We're moving over here--> http://oibloggerhq.outside.in

We’ve consolidated our individual blogger HQs into one destination site since we see a connection between all hyperlocal bloggers, regardless of the town, city, or places you write about. There we’ll be laying out tips and tricks of hyperlocal blogging, and we’ll also be interviewing writers who have great local blogs (this means you! If you’re interested in being featured here, send us a note). Check us out and join the conversation! —> http://oibloggerhq.outside.in

ONA09

The Online News Association Conference is meeting in San Francisco today and tomorrow. Even if you’re not there, you can still follow along. Follow the ONA on Twitter (@ona09) or search their hashtag to see what attendees are saying (#ona09). Select panels are livestreaming, as well. Pretty great, but of course you’d expect that for an organization championing media via the internet!

We’re especially interested to see who wins the Online News Association Awards (to be presented on October 3, 2009, the last night of the conference) in the General Excellence in Online Journalism, Micro (under 100,000 monthly uniques) and the Online Topical Report/Blogging, Small (under 100,000 monthly uniques) categories. Check back to find out the winners. Maybe next year they’ll have a Hyperlocal Reporting category!

From NY Times to Anywhere USA Times?

The New York Times is launching local editions this fall in Chicago and other markets in addition to San Francisco. They plat to eventually “turn the production over to a local partner.”

Where does this leave local bloggers? Does a top three newspaper moving in to other cities threaten the media climate even more? Time will tell, but as their other local experiments, we think they’ll look to local sources.

Blogger Tip #3: Post early and often

The more posts you have in your archives, the more people will find you via search—especially if you’re following our advice and using geotagging and other geoSEO tips—and the more your audience will grow, so keep posting.

Here are our tips to keep up your blogging momentum:

• Set a schedule for yourself and stick to it. No need to tell your readers about the schedule (unless you want to come up with clever themed posts ie. “Link Love Monday” or “Follow-up Friday”), it just helps productivity to have something to aim for.
• Get inspiration from bloggers you admire, whether they are local bloggers, or ones who write about your general interests. Keeping up with other blogs can help generate ideas for your own content.
• Schedule your posts ahead of time. Many blogging platforms allow you to schedule a post to be published in the future. That way, you can sleep in, but your post can go live early in the morning when it’s likely to get the most eyes.
• Brainstorm! When you’re feeling creative, jot down a list of ideas so you’ll have a jumping off point when you’re experiencing writer’s block.
• Just write! Start a post about anything, and you’ll probably extract something useful from the writing process (just make sure to edit out your rambling before you get to the point).
• Oh yes, and don’t apologize for not posting lately! Nobody wants to hear it, just post your regular, awesome content (unless you have an extremely regular schedule and something horrible has happened that you want to share with your readers—but no need to apologize, just mention why you haven’t posted if you feel the need).

What are you tips for staying productive on the blogging front? We want to hear them in the comments below!

A note about the blogroll

Hello New York! We know there are a lot of great bloggers out there covering neighborhoods, subjects, places, and the whole darn city in NYC, so the blogroll you see to the right is just a small selection of these. Want to be on the blogroll? Want to grow your audience? Submit your site to the outside.in system and then email us and we’ll hook you up with a link over there —>

Maybe we were on to something...

When we mentioned as our first Blogger Tip that you should report where big media isn’t, we didn’t think that we’d have a real-life example so soon after writing that. This week, Atlanta has been hit by terrible floods and only one major paper was reporting on it as of this morning. MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media calls this a “Newsfail” in this morning’s post, Newsfail: No Major Newspapers Able Or Willing to Cover Catastrophic Floods in Atlanta.

However, a bunch of local sources are reporting on this. For a collection of blogger stories, check out outside.in/Atlanta_GA.

Not only do bloggers cover stories that larger media doesn’t, they are also usually able to post most quickly on an event than a larger media machine’s publication schedule allow. The timeliness of events and the nimble nature of blogs give them a one-up on bigger sources, and distribution on outside.in and on our partner pages shares your content with big media’s audience, so get your stories in our system today!

Blogger Tip #2: Don't forget geoSEO

You probably know all about SEO (search engine optimization) and how to write with keywords in mind that potential readers search for, but maybe you’ve never thought one step ahead to geographic search engine optimization, or geoSEO. One way to be a better hyperlocal blogger is to optimize your posts for the geoweb. Don’t forget that if you are a localized blogger, you should be speaking to your local audience.

How to do it:

• Mention places by their exact names, like “I went to Roberta’s Pizzeria last night” rather than “I went to the new pizza place down the street.”
• Mention neighborhoods by their name so if someone is searching for, for example, “parenting and Dumbo” they’ll find your blog because of all the mentions of Dumbo: “I’ve noticed a lot of ‘babysitter available’ signs up around Dumbo lately” rather than “I’ve seen a lot of ‘babysitter available’ signs around the nabe lately”
• Use the outside.in geotagging tool that will attach outside.in place and neighborhood pages to your posts, which then syndicates your posts with these tags attached to our media partners.

Try out these simple geoSEO tagging tips and see how your traffic grows!

Blogger Tip #1: Go Where Traditional Media Doesn't

Back in the old days of journalism, beat reporters would sit through Community Board, school board, and city council meetings to cover for their local papers. These days, papers are cutting staff left and right as cost cutting measures. With more attention being paid to newspaper websites, local bloggers are poised as a new source for localized news. If you’re struggling for content or looking to gain new traffic, reporting on local community events at schools, in government, and other civic organizations is a great way to gain attention of bigger media sites and get their referring traffic. And if your blog is in the outside.in system, we will facilitate the syndication of your stories to our media partners. It’s as simple as that!

As a resource for bloggers, we’ll list some tips and tricks of the hyperlocal blogging trade. Feel free to send us ideas or comment below with your own tips that may end up as a post here someday as well (with credit, of course!).

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