📬 Local Newsletter Life: Makeover Edition

It’s been a minute since I gave you an update on my local newsletter here in Vegas.

I think the last thing I that I told you was that we were pivoting to focus more on the site that goes with the newsletter as a growth machine.

That’s been working well enough.

But it’s still not where I want it to be, or frankly where I think it would be if I was in a different city.

So, more changes are on the way…

Making A Big Switch

So, right now, our local newsletter targets locals (duh) - but only those on our side of town - and it doesn’t cover anything on The Strip or any tourist shit.

Mostly because the last place that I wanna be is on the Strip dealing with too much traffic and drunk tourists. And we do actually visit the places we write about currently.

That being said, it’s not like our current strategy is knocking it out of the park, y’know?

So what do we do?

Well, we see enough things online of tourists looking for things to do that aren’t the traditional drinking/gambling/debauchery….

So we’re going to pivot a little to also target those tourists.

Ideally we can continue serving our same audience (even though most of them suck in terms of ROI) while also serving this new audience.

But we’re gonna need a branding makeover…including a name change.

The current plan is to keep our current audience/newsletter branded the way that it is while we launch the new brand/site and then in a few months merge them into one.

We can likely send out the same newsletter to both in the interim…

Except we’re thinking maybe the new site will have a less frequent sending frequency. Currently we do twice a week.

Will it work better? Honestly, I have no idea. But I feel like it can’t do any worse than the way things already are.

And, I’ve noticed that the newsletters here that either target tourists, or include tourists in the target audience, are actually doing better than us with more sponsors in each newsletter.

Regardless, I’ll keep you updated on how it goes.

Coming up…

More on what I’m working on and how it’s going.

Stay awesome,

Shawna

P.S. If you’re looking for high level discussions or tips on things like local SEO and Rank & Rent, I highly recommend Jacky Chou’s Advise community. I’ve been in it for several months and there’s tons of value in it, including a SOP for local SEO.

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