You Need to Establish Your Blog More Locally

Our host today is Melvin Dichoso. If you're interested in getting in front of the readers of Site Sketch 101, check out our guest posting invitation here.

I am a stat-junkie in the sense that I love to play with numbers on my blog. I love playing with the data that I see in Google Analytics and try to optimize more based on what is in the statistics.

Anyways, one part I really love looking at is the traffic part and today I am going to share to you my insights on local traffic and why your blog needs more.

When we were just all getting started, we were probably all told that we need traffic, specifically we need good chunk of traffic from big and commercialized countries like USA and probably Europe. Because of that, we align our marketing more to those countries, not really paying attention on growing our blog’s readership on a local basis.

There’s nothing wrong in that concept, except for the fact that we should not forget we need to have good traffic as well from our own geographical location. I live in a small country and because of that my majority of reader still comes from US (because of how big US is). However, if you ask about my blog here in Philippines, there’s a good chance they’ll recognize it.

Promoting Locally

I will give you one good example. If I am about to blog about making money online, do you think there’s any chance I can stamp my expertise on the niche? Probably, probably just a small chance. So instead, I focused on the marketing aspect of blogging, internet marketing for instance. And that has proved to be vital for me.

It’s just same case in marketing your blog locally. Philippines is a small country and there aren’t many experts here yet in the subject of blogging and marketing. At the start of last year, I dedicated myself to promoting the blog more on a local side. I went to local forums here, talked offline with prominent people here and basically just grew my expertise by handing out a lot of value.

The end result was altogether fine. Sharing pre-eminence with other prominent figures here, being able to launch an offline product for the market, getting to large events for free, having the benefits of being recognized as an expert, getting invited to be interviewed, having the opportunity to speak in blogging-related events and a whole lot more. Those things will not happen, had I not tried to establish myself locally.

How Do You Establish Yourself More Locally?

There are endless of how ways on how to do it and it all depends on your creativity. However I would share with you some of tactics I have been using to make the most of it.

•    Getting into local forums – I’m sure in whatever niche you are there are some forums targeted into it. And if you are in a really big niche, theres a good chance there are some good local forums around there. With my blog, what I did was do a google search for my niche then appended the keyword “forum” at the end. Google will show all forums and its up to you to decide whether you’d join those forums or not.

•    Attending Meetups and Conference – By attending conferences, you are engaging to people on a more personal basis. You network with them, and more importantly, you build business relationships.

•    Running local contests – It’s been proven that contests are the quickest way to drive people on your site. With that in mind, your focus should be on building a quality contest and making sure those people will be with you for the long haul, not just because of the contest.

It’s All About Market Penetration

The key here is market penetration. Never ever worry about being profitable. In any country, there is a strong market that wants to spend money to get something valuable. As long as you’re providing good value over time, you can easily establish yourself in a local scale.

There’s really nothing wrong in doing local marketing and promotions. By establishing these things, you’re not just building something for your online business, you’re opening a great opportunity for a real offline business and of course building good relationships with your fellow countrymen.