Becoming the Mayor of Concord

No surprise to my readers that I bought a new domain. It is my addiction. I started looking online for some local blogs. My plan was to write a post about local bloggers and what their perceptions of this fine city are. I started with StumbleUpon searching through members that live in the surrounding area to see what sites they have. Most didn’t have links to their own blogs and the ones that did only referenced their MySpace pages. Most of you know how I feel about MySpace. It’s garbage. The concept is great but MySpace dropped the ball when it came to keeping the freaks and spammers in check. I have an account but I rarely use it for anything more than accepting friend requests from people that I know. I then dug a bit deeper into the internet and found a few local Concord blogs that actually surprised me with the amount of content.

Looking for the Mayor

I wanted to see if the Mayor of this fine city had a blog (I knew it was a stretch) but maybe the city maintained something that would resemble a blog. I took the chance and typed www.mayorofconcord.com into FireFox and saw that there was nothing there. The next obvious step was to grab the domain from GoDaddy since no one had thought that far ahead.

Becoming the Mayor of Concord (sorta)

I bought the domain last week and really had second thoughts about it, like buyers remorse for domain names. WTF was I going to do with this? About three days ago I thought I would at least throw together a WP blog for the domain and use it for feeds from local papers and other stuff from around Concord, maybe write a few small things just for SERPS. After the design was finalized and I felt comfortable with it, I made an initial post “Welcome to Concord” with some basic facts about the city. Actually I was going to leave it at that until I saw a news article in the local paper that there were some kids in the area being persecuted for selling fruits and veggies out of their backyard to people. That reminded me of a story in Florida about a girl that was being harassed for having a lemonade stand. I put together a quick post about this ridiculousness. Little did I know, there were a few other people that liked to search for blogs about Concord.

There is no hiding on the internet

One of the sites I had found in my initial search was called Halfway to Concord and was probably the most professional site I came across. I sent an email to the owner after setting up my site just seeing if he would be interested in exchanging links for the blog roll. He went one step further and put together a mini post. What shocked me more than anything was that the email I sent to him was fairly anonymous which was intentional, just my email address and first name. I manage several sites and most of them are not directly attached to ME since they have nothing to do with ME. With the great powers of Google he was able to get some information about me for the post.

Since his site gets a great deal of local traffic, once he posted, I was getting a lot of visitors also. Hey, I’m not going to complain. The best thing for a blogger is to get linked and gain traffic from as many sources as possible. I was just surprised he did some research before the post. No offense intended Bill, I should have expected it.

I have gotten about 80 emails in total from people saying things like “Great site Mayor” to “Can you place an ad for my local business on your site?”. There were a few haters but I chalk it up to jealousy since they didn’t think of buying Mayor of Concord first. In fact if you Google “Mayor of Concord” I rank higher than the cities website and and fall in at #3 overall. My favorite comment was “What a waste of money buying this domain. No one bought it before because it’s worthless“. So not true. 80 emails and 1000′s of hits later I have already gotten a couple offers to buy the domain which I refused.

So the plan with the site is simple. I’ll post to it from time to time when something of interest sparks my creative juices enough to write about. I want to leave the ad space for local businesses and already have a couple up. I put together a Concord job board and may build in a few other pieces.

I was wondering what people thought of this? Have any of you done something like this?