Building LocalCenters.com: Working Towards Alpha

January 2, 2008: Happy New Year to all the LocalCenters.com readers, whom I might add , now span 18 countries and 38 states! Just recently we’ve welcomed Argentina, Sweden, Ghana, Spain, Italy, and France. We’ve broken through the magic number of 100 page views a day now, that makes us actually rank and look legit, and even better is that you are now viewing nearly 3.5 pages per visit which is wonderful.

We’ve made some significant changes over the holidays, although few will be apparent to the non-techies, which I am fast becoming not, an unplanned learning experience. We’ve added site tags for easier navigation between articles. Our related articles section has better contextual relationships, and we now are introducing articles through excerpts rather than the first few lines. The day after we made this last change our page views started to go up, and they keep climbing. We have two guest articles up and more coming.

I added some downloadable coupons for our upcoming Murphy400 Blood Drive , this Sunday. It’s my hope that I can get my merchants to realize there’s no distribution costs (for them) and that we will be publishing many more coupons for our local communities. I have to say it’s frustrating; I think we could be offering better discounts for no marketing costs but this is the first run and I wimped out rather than pushing. Once we get the system down, I expect some terrific daily bargains to be found here!

Our Elk Grove, CA Tip Night Podcast downloads have now exceeded 250 which is great for any non-mainstream podcast, but if we got the Pay It Forward message to a couple of hundred people in the process, that’s worth more than any statistic.

Yesterday I started adding some affiliate advertising. Affiliate advertising, wherein the publisher (that’d be me, LC) gets a percentage of the sales (Amazon), or gets paid per click (Google). Initially I had too much on the home page, and pulled it back. Then I pulled back more and it doesn’t look crowded. Amazon is very low paying, but the books I’m featuring are my selections and so good that I want everyone to consider buying some of them. This is what is known as a “long-tail” site, meaning the strip mall business is not ranked real high in search word popularity, so we’re in an extremely focused niche market. As such, most of the advertising offered to us isn’t contextually relevant. We’re searching for relevant products, but content will always be what drives the viewers here, and advertising will be secondary for months to come. I am working on some proprietary products to offer which are extremely relevant, but rather than throwing something out that’s not of supreme value, I am taking the time necessary to produce some killer items for our industry.

Thanks again for your support. Our returning visitor percentage has almost doubled since we started tracking November 14, but new visitors still account for the majority of visits which is good too; I’m now ahead of projections. Please make some comments or email if there’s something we can publish that would help you make some money in 2008. Thanks,~LC.

December 27, 2007: Today I changed “Ask LC” to “Ask The Strip Mall Insider.” I also went to a posting format from a static page format to enable easier questioning and posting. The name change was partially because many of the responses will be from our associate experts, and also because I learned by a quick Googling that “LC” is not exactly a unique name! I think we’ll have better indexing with the new structure. So, ask away!

December 26, 2007: Our Christmas podcast was a recording of a spectacular benefit in Elk Grove, CA, and we had nearly 200 listeners over the first 5 days of publication. Two social networking sites picked it up and it is getting more viral every day. We have visitors now from 37 states and 11 countries, and localcenters.com moved up 1.2 millions spots on Alexa today! I hope to be in the six figures soon and that would be great for a site that’s been indexed by the search engines for only 32 days.

Our first guest article is up, and today we added a “related posts” feature where articles with similar topics are hyperlinked to the bottom of the post.

I read something today about Web 2.0 that made quite an impression-”a site should not only be easy to use, it should be a joy to use.” We’re trying to make localcenters.com just that, and thanks for your continued support.

December 19, 2007:, Our first Podcast will be broadcast on localcenters.com on Saturday, December 22! We will start out with a short interview with Jacqui McManigal who brought the Pay It Forward concept to Elk Grove, CA with her “Tip Night” which she started in 2006. Then, we’ll have some event guests shout out some holiday greetings, and finallybroadcast the evening’s moment, which I won’t write about until Saturday. We’ll let you know when it’s ready to play or download by email or through EGO. Podcasting playback is now a no-brainer; you can download to your own computer or I have it set up so you can play it right here.

A bad idea is best tempered by not implementing it, and tonight I made the decision to jettison the plan to split this site. Previously I had posted that I planned to keep localcenters.com local to our region, and port over the general strip mall content to another site, strip mall advisor.com which I have purchased.

I didn’t realize how bad of an idea it was until I reviewed some traffic figures in some detail. I had jokingly said recently that my traffic ranking as an internet site is 11,288,649, and to compare it to www.elk-grove.com at 550,000 was laughable, even though Jeff’s been around for 10 years and localcenters.com has been up for less than two months with statistics available since November 14, 2007. What I didn’t realize is that those figures are a 3 month daily average, and two of those trailing three months I had no traffic as we weren’t published. Tonight I looked at the trailing 7 day rankings, and based on that average localcenters.com is ranked 594,562 and EGO 373,310. Granted EGO is localized and as such much better able to target direct advertising, but sheesh….I am very pleased with my ranking for being up for about a month!

Splitting the sites would split the page views, the ranking, and thus the stats I need to work up to a good CPM ad rate. As of today we have viewers from 9 countries and 33 states, with California, Texas, New York, and Florida the leading source states. Those are all strip mall states, so the rank order is not a surprise. We’re getting mentioned in some real estate sites, and two of the social networking blogs have given us good referrals. I’m just not prepared to start over.

I don’t know exactly how I am going to reorganize the site, but I think it will be fairly easy, and if the local viewers have to wade through much strip mall writing we’ll lose them so I’ll damn sure make it easy to find what you like! Interestingly though, a lot of Elk Grove, CA viewers are reading the articles, and that’s another reason I no longer like the split idea.

December 10, 2007: We now have localcenters.com viewers from half the states! The 25th state was Georgia. Not surprisingly, the majority of views are from the states where strip malls are common; California, Texas, Florida, and the northeast states where we are seeing much urban re-purposing. We’ve met people from six other countries now, Singapore, Philippines, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Germany. Over the weekend I took on the project of re-doing all the URLs to show them in plain English. In other words, instead of localcenters.com/php?/codevault32, the URL for this article and now all the others actually makes sense and is more Google-friendly. I was pretty proud of my handiwork until I noticed the traffic dropped by half the next day. What I did was effectively break every link and URL code I had! Bad LC!! So, if you are getting the site by RSS or have linked to an article, you’ll simply have to re-submit the feeds by clinking on the orange RSS icon or re-lnking to the article. Sorry!

I started the mapping backbone for our properties for lease over the weekend as well. If you click “Locate Your Business Here” you will be re-directed to a map with all the available properties marked, and when the property is selected an info cloud appears that will ultimately link to the property page. The coding is not intuitive so it’s taking some time. I think the final product will be very user friendly and unique to commercial sites, however.

December 5, 2007: I took a break last weekend and did an impromptu family trip to Chicago. Having two articles written but unpublished, I set the publication dates for the time I was gone, but didn’t take the computer. Assuming the page views would drop with less fresh content, I was elated upon my return to see they had continued to climb even in my absence. RSS feeds almost tripled last week, my bounce rate is dropping like a rock, return visitors are climbing, and I’m signing up several new members each week. Although barely live for one month, Localcenters.com is growing rapidly. In addition, I am starting to receive some requests for advertising kits. I received an unsolicited article tonight from a well respected industry source, and I am getting a steady flow of encouraging comments. This has been the best week yet!

The Space for Lease page remains incomplete, and I have not had the time to work on it. I will be adding a series of maps and links, and once it’s up I think it will be an easy experience for prospective tenants. Once the national content for LocalCenters.com is ported to the StripMallAdvisor, we will start adding some tenant features to LC.com, including some great specials for members only.

I ran a Craigslist ad for our executive suites last week, and the only contact given was this site and the appropriate page. I had almost 40 unique visitors directly from Craigslist but the average page views were 3.3 per visitor! What’s up with that? One would think that those interested would look at the executive suite page and either reject it or contact us, but apparently most people decided to dig further into the site. Of course that’s great, but I do not know why these pageviews were so strong. I got one call and appointment from the 5 day run, not bad.

I have a new theme for StripMallAdvisor.com and I’m really pleased. While LocalCenters.com has one featured article, SMA will have three, including a permanent “Ask LC” column and if the inflow of articles continues I will have a permanent guest author column as well. My goal is to publish StripMallAdvisor.com by December 15, and I think we will make it. We’re working on a very cool logo now. Kristin is the best, and if anyone can achieve the desired effect, she can do it.

November 28, 2007: LocalCenters.com is ONE MONTH OLD! It’s hard to imagine that we went live only a month ago. It seems like this project has been a 24/7 task, probably because that’s pretty close! Last night was the first night in a month I’ve gone to bed prior to midnight.

Since the last entry we have a brand new theme, designed by Michael Pollock from Solostream Studios. Accordingly, there have been a number of changes to the look and feel of LocalCenters.com. Starting with Michael’s base theme, I’ve changed the fonts, colors, and background, added the logo, and re-arranged the sidebars to be less obtrusive. Little tweaks, but with a nearly vertical learning curve still in place, especially learning code, it seemed monumental at the time. What has not changed enough is the content, and that is troubling. For some reason it has not affected the daily visit numbers, but we have more new visitors than returning now which is a bittersweet stat. I know I have to supply new content at least 5 days a week in order to keep the return visitors happy, but there is a reason for the lack of new articles.

Per the last entry, LocalCenters.com is slowly morphing into a local site, rather than the industry trade publication we see now. Google Analytics tells us the site hits are still 78% from northern California as we are a somewhat known quantity here AND some of the content is relevant to the locals. The current task is to finish the mapping and graphics for our shopping centers, and although Google Maps provides a great platform for custom mapping it does take some time.

Once the property profiles are complete and hyperlinked to the maps and tenant websites, we will start the process of migrating the non-localized LocalCenters.com content over to The Strip Mall Advisor which currently lays fallow, awaiting content and publishing. LocalCenters.com will then have community sections for Elk Grove, Folsom, and Antelope; our current market areas. As our base is in Elk Grove, CA and the majority of our merchants are there, Elk Grove will have the most content for now. We do plan to add some local news and engage our merchants in posting and participating.

The critical task now is to create more relevant content for the chosen market. I know this because our bounce rate is nearly 50%, meaning than half the site visitors do not look at more than one page prior to exiting. Yesterday I placed an ad in Craigslist for our executive suites and dropped in a link to the executive suite pages in LocalCenters.com. We had 9 unique visits from Craigslist, and the average page views were 3.36 from those viewers. They came from all over the region, not just Elk Grove, which is good 411 for us as we had planned to zone our Google AdWords to Elk Grove only. Apparently they found relevant local content; that was a big reminder to us to never forget that your viewers want something that relates to them personally. I think we are now fragmented and that is why The Strip Mall Advisor is being created, to separate local content from trade articles.

The next entry will be after we have new local content and yet another new look for localcenters.com. See you then, and thanks for reading!

November 19, 2007: LocalCenters.com is 3 weeks old!

And I feel like I’ve aged a year! Not only have I learned so much in this short time, I had no idea of what I didn’t know, and how complex these sites can be when monetizing is a main goal. Here are a few things I’ve learned in this short time:

• The world can get along just fine without my site, and they still do. While we add new viewers every day, and the return rate is good, we have a long ways to go to justify decent advertising rates.

• Sleep deprivation is cool if you’re learning and loving the process. Waking up is a bitch!

• Content is king. Some of the articles get read, and some don’t. We need to work on relevancy for our market.

• SEO (search engine optimization) is extremely complex. Word order, headlines, meta tags, XML tags, obtaining links to related sites, and browser titles are generally new to me. There are volumes of books and a plethora of courses on the topic, none of which I have endulged in to any degree yet. Carlton Sheets is in the wrong business.

• For the past 11 days that I’ve had good analytics to review, the numbers are encouraging. We’ve had 132 unique visitors from 5 states and two countries. Our bounce rate is 38%, meaning that over half the visitors saw enough value in the landing page to keep looking through the site, reading at least two articles. Our return rate is about 62% which isn’t great but the content is still building.

• Localcenters is a lousy search name for a national site. We have top billing at Google and in the top 5 in Yahoo as a site URL, but the organic searches could be better. Still, using some obvious keywords, localcenters.com comes up twice in the top 10 results in Google. That’s very encouraging for three weeks published.

• Last, my site developer was right when he told me months ago I was headed toward schizophrenia with my site vision. I am trying to appeal to the trade nationally and businesses and consumers locally, and viewers are getting mixed messages and some confusion of who we are.

Accordingly, there will be some major changes occurring soon. Shortly, localcenters.com will in fact be a local site, and we will be hawking space in our centers and having fun with our friends and retailers in Elk Grove and our other markets in the region. No longer are we going to try to cover too many bases. About one third of our traffic is from Elk Grove, and we have no intention of losing you.

The Strip Mall Advisor (stripmalladvisor.com) will be launched very soon. It will be a continuation of our national and trade comment here, sans our properties and any local tenant or event mentions. I bought the name a week ago on an expy, picked up stripcenteradvisor.com as well, lest we be confused as to our terminology, and SMA will be our final print for the national side. Localcenters will be local My site developer doesn’t know this yet. He’s not thrilled with my whimsical changes anyway, and this one will set him off to coders hell I’m sure, but that’s what we doing. The two will be linked, but I do not believe that there will be much cross-referral; they are going to be very different sites for different markets.

The site re-design will be put off for a few weeks obviously, but I feel great about finally figuring out where we need to be headed.

Thanks to those that have opted to get our RSS feed or updates by email. We have a good number of subscribers through those methods, more than I had imagined. It makes sense; you just wait until a new article pops up on your Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Google, or by email–then you go read.

Thanks for reading. I will continue the journal as things develop or if I just feel like it. John out: 3:45 AM

Related Articles You Might Enjoy

• How to Use Wordpress 2.3x Tags and the "More" Function with Excerpts (2)