5 Mistakes That Make Local Blogs Fail

So you’re thinking about starting a local blog. Maybe you’re a
reporter tired of office politics and lowest-common-denominator
assignments. Maybe you’re a neighborhood gadfly who wants to create a
new place for locals to gather. Maybe you’re a realtor who wants to
generate new leads.

Either way, your local blog, like most new things, will probably fail.

It will fail to support you. 

It will fail to win an audience. 

It will fail to have real impact in your community.

I meet a lot of local bloggers and people thinking about starting local blogs who ask me for tips or for feedback.  After having several of these conversations, it seems useful to pull these conversations together in one place modeled after a great piece Paul Graham of YCombinator wrote back in 2006. He found 18 mistakes that kill startups. I think the mistakes that kill local blogs can be condensed down to five.

Let’s break them down.

Five Mistakes

#1. You’re doing it alone.

The first reason your local blog will fail is because you don’t have
the right people working on it. Notice I said “people.” No, you will
not succeed working on this alone.

As a solo local blog founder, you
alone will be responsible for creating the content, editing it,
distributing it, selling ads around it, promoting it, collecting
payment, accounting for the money collected and spent, and then
covering all your legal bases. That’s an incredible amount of work. More importantly, any time spent on any one of these tasks is time NOT
spent on the others. If you go it alone, your business will be
single-threaded. Everything will have to run through you before it can
happen and you can’t always be available. In a single-threaded
business, if the one agent needs to take a break, everything else
grinds to a halt. 

As Graham puts it:
“When you have multiple founders, esprit de corps binds them together
in a way that seems to violate conservation laws. Each thinks “I can’t
let my friends down.” This is one of the most powerful forces in human
nature, and it’s missing when there’s just one founder.” If it’s really
just you, then your team is weak and your blog will fail.

#2. You don’t know your market.

The next reason your blog will fail is because you didn’t do your
homework. In the case of the local reporter who’s been covering her
beat for a few years, yes, she knows her subject matter inside and out,
but that’s just the tip of the iceberg of necessary knowledge for
building a business around it. For example, does she know:

a. How many people are actively looking for coverage of her beat?

b. The average incomes of those people?

c. How many of them have Internet access?

d. How much time they spend online?

e. What businesses or organizations would like to reach those people?

f. How much money they spend annually in doing so?

I could go on. My experience has been that very, very few local
bloggers have answered any of these questions or have any intention of
answering them in the course of working on their blog. And these are
not tricky, obscure questions. These are questions that any business
founder would need to answer in order to be taken seriously or stand a
chance at success. If you don’t know these things, then you didn’t do
your homework and your blog will fail.

#3. Your content is weak

The third reason your blog will fail is because your content stinks.
It stinks because it lacks a point of view and it fails to address a
real, general human problem.

Whether you’re a trained journalist, a neighborhood gadfly, or a
realtor, your content probably lacks a point of view. As a newspaper
reporter, you were trained to be objective. As a gadfly, you have
relationships around the community that you have to protect and worry
about. As a realtor, you will never say anything bad about the
community you cover and therefore will be a bore.

Your blog has to have a point of view and a voice because people only
engage with things they can wrap their heads around and get familiar
with. Your local blog will only succeed if it wins an audience. You
win an audience by building relationships between your stories and
readers. No one relates well to something they don’t know and
understand. Your blog has to have strong, easily remembered stances on
local issues people actually care about or it will fail. Groupon
is a company that sells deals, not local news per se, but they have a
phenomenal grasp of the voice and point of view of their content. Read their style guide here.

Which brings us to the other reason your content is weak. It’s weak because no one wants to read it. And no one wants to read it
because it doesn’t address any real, general human problem. For all
the bluster about hyper-local coverage and blogging in the last five years,
as someone who runs a city-specific social news site where people vote
for the stories they actually are interested in, it seems pretty clear
that most people don’t give a fig about what’s happening day in and
day out in their local elected bodies. That stuff matters a great deal
to other elected officials, people who do business with elected
officials, and the political/news nerds in your community, but that’s
it. 

If your local blog is focused on covering local government, it
should be a subscriber-only, paid newsletter that goes out to just
those people. It should only be a public blog if there’s mass interest
in the subject matter, which there just isn’t for a lot of the stories
showing up on hyper-local blogs. If your content lacks a point of view
and is centered around things that the general public isn’t interested
in, it will fail.

#4. You haven’t thought through your business model

Let’s assume you figured all this stuff out. Now how are you going to
make money? Ads, you say? Okay, great. Have you answered these
questions?

 -What kind of ads? Banners? Text links?  Sponsored posts? Real-time ads?  

 -Who’s going to sell them?

 -How are they going to sell them?

 -What are you going to charge? 

 -Who are you going to sell them to? 

 -What’s the value proposition of buying your ads over someone else’s?

 -How many ads do you need to sell to cover your costs?

 -What the heck are your costs?

Until you answer these questions and more like them, your blog will make no money and it will fail.

#5. You have no distribution strategy

Finally, your local blog is going to fail because you can’t
distribute it to enough people. If your local blog is ad-supported,
then your ads are your product and your content is a marketing tool
created to bring people to look at your ads. In order for you to sell
ads, you need to have people coming to look at them. You need
eyeballs on your blog. How will you get them? 

Twitter and Facebook are good but not great answers here. Both can
drive significant traffic but require a lot of work on your end. Also, their purposes are at odds with yours. Facebook and Twitter are
your competitors. They sell ads to the same people you probably want
to sell ads to. They would be perfectly happy if you didn’t start a
blog at all and just started a Twitter/Facebook account and posted your
content there. If you are a local blogger, Facebook and Twitter, not
your local paper, are your biggest threats. Why should someone visit
your blog when they can read your headlines alongside other
neighborhood headlines over there? They are useful but can’t be your main tools.

Search could be a win for you, but have you devised a search engine optimization strategy?

In the end, the main mistake is looking at it wrong. You are not starting a blog, you are
launching a small business. You are no different from the guy opening a bar up the road. You are both starting small, local businesses. You need to know something about blogging
and social media, yes, but what you really need to bone up on is what
it takes to run a small business. Instead of going to the local
blogger meetups in your city, you should go to the local small business
owner and entrepreneur meetups. Instead of following the latest
social media news, you need to read up on the latest advertising,
marketing, and search strategies showing results for actual media
entrepreneurs in the field. This is the main mistake local bloggers make that dooms their efforts.

But if you can avoid this and the other five listed above, you’ll have a chance to start something that will sustain you and have a real impact on your community. That’s a special thing. 

There are opportunities out there for local blogs, they just need to be considered and approached with the right frame of mind. 

Thanks to tracysamantha</a>, <a href="http://twitter.com/kiyoshimartinez">kiyoshimartinez, and @annatarkov for reading drafts of this.