Being a native Portlander, David Strom knows his way around PDX. Over the last year, he’s become an important online source for Portland events and festivals.  Starting off slowly and building an audience, Dave started a blog called “Dave Knows: Portland‘ and has developed a great formula of providing the right content and keeping people coming back for more. Learn how he got started and where he’s headed with “Dave Knows: Portland“.

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What inspired you to start your blog?

In Portland during the summer there’s something going on every weekend
- street fairs, beer fests, cultural festivals, etc. These are the
kinds of things that interest me. A few years ago I found myself
keeping track of upcoming events and coordinating my friends’
weekends, via email. Basic information about these kinds of events,
date and time maybe, could be culled from newspapers and other
websites, but other than for the bigger beer fests, it was really hard
to find information about them. I’ve noticed that if it doesn’t have a
corporate sponsor, most mainstream media will relegate an event to
some obscure, usually reader submitted, “community happenings”
section, or not mention it at all.

One day in Spring 2007, I was hanging out with friends when someone
asked “Hey, when’s the Polish Festival?” Another friend, a long time
recipient of my weekend coordinating emails, immediately answered
“Dave knows!” That was the Eureka moment. I was working in web
development at the time, and knew setting up a blog was fairly simple.
I already had the basic infrastructure for the blog already, in the
form of bookmarked webpages and my email archive. In addition to my
interest in festivals, street fairs, and beer, I have an insatiable
curiosity about Portland, pinball, soccer, accordion music, poutine,
and other esoteric things that, by mainstream media standards, are too
obscure for them to waste much time on. I knew there was a niche in
Portland for these sorts of things.

What’s been the best/most effective way to promote it?

Definitely, the best and most effective way to promote the blog has
been to understand and embrace blog culture. I always credit and link
to other bloggers’ work if it in anyway influences my post (something
traditional journalists are loathe to do – they don’t want to miss the
appearance of having a scoop!). It’s the polite thing to do, it builds
up camaraderie in the blogging community, and frankly, it helps us all
get better google rankings.

I’ve experimented with reddit and stumbleupon, and some other local
and topical aggregators, but self promotion is usually discouraged on
these sorts of sites, and ultimately I’m happier with steady, somewhat
predictable, growth than occasional weird spikes in traffic.

Right now the blog has some bus ads running (a fabulous birthday gift
from my awesome girlfriend!
http://portland.daveknows.org/2009/12/18/dave-knows-on-the-back-of-the-bus/),
but it’s hard to identify visitors to the blog who visit because
they’ve seen a bus ad. Traffic has been up the past few months; I
like to think some of that is due to the ads.

How has your experience been being a blogger in the Twitter community,
what have you learned?

Twitter has proven to be a great boon to my blog. It’s not entirely
frowned upon to self promote – if you’re measured about it.
Ultimately people can just stop following you if your Twitter habits
irritate them. But of course, you don’t want to irritate them. When
I have a new post I announce it on Twitter, but that’s about the only
self promotion I do. Lots of the folks I follow on Twitter have blogs
or other creative projects, so I get updates on those in real time,
and I can retweet the things that interest me; similar to blogging,
there’s a Twitter ethic of retweeting with credit.

What’s the future of Dave Knows Portland, where do you want to be in a year?

The blog has opened some doors for me that I would never had expected.
I’ve been a guest on Portland Sucks and Savor
Portland. I’ve been asked for interviews [by
you!]. It’s been somewhat disconcerting for me, as an introvert, to
find that in some circles my alter ego, “Dave Knows”, is a
“personality”, and considered a source of “news”.

My girlfriend and I are constantly brainstorming for ways to maybe
possibly someday make a living from our blogs (Heather blogs at
http://mile73.com and we share the blogging duties at
http://portlandpoutine.com), and we have a few long term ideas I’m not
at liberty to discuss I just started offering advertising space
on my blog (http://portland.daveknows.org/advertise/), but so far the
blog barely makes about $1/day from Google Adsense. Over the next
year the staples of my blog will remain events, beer, and soccer news.
But my blog posts on fellow Portlanders’ creative projects have been
fun to work on, and are well received. I plan to do a lot more posts
like them in the future.

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I’ve been learning how getting content out to different sources and wondered exactly what does content pushing do and how do you do it?

There’s a tool I learned about recently called Onlywire. The way it works is you have two options:

1) Pay version — pay for ad free sharing

2) Promote version — use for free with ads

Onlywire is an automated bookmarking service kinda like ping.fm. It focuses on 4 things:

*setting up your social networking sites, view the submission history
* automate content into your CMS
*give your website and blog the ability to share your content
*Auto submit content to your social networking sites (like digg.com)

One nice feature – it help you with your Wordpress plugin and allows you to download and use  immediately. I just added it to my blog today. I was using the “Share This” plugin, but that only allow readers to submit to one social bookmarking site at a time. With the OnlyWire plugin, you can submit to many social bookmarking sites at once, a huge difference!

OnlyWire.com has exponentially increased in the past 6 months and is now the #1 content syndication system on the Internet. OnlyWire is used by over 100,000 publishers and blogging sites. I also read that it’s gone through a large transformation.

It even has features like an addon for Firefox and a plugin for WP! See if it would work for your blog or website.

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• Building an audience with your blog: Dave Knows Portland

google-analytics

The answer isn’t simple – having your website ranked higher might result in more traffic, but do you really see your ROI? Will it encourage products and services to be bought and sold? Are you aiming at the right target market? The following suggestions focus on changes you can do to attract the right customer.

The key point to remember is that you don’t want to be too broad when marketing your business online and ranking high in a search result won’t equal products/services bought or sold.

CONTENT

It’s crucial that your website is written so it’s easy to read and incorporates some keywords. Be careful you don’t overdue or add too many keywords (about 1 every 100 words). Engage your  targeted audience and draw them in, it’s important to put time and energy into all the content of the website. Hire a copywriter or editor if you need help.

REFERRING LINKS
Google rewards websites when other quality websites link to each other.  Having  quality & high-traffic websites (including blogs, social media sites, forums, wikis) link to your website is a good thing. For example, having your business on yelp.com with excellent customer reviews can be a huge way to gain new clients.

CLEANLY CODED WEBSITE

The foundation and structure of your website can play a huge role in how Google perceives it’s value. It’s important that your website is current and isn’t running extra scripts or excessive information. Running a 8 year old website will not encourage folks to come. Make sure that your web designer meets the basic standards and doesn’t produce a broken website.

Google has many tools to help you improve your website include Google Analytics, Google’s Webmaster Tools, and much more. Get your hands dirty and start doing these simple things today.

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