Hurricane Sandy; Hyper Local News Success Using WordPress

As a hyper-local news consultant, Hurricane Sandy had an unexpected affect on our company recently.

This so-called ‘Frankenstorm’ wreaked havoc all along the eastern seaboard. The center of the storm made landfall right on our front step, here in Brigantine, New Jersey.  This fateful distinction played a major role in accelerating the work we do on BrigantineNOW.com; our community website. This local news project leverages low-cost, high functionality of the WordPress CMS (content management system)

Our little seashore community of Brigantine Beach is just north of Atlantic City.

Traffic to BrigantineNOW surged to well over 50k pageviews per day. For a site that’s accustomed to 5k, we were amazed.

  • Facebook fans jumped from 320 to 2,100
  • Email database increased from 275 to over 700

Good thing we upgraded our host servers. We chose an excellent WordPress service. While two local TV & Newspaper sites crashed….we weathered the tsunami of web traffic with ease.

  • For video, Vimeo was the pick. Awesome.
  • For Email, we watched how our ‘opt-in’ database more than doubled. AWeber.com was a big reason for our success here.
  • Dynamic headlines & big story images: SlideDeck.com

Other tools we used:

  • RSS feeds
  • Twitter embeds
  • Google+
  • Many plug-ins too numerous to mention.

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