Start a Community Niche Website (easy to get traffic!)
Whether you do it for fun, love or income, a community website or blog is a great idea to inspire your community. You could do it for a village or town, or perhaps something niche (say sustainable fashion in your city). Create something unique, and then it’s fairly easy to get traffic, if it’s for a local area.
Most local websites (especially council tourism ones) are deadly boring and just focus on shopping malls, zoos etc. So go local, and focus on nature trails, indie shops (you could negotiate discount cards or have interviews). Just imagine if all the towns, villages and cities in England had creative peeps tapping away to showcase their area in a loving way!
Around 80% of google searches are local. So if you focus on an area to offer veggie restaurant reviews, green politics, litter clean-ups, public transport campaigns and zero-waste initiatives. The world’s yours!
Unlike a national website that often takes months to get traffic, if you focus on a local niche, you will get traffic far quicker. Although it will take a while to build trust and reputation with readers.
Tips for your community website or blog
The main points to take away are:
- Create inspiring titles (how-to posts are good, round-up posts of favourite books or products, interviews and simply write what you wish to share). Keep things simple (have as many external/internal links as you need, but no more).
- Regularly edit posts (people read slower online) and divide long content into short paragraphs with H2 sub-headings and bulleted points, to make info easy to read. You don’t have to write ‘really long posts’, but do write enough for the subject to be the best it can be. If it gets too long, break the post into two or three shorter ones, then interlink.
- A few images per post is fine, but don’t overload (this slows the site down and means more hosting fees). It’s best to link to videos (not embed them) to keep bandwidth to a minimum, and make your site less messy. Plus many people don’t have Google accounts, so you’ll end up just promoting blank squares.
- Keep sidebar clutter-free. An ‘about widget’, search box, popular posts widget and category list is enough. Ensure people can reach any page in two clids and never use ads (most people block them with free plugins). And never use hugely-annoying pop-ups.
- Social sharing buttons are hardly used either, so remove these too. Regular quality content is more likely to get shared, not plastering ‘share it’ buttons everywhere.
- Don’t worry too much about social media. Instagram is not good for your mental health, and images are shared for a second, and never again. Pinterest has changed its rules, so it’s difficult to get traffic, unless you’re spending your life on there. Just build stable organic traffic for search engines to find your site.
Where to host your community blog
Self-hosted WordPress is the best bet for most people (non-profits can use free hosted WordPress, but its business hosting is good for established sites as you get unlimited traffic. Good hosts will back up your site each day, so you should not need extra add-ons.
Krystal Hosting is a new green web host. Their Switch Credits gives you money back on time left on your plan, so you can join sooner, if locked in with a current web host. It runs on Ecotricity, is fiercely independent, and works with tree-planting organisations.
Choose a domain name (fairly short and easy to type with no hyphens), and add domain privacy to protect from spammers and keep your personal details like address private (the laws have chanced so use your personal name as business name addresses will be published).
Once launched, delete unused default plugins and add only those that you need. We use:
- Jetpack (simple and effective for stats)
- Open external links in a new window
- Stop spammers (disable Jetpack security for this to work)
- A broken link checker
Once that’s all done, invest in a pretty affordable website or blog theme:
Simple affordable SEO tips
With a few smart steps, you can improve your rankings and bring more people to your site.
We recommend Mark at Fiverr, who gave this site a wonderful audit in plain English!
Stray Curls is a fun site packed with useful articles by a successful blogger, who creates art to break up important information. As well as freebies, she offers good e-books to become a blogging expert.
Write for People (not just search engines). Start with keywords that readers will want. For ideally, long-tailed keywords. For instance, if someone is looking for a local Derbyshire vegan bakery to buy Bakewell tarts, the following would apply for your blog post title:
- Find local vegan bakeries (a bit vague)
- Find vegan bakeries in Derbyshire (better)
- Buy Vegan Bakewell Tarts in Derbyshire (best!)
You can apply this rule to anything. That’s why if you run a local blog (especially for a village or small town), you will find that most of your posts will end up being the top searches, so you’ll get visitors far more quickly, than say a national website.
Meta titles and descriptions tend to automate these days. Some say to add them, others say that Google does not take much notice of them. They are useful in that they describe your post.
But if you make sure your first paragraph is descriptive anyway, search engines will pull that, so you don’t need to waste time manually creating them for each post.
Link to other pages within your own site. We use Kadence theme (which automatically recommends related posts). But it’s also good to interlink to other quality content within your post, this shows Google that you have a site packed with quality useful information.
Backlinks from trusted sites. This is important, but pretty difficult to do. It means having links from other trustworthy sites, but these days most sites just use social media to recommend. If you can get a few quality backlinks to your site, great.
But rather than ‘asking’, it’s best instead to just make your content so good, that other sites have no option but to recommend our articles, and link to you!
Always be nice on social media
If you are going to use social media for your site, always be nice. There is enough nastiness and comparison in the world right now, so use it discerningly and don’t let it take over your life.
Don’t be nasty, or make jokes about people’s looks, views or intelligence. Just focus on building quality content and getting your business paperwork in order, using social media as a helpful add-on.
If when you participate in online platforms, you notice a nasty thing inside yourself, an insecurity, a sense of low self-esteem, a yearning to lash out, to swat someone down. Then leave that platform. Simple. Jaron Lanier
I didn’t know what Facebook was. And now that I do know what it is. I have to say – it sounds like a huge waste of time. Betsy White
Should you use AI for blogs/websites?
Some people are concerned that AI (artificial intelligence) is killing off creativity. If used unwisely, it is. But used wisely, it can be a useful tool for accuracy and to save time.
If you are writing a poem or personal review, then don’t use AI. But if you are writing factual information where accuracy is important (or a series of local articles where you would like to find useful information to inform readers), it can be good, and could boost search engine results.
Say you have a mountaineering blog or one about the Lake District. Just pop in the phrase ‘guide to Lake District mountains’. And in one minute, you’ll get a detailed guide to all the mountains, their height and viewing information from each summit. You can then edit into your own words.
You could then do this for all the local mountain ranges in England (or all the towns in the Lake District), depending on the niche of your site.
If you’re going to use AI, choose RightBlogger. Used by over 33,000 bloggers worldwide, it’s a beautifully designed interface to create easy-to-read lists, and would certainly be a boon for local community blogs.
Again if you have a sustainable fashion site for Manchester, a vegan site for Bristol or a walking site for the District, this site could give you all the up-to-date accurate information you need to produce say 100 posts, which you could then edit, make them your own and add in some images.
If you’re concerned about copyright, you can also use AI-generated images.
This does not mean that you let AI write your blog posts!
It’s also a great site to use for offices to produce better content. Governments and councils could use it to, to rewrite all their complicated laws and pamphlets into plain English!
