brought to my attention which formed the basis of two posts on parking problems and a derelict building.

The benefits of the leaflet drop are probably still going to be felt over the next week or so. Questions can be raised about whether the leaflet was effective and whether having it distributed with other advertising flyers was a good idea. But on balance the experiment was worthwhile - even if to rule it out as an economic option in the future!

The Hedon Blog will use offline publicity again, but probably limited to posters in key places and the distribution of business cards.

Have Bloggers out there had better experiences of using flyers to promote their Blog?