I had the pleasure today to meet with Jason Peck today, who runs the local Raleigh community blog, North Hills Buzz. With a journalism major under his belt, Jason does a great job with the site and bringing together the North Hills community. Despite being being less than a year old (the blog, not him), I was surprised at how much traffic the site was getting.
Community blogging is something that has been coming up more and more on my radar lately. In the past two weeks, I’ve discovered several Raleigh blogs, and expect to find many more on my travels.
Despite my focus usually being on corporate blogging, making the step of bringing the blogging platform to local communities makes complete sense. It’s easy to understand, easy to update, content-rich, focused, and highly relevant.
One of the big topics we discussed was monetization, and the question of what local businesses would be willing to invest their marketing dollars in. It’s an exciting position for him to be in, paving the way for new service offerings that, for the most part, don’t yet exist.
Expect to see more local community blogs like Jason’s coming up in the near future.
North Hills Buzz looks like a nice site. I agree, he is creating all sorts of opportunities for local merchants to get involved without a huge marketing budget that a traditional firm would require. Good luck.