By the end of the day, you'll see a noticeable change in our main header on the homepage with an emphasis on identifying this website as NSBNews.Net. With that said, we will continue to emphasize news from throughout Volusia County. So our new brand is NSBNews.Net, underscored with Around the clock Internet news for Volusia County's 16 cities based in New Smyrna Beach.
While we were hoping to ease off or de-emphasize NSBNews.Net as our brand in favor of VolusiaNews.Net, it got to be confusing to those discovering us for the first time and even for us in identifying ourselves in stories and photo and video credits. Plus Google would only recognize as a news outlet as our established NSBNews.Net.
This is the brand we started with in launching our website and our Google analytics continue to tremendous growth with that name identifying our mission as an around the clock news website not only for greater New Smyrna Beach, but for Volusia County as a whole.
While we wanted to ease off of NSBNews.Net in favor of VolusiaNews.Net in the last couple of months, the Google Analytics showed even more people accessing the site through NSBNews.Net, We've covered Volusia County news from day 1, but not to the extent we've done over the last eight weeks.
Many people were confused asking: Why do you have two names? Isn't it difficult enough trying to remember one name?
The answer to the first question was we wanted to be known as a daily news website for Volusia County while not losing our commitment to New Smyrna Beach where we are based. As to the second question, the answer is definitely yes.
We were concerned that visitors and potential advertisers would think of us simply as a news website that covers New Smyrna Beach. But people have come to understand and see that we are covering local news beyond our home base.
Our Google Analytics have shown tremendous increases in the few months. Not because we pushed VolusiaNews.Net, but because of the intensity of our expanded news coverage countywide. It's the journalism that draws people to our site.
Prime examples are stories like the exclusive interview we had with the woman caught in the middle with her estranged husband she was planning to divorce who is charged with capital murder in the New Year's shotgun-slaying of her boyfriend and our breaking the story on the Oak Hill police scandal.
Sera and I love New Smyrna Beach. We have a beautiful home in Sugar Mill where we are raising my teenage son. This is where my business partner, Peter Mallory, also makes his home. And so we are keeping our commitment to New Smyrna Beach just as the News-Journal does with Daytona Beach.
We lead all media outlets in covering New Smyrna Beach city government and police, as well as business and community events. For three years running, we've been to nearly every weekend festival on Canal Street and Flagler Avenue. Our video catalog is a testament to that with more than 500 video segments posted with our stories. We were at the NSB CAPS fundraiser two weekends ago. This past weekend we were jockeying between the Rolex 24 at Daytona International Speedway and the two-day IMAGES art festival in downtown New Smyrna Beach.
In the past two months, we've put a tremendous effort into getting the news of the day from throughout Volusia County while still keeping New Smyrna Beach in focus. Our first priority is breaking news countywide, followed by investigative reporting and then daily news items.
Since New Smyrna Beach is our home base, we staff city commission meetings here and provide police patrol reports for NSB as well as Edgewater every day. We're also making an effort to staff County Council meetings, though we were unable to attend County Council Chairman Frank Bruno's state of the county address.
We are primarily a one-person news operation with me covering the major news of the day as well as in-depth or investigative reporting. We have a stringer to help with a few meetings stories a week. We also have more than two dozen community bloggers, in addition to Mallory and myself. Sera does the multi-media such as videos as well as graphics. We have a Utah-based webmaster to help us with technical issues and trouble shooting.
Our website is custom built from scratch with the ability to bring news, entertainment and sports from around the world in the form of stories and videos directly to your desk-top computer, laptop. iPad, iPod, cell phone and other Internet-friendly electronic devices.
The non-local news side of the website continues around the clock with news imported through Google feeds, in the form of rotating headlines and photos, as well as video feeds from the Associated Press, the New York Post and the New York Times. Our Business page offes videos from Bloomberg News and our Sports page provides videos from ESPN3 and continuously updated headlines from NASCAR.
Besides doing most of the daily writing, reporting and editing of local content, I also sell all of the advertising and do the marketing. Thanks to Facebook and Twitter, we have the largest social media network.
It's an overwhelming responsibility and hopefully, more advertisers, especially Volusia County's larger companies and business owners will see the value in NSBNews.Net and help us grow. Of course, small business owners see that we provide an affordable means for them to reach out to customers.
We are not the Orlando Sentinel nor are we the Daytona Beach News-Journal, but we do have a place in reporting relevant and timely news that impacts the community's quality of life, both good and bad.
We certainly can't compete with the daily print newspapers with their far greater resources, money, personnel and name recognition. We're not expected to provide ongoing coverage of issues such as the American Music Festival scandal, high school and college sports, daily court trials and issues such as development of the Daytona Beach Pier and county and municipal governments.
These heavy lifting stories are the responsibility of the News-Journal from a countywide point of view and the Sentinel on a regional basis.
These print newspapers have to stay on top of major news and maintain a fine line between news coverage and their advertising and marketing. And let's be real about this: Based on what we've seen regarding the fallout from the American Music Festival, the public becomes even more skeptical of that fine line and whose are being served by local print media..
When the local print newspaper gets beat on major stories, it increases our credibility and standing. As Volusia County's only exclusively on-line newspaper -- despite our extremely limited resources -- we are gaming a loyal and growing following among Internet readers.
And in our 21st-century digital world, print media is on its way out. People want their news today -- not the following morning. And they hunger for more than a few re-written cop press releases posted on the print newspaper website as breaking news.
Our Google Analytics clearly show that NSBNews.Net is gaining a lot of interest throughout Volusia County as the stats show in the form of daily visits and page views. Here are some exciting stats that demonstrate our growth:
In January, we had 60,524 visits (hits) and 88,260 page views. On Jan. 9alone, we set a record with 7,407 visits, as more and more news came out of the Arizona shooting massacre from the day before on our wire videos and our local reaction blogs.
In January 2010, we had 29,932 visits and 55,639 page views. In January 2009, we drew 3,902 visits and 10,756 page views.
We'll continue with VolusiaNews.Net as a secondary as a secondary outlet, but our main brand is definitely NSBNews.net, especially since search engines for "Volusia News" will direct people directly to NSBNews.net and to a lesser extent VolusiaNews.Net.
Anyone who doubts NSBNEWS.Net's standing on the Internet need only to go to Google and type in google and news. That will take them to Google's up-to-the minute news page. Then they can type in a city and state or simply just their zip code in Volusia County. NSBNEWS.Net pops right up: every day and throughout the day.