Here's the latest on my local blogging experiment "Menifee 24/7".

I launched that blog just over four years ago, as an experiment to see how well I can monetize an audience limited to a geographic area. In this case, it's my hometown, Menifee, CA.

Menifee is a small town by Southern California standards. About 60,000 people. Many people here still know each other, and still wave hello to you when they see you at the grocery store. Menifee 24/7 covers news stories specific to this town that the newspapers usually consider too small or too detailed to cover. I've managed to build a decent sized audience of about 20,000 to 30,000 visitors per month.

Advertising is Difficult

While I've been running Google Adsense on Menifee 24/7 for quite some time, it doesn't really monetize all that well. Most of the ads that show up are real estate focused.

I have a good sized percentage of repeat visitors, and those visitors don't want to click on ads. It's the incoming Google traffic that tend to click on ads anyways.

I had hoped to sell CPM based banner ads to local merchants, such as the pizza shop, the real estate agent, the child care center, and businesses like that. But the problem is that these businesses are all accustomed to advertising in the newspaper and through junk mailers. They don't give a website like mine any thought.

And the local business owners don't have ad banners. I'd have to make them for them.

I've attended the local Chamber of Commerce's monthly mixers, and spoke to business owners about advertising online. They all sound open to the idea, but when I follow up with them, it's a different story.

Part of the problem is these local businesses don't know how to measure the ROI on advertising. When they buy an ad in the newspaper, even then they don't know. What they do know is that the newspaper reaches 100,000 households across the greater area, but they don't know if they're getting any business out of it. So if you ask them to buy space on a website, you're asking them to venture deeper into the unknown. That's why they're gun shy about advertising online.

The truth is the ROI of online advertising is much more measurable that the newspaper, or even television. We have a local television news channel here, that does get ads from local businesses, but the television station is so small, it can't afford Neilsen Ratings. So, it can't offer any ROI metrics to its customers. Yet, those customers are still buying airtime from them.

I can sell online ads to these local businesses if I spend the time to get know the business owners personally. If I build up a trust with them, they'll spend the money just on the fact that they know me personally. I've actually been able to sell advertising to a real estate agent just on this facet alone.

But I can't spend my time becoming buddies with every business owner in town.

So, I've resigned myself to just letting Google AdSense run on this space, and have kinda throttled down the time I spend on Menifee 24/7. Maybe my goal is to sell it off, and make some decent money that way.