The Trouble With Getting Your Friends, Family & Local People To View Your Blogs

Just over 12 years ago, me and a couple of friends had a weekly video conversation using Google Hangouts (how many of you remember that?), calling ourselves the Google Hangout Crew. Most of the time it was just the 3 of us, but sometimes we’d invite someone else onto the chat to talk with us and share their opinions on the topics of the day.



Sheryl Loch, Brian Hawkins, and me

On one of those days, which was always a Sunday, we decided to discuss the topic of blogging for local folks and businesses, and the issues we all seem to have in getting those people to take a look at what we write. This wasn’t a new topic for me actually, as I talked about it first in 2009 when I wrote a post leading with If You Can’t Get Your Family And Friends To Subscribe… and again in 2011 when I asked Why Aren’t You Well Known Where You Live?

This conversation was slightly different than our general conversations, but the overall theme is the same. I always make the recommendation to businesses that if they want to increase their search engine optimization and the potential for doing more business locally and online, that having a blog can do wonders for each. Just being a player in the online game gives you a great boost in local search, which is a great thing, but the question was do those visitors read your stuff, and if not why not? For that matter, why don’t they ever comment on any of it?

I tend to want to look at my own sites, and I’m going to share statistics on two of them from that moment in time. I request that, if you have the time, that you check out the video at the end of this post where we talked about it all, and the other site I’m going to talk about that’s mentioned in the video; the statistics I’m sharing is what they were back in 2012, as I haven’t put much effort into figuring out how to track my Google statistics in the last couple of years.

Anyway, for this blog, the month’s stats at the time showed that there were 32 visits from what I’d call the local area, which includes Rochester, which is about 75 miles away. If I only included the Syracuse area, I’d have had to remove 11 visits. That’s pretty poor if you ask me.

New York state is my highest volume state, and the majority of visitors were coming from New York City (which makes sense), but that’s not quite local. I consider this my flagship blog, even though it wasn’t the highest ranked blog at the time. I didn’t have many local visitors who were subscribed to the blog back then, which means I wasn’t sure where they were coming from, but I knew they weren’t subscribers at the time.

My other blog is called Syracuse Wiki, and it’s my local blog. It’s not a highly visited blog now, but even then it wasn’t seen by many local people, even when I wrote specific articles regarding those times when a bunch of us met up for some kind of frivolity, but I also didn’t and still don’t write a lot of posts there because I mainly write about local events and issues, and it helps when I can capture pictures regarding local events. I couldn’t gripe all that much because the visitors on that blog were 54% local, but I also knew that blog would attract way more people because it talked mainly about local topics.

This brings us back to the original issue and why it’s a problem. If you’re running a local business and you’re trying to get local people interested in what you do, what can you do to advertise yourself and get local business consumers? On the video above, I offered suggestions to companies that sell products, which includes coupons and lots of pictures, and even advertising their blogs in their stores and advertisements so people can keep up with new things they offer. It’s a great way to show off your personality, unless you don’t have one; I’m just sharing… lol

What about those of us who offer services, who don’t have offices outside of our homes or even if we do, we don’t own the space and thus are more limited with some of our banner advertising, if you will? Is there a way we can target our blogs so that it attracts local traffic and thus local business?

What about our friends and family members? One’s best advocates are always those close to us, but if we can’t get them engaged then can we legitimately hope to engage our community, no matter what we do? Truth be told, I have a page on Facebook called Mitch Mitchell’s Writings And Videos that’s been live for around 4 years, with only 55 subscribers, few of them local people. I have to own up to the fact that I haven’t advertised it as much as I did when I created it, but it gives me the opportunity to share some of my older articles here and there; in case you didn’t know, I’ve been writing online and off since 2001… whew!

I put the question out to all of you… at least I hope there’s an “all” instead of one or two readers; what do you do to help increase your online footprint? Do you blog, and if so how often? Do you create videos on YouTube and advertise them? Or, and this can work, do you comment on other people’s blogs or videos, making sure you link back to your blogs of videos or other online sources?

Let me know if you can; meanwhile, check out this video from over a decade ago (Google Hangouts could be wonky, so I apologize up front if there are glitches lol):


 

Can I help your business or blog with some of the services I offer?

© May
I’m Just Sharing

You Probably Aren’t Going To Meet Her; It’s Not Important

Many years ago, I was in Las Vegas at a health care finance conference. I had a pretty good time, first time in many years I have to say; I had 3 conferences in Las Vegas, and visited two other times. This time around, I noticed something pretty wild that helps me with the premise of what I have to say today.

Photo by Jemingway via Flickr

If you’re anywhere on social media, you’re going to see a lot of images of some very good looking people. The overwhelming majority are pretty women, but sometimes it’s a good looking guy (I suppose; I don’t notice the guys that often lol). They’re extremely good looking, to the point of perfection sometimes. They just look too good to be true.
Continue reading You Probably Aren’t Going To Meet Her; It’s Not Important

Getting The Most Out Of Shutting Down A Business And A Blog Online

This story goes way back in time. In November 2018 (a repost from November 2014), I wrote an article titled Are You Spreading Yourself Too Thin. In that post, I talked about how sometimes we all try to do too much, and how I had way too many things going on, especially with all the travel I was doing at the time.

I’m tired…

I listed some things to think about, but point #4 was especially telling, though most people seemed to have missed it:
Continue reading Getting The Most Out Of Shutting Down A Business And A Blog Online

Are You Guest Posting? Are You Still Asking To Guest Post?

It’s been a long time since I accepted a guest post on this blog. How long? Well, the last one I accepted was in December 2011; you do the math. lol I used to have a lot of reasons why I didn’t accept guest posts on this blog and most of my other blogs; the only one I readily accepted guest posts on no longer exists; it made money, but the extra work wasn’t worth dealing with it.

I’m actually a nice guy trying to help 🙂

I never really wanted to accept guest posting unless I knew the person asking the question well. Sometimes I was the one asking someone I respected to write a guest post for me, like I did with my friend Scott Thomas about copyright laws; very illuminating, something I should have paid more attention to. 🙂
Continue reading Are You Guest Posting? Are You Still Asking To Guest Post?

The Purpose Of Repurposing Blog Posts

There’s three interesting things I’m going to share regarding the topic of this article. The first is that I actually wrote an article asking this very same thing back in 2012, titled Repurposing Your Own Blog Content; Good Thing Or Bad?, and a second one giving tips on how to do it titled 24 Ways To Repurpose Your Content – My Way!. Other than those two, I addressed the topic in a few different ways; the titles are:

Google Indexing And Older Blog Posts… Kind Of… (November 2023)

I’ve Lost Over 500 Articles; Why? (November 2023)

Repurposing Content From Other Blogs You’re Shutting Down (February 2019)

Taughannock Falls and Gorge, Ithaca NY

Right now, the two most important articles this one relates to are the first two, 500 lost articles and Google indexing issues; let me explain.
Continue reading The Purpose Of Repurposing Blog Posts

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