My New Project NorthSanDiego.org

My new project is NorthSanDiego.org. It’s going to be a community site for North San Diego County full of local residents, local businesses, start ups, bloggers, entrepreneurs, and really anyone else in the area.  The past few years and currently my clients have been small businesses with a low budget.  I have spent, and still do, time listening to the problems that these local small businesses go through. Now I am using that knowledge to come up with a solution and resource to be utilized. I enjoy helping people compete against the big guys anyway I can. This is where NorthSanDiego.org came in.

The North San Diego site is set up strictly as a  blogging platform using WordPress and will always be free. Anyone can sign up and start posting immediately. There are many news sites and local sites specifically for one town, but doesn’t canvas a group of towns like North San Diego County and gives you control to post what you want. Many local businesses want their press releases and articles submitted to papers and online.

With some of the news websites, there are processes that the article/press release has to go through. It has to be approved by the editor and in my experience the editor hand picks what is news worthy and if it’s too self promotional they won’t run it. With other sites like the Patch personally I’m a little hesitant to try to do too much self promotion because again it has to be approved by the editor and most likely won’t be if it’s strictly promotional. I’m not putting down the Patch, I blog on it and like how they allow that. More than anything I understand what having a slow week is like and when a business is having a slow week they can come on and write out their own promotion. They can also just send it my way and I will put it up for them.

As far as some of the platforms some of the other local sites use, they are limited as far as what you can do with it opposed to WordPress. With WordPress there’s so much you can do to make your blog post professional,  read by the search engines, and there are endless plugins that can help out.   I have no intention of making northsandiego.org a competitor to any other city organizations but the exact opposite. I want the website to support these other local North San Diego resources, share their posts via social media, and whatever else in person or online that can be more of cross promotional partnerships and be locally focused.

Here are some of the goals for NorthSanDiego.org:

• Help connect local residents to businesses, businesses to residents, residents to residents, businesses to businesses
• Give small businesses, professionals, and everyone else a free resource to be heard
• Use it as a networking platform and have meetups using meetup.com
• Showcase the different beaches, hiking spots, fishing, any outdoors activities by personal experiences
• Showcase local restaurants & businesses in the same format
• Showcase additional places such as trips to Big Bear and other trip locations
• Showcase inside activities, theme parks, zoos, museums, and anything else
• Use social media to promote the blog posts for the businesses and help them get their name out more through social channels

Why join and post on NorthSanDiego.org?

• Learn to blog – the first couple handfuls of people will get one on one training to blog using WordPress (for free)
• Within the next two weeks there will be how to videos on how to blog and use the platform as well available to anyone for free
• If you blog even once a month then your profile will be listed under the bloggers page with your business/website/social media and any other information you want with a bio.
• Frequent Bloggers on the site will get your own category under bloggers by your name – this can be used as a resume, portfolio, etc so someone can easily find all of your posts
• Learn Social Media – a couple of people that take interest in the site I will train personally how to run social media accounts using northsandiego.org – I will give you a personal recommendation / character reference letter and have any potential employer give me a call
• Get creative and have fun – if you don’t see a category you would like just ask me and I will create one for you – whatever you are passionate about, write about
• Photographers and artists can utilize the site to showcase their work as well – you can add a whole gallery and embed YouTube videos on your posts
• Your posts will be shared on NorthSanDiego.org social media channels (Facebook Page, Facebook Group, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube channel, Google+ page) and any other ones that are up.
• If you take the time to learn how to blog properly your posts will be keyword optimized, show up in Google Search results, indexed, and will be submitted to link submission sites.
• Gain exposure for yourself, your business, become an authority figure on your topic locally, and promote your events
• Events are the featured category on the site right now so they will have the most exposure on the site

I’m really excited about this project! First off I was shocked that NorthSanDiego.org was even available as a domain name.  According to the Google Keyword tool “North San Diego” gets about 70k hits a month. With some hard work some of the traffic will come into the site. Spread the news to anyone you know around the San Diego County area. If you check into the site now give it another look in about 2 weeks.

I know San Diego County has great people that have probably been waiting for something like this to help them out with their life endeavors and business ventures. One of the main areas I’m focused on is feedback. The feedback given will be taken seriously and the site will be tailored to what businesses and the community want and make it.

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