An apartment complex in San Marcos, Tex., one of many fast-growing communities hit hard by flooding. Credit Stephen Ramirez, Birdsiview.org
One of the great joys of working at Next City is when I see in the comments or on social media someone inspired by our journalism. The best way this happens is when someone says, “We should have this in my town” or “This is happening here too.”
Our feature this week is about San Marcos, Texas — a town I hadn’t even heard of — and how it’s being overrun by the university there. Housing for the booming student population has been at least relied on the private market. This has led to the increase in rent-by-the-room housing in the city.
I expected this article to be popular, but had no idea how popular it turned out to be. Thousands of people have shared it on Facebook, and it’s gone viral by our standards. In going through their comments I expected some backlash in defense of the school. But almost every comment I read either agreed or said that the same thing is happening in their small city with a big university.
It’s been an exciting few days watching all the traffic and comments come in. I couldn’t be more proud of the editors and writers I get to work with everyday.
As the audience engagement manager for Next City, one of my main jobs is building our database. For a news organization with as much traffic as nextcity.org sees, the database, while by no means small, could be a lot bigger. So over the past year, I’ve focused on building better landing pages to help convert readers into newsletter subscribers and donors.
ABC. Always be converting. (Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross)I’m not sure where I heard this, but in my various jobs for nonprofits, I’ve always tried to convert people “up the ladder” — from someone who never heard of your organization, to reader (or follower), to email newsletter subscriber, to donor, to advocate for your work. The best way to convert people online is through landing pages. These are pages in a website that have one job, like converting newsletter signups, giving away free downloads or selling a product. At Next City, I’ve focused on three: newsletter signups, free ebook downloads, and membership donations.
Along with our art director and developer, we came up with designs and functionality that works really, really well for us. In fact, as I just learned, they do shockingly well. The main reason, I think, we’re so successful on landing pages is that our editors deliver high quality journalism that our audience trusts. That trust makes it easy for people to take the next step up the ladder. In terms of the first step on the conversion ladder, we’re doing really well. Once you’re aware of us and read our reporting regularly, you know what we can deliver.
From Moz.com.According to this video by Moz, landing page conversion rates are much lower than I thought. None are above 5% according to Moz.
These are not a one-to-one comparisons to my world, since they focus on for-profits, but they’re close. They say email signup pages (newsletters) convert 3-5% of the time, free app (free ebooks in our case) is 4-5%, and business to consumer (donations in our case) is 1.5-2%. Now these aren’t set numbers for everyone, but they’re still much lower than I expected. Next City is brining in 10 times the conversion rate on these pages.
After you build trust in your brand or nonprofit, you have to build landing pages that work. I will discuss what we’ve done to be successful in my next post. In the meantime, know that if you can get 5% conversion on a landing page, you’re doing pretty well. If you’ve ever thought that no one is signing up on your newsletter page, you might just need to focus on driving traffic to site and compare your numbers with what Moz says is about normal.
DETROIT, MI – MARCH 23: The words, “God Loves This City” are painted on the front of an abandoned home in Detroit March 23, 2011 in Detroit, Michigan. The new census figures show that Detroit has lost 25 percent of its population in the last ten years, bringing the city’s population down to its lowest since 1910. (Photo by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)
While I love cities, and always want to live and raise my children in them, I wouldn’t call myself an urbanist. Mostly because I find the typical urbanist arguments about labor, housing and education to be extremely conservative.
Pete Saunders’s blog The Corner Side Yard has been an antidote to the typical urbanist arguments for me over the past two years. When I’ve read the latest argument for supply-side housing to combat gentrification, for example, I look up what Saunders has to say on housing. Whenever the major urbanist writers are on the same page about a recent topic, I look for his take to help me put it all into perspective.
He’s taking a break from blogging, and hopefully will be back at it soon. In the meantime, catch up on all of his posts so far. Here are three of my recent favorites.
The Orthodoxy of Supply Side Urbanism: Wrong
“Relaxing zoning in cities or metro areas with a lower housing demand, which is the case for much of the Rust Belt and many low density Sun Belt cities, in my opinion would lead to a concentration of new housing development in the most in-demand neighborhoods within them, at the exclusion of other neighborhoods and suburbs. It would serve the affluent, it would be clustered, and would potentially decrease affordability and further increase inequality.”
Let’s Put an End to “Tales of Two Cities”
“I also find that many current urbanists want to put economic clothing on what is largely a sociological phenomenon. The disappearance of demand in cities is only in part economic. The pull of suburbia did indeed present new economic opportunities for many, through the late 1960s and early 1970s. But too many people seem to forget, or understate, the importance of push factors that fueled suburban growth as well. Perceptions of crime, poor schools and social unrest sent as many people out of our cities as did economic opportunity.”
Revisiting Black Urbanism
“Three years ago, in the very early days of this blog, I posed a rather provocative question — where are the black urbanists? The genesis of this question came as I looked over a list from 2009 by Planetizen of the top 100 urban thinkers, as designated by a poll. The list included many architects, landscape architects, elected officials, designers, philosophers, people from antiquity and from the present day. But the list included no African Americans.”
