100k/month traffic for a localized online magazine/blog - how much effort?

Not sure how to do these multiquote things, so bear with me.

The newspaper's site had been in operation for about 2 years before I took over and was sitting at around 20K per month at that point in time. It took me about 2 months to get it up to 60K. We have plateaued there because we are currently in the middle of a website CMS upgrade, so I haven't been pushing it as much.

We too have a rather apathetic readership, but our post reach is running at about 10 to 15%. I've learned with our readers that they won't often engage positively, but they sure as hell will let you know when they don't like something!

Remember that we are VERY local, so my experience does not include covering news of a national scope. That being said, I would not worry too much about how many posts per day you are putting on Facebook, but I would worry about the content you are posting. Ask yourself: Is the corresponding photo a good one? Is the headline catchy and does it make one want to read more? Do people care about what you're writing? I don't think actual news can ever be considered "spammy," quite frankly, but there is a fine line between being interesting and being annoying. We have a rule of thumb of posting one news and one sports story per day, but that number can go up if there is breaking news. Things like election night updates, bad weather and emergencies can generate a large number of posts in a short amount of time as we attempt to keep our readers up to date. In our coverage area, these things don't happen very often.

One other thing I would bring up that helps us on a local level: Names. We try to fill our publication with names whether they are of each player on a certain high school's sports team or who won what prize at a fair, or even the names of every graduating student at the 10 high schools we cover. Names, names, names. It makes people pick up our paper. They may even pick up numerous copies to share with friends and family members. This is the hard copy version of "Sharing" on Facebook. People will share a Facebook post with friends if their name is in the story. Doing this same thing on a national level may be tough, but I would look for some way to implement it. Perhaps the names of the graduating classes at the various universities in the Philippines. If you happen to get some of the emails of those graduates, you could shoot them a friendly email letting them know their name is in the story and give them the link to the Facebook page (increasing the number of followers) or directly to the story. I would be inclined to send them to the FB page so that you have a follower for longer than the duration of the story itself.

These are just some random thoughts. If I think of any others, I'll pass them along.

Shawn Garza

Not sure what you mean by this question, but they come from two sources. One is press releases coming from agencies or the marketing group of the companies themselves. We either post the content verbatim or make some modifications to it.

Another source is topics that we come up with ourselves. If we see something newsworthy, or we get invited to review a product/service, or we see something we want to write about that is related to the subjects covered by the site.

Did I answer your question?

Not sure if I have done a good job, so far it's still tough to sustain traffic without fresh, really good content. Yes Sir you are correct about the term "pinoy"

Not crazy at all! Never would have thought of this. It is going to take a bit of work but I really like this idea. Thank you so much