8-30-2012
In 2012, Gordy Rush attended Radio Ink's Convergence Conference in California. His goal was to pick brains to find ways to keep the revenue machine humming back home in Baton Rouge Louisiana. We checked in with the VP/General Manager for Guaranty Broadcasting who has a great success story he wanted to share, resulting from being an attendee of Convergence 2012. Before you read our interview, log on to www.louisianadaily.com. This idea is a no-brainer and it doesn't involve ad-insertion.
When and why did you develop this site?
We began to develop this website back in mid-June with the help of Transformyx, a Baton Rouge based technology business. It took us about a month and a half to build the site and perform two weeks of a soft launch before we launched on August 1st. We built the site for two reasons. First, we have an FM News talk Station (WBRP - Talk 107.3 FM) and an FM all-sports station (WNXX-104.5 ESPN). These stations feature seven local, live programs. There is only one other live and local talk program in the market. We felt that Louisiana Daily would re-enforce our talk brands, deliver our podcasts through the internet, and drive Louisiana Daily's listeners back to our streams. Secondly, Louisiana Daily provided us with another revenue stream from the growing digital advertising budgets.
What is your goal here?
We have specific revenue, website traffic, and subscription goals. Our broad vision is simply to be the leader in Louisiana News, Politics, and Sports coverage. However, on the revenue side, we were to the positive after 3 weeks.
What kind of content does it have?
We have three main areas that we have focused on since our launch - Louisiana News and Politics, Louisiana Sports, and Technology provided from our partner, Transforyx. Our radio cluster includes the flagship station for LSU Sports - WDGL - Eagle 98.1. We launched on August 1st with the launch of LSU Football so that we could take advantage of the worldwide interest of Fightn' Tiger Football. As a result, our website has been read in over 57 foreign countries. We include primarily articles and audio from our radio stations. Some of the content is pulled from our live programming and other content is recorded specifically for Louisiana Daily.
How do you gather the content?
Our digital manager, James Gilmore, serves as a "air traffic control" type receiving the information from each station program director then directing it to Transformyx for delivery which is 1:00 p.m. CST every weekday.
How is it associated with your radio product(s)?
All five streams can be found on the website with the majority of the content coming from our talk stations, 104.5 ESPN and Talk 107.3 FM.
How are you promoting it?
We are promoting it through all five of our radio stations as well as the sports franchises that we air - the New Orleans Saints and the LSU Tigers. We have also done a good amount of social media advertising to direct listeners in our area to the site.
What are the numbers so far.
We started with 50,000 plus e-mails for our launch giving the recipient the opportunity to opt in as a subscriber. Our website spiked with the coverage of Hurricane Isaac this week and we are expecting to be close to 250,000 at the end of our first month. We will find out on Tuesday, September 4th!
Want to ask him how he did it, contact Gordy via e-mail gordy.rush@gbcradio.com
And don't forget to join us for Convergence in May of 2013.
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