New Jersey Blog Becomes Local Legend

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

If you have a love for your city, town, or region, you might want to pay close attention to today's story. In fact, if you live in a mid-sized city, as opposed to a huge metropolis or small town, it might be especially relevant. Why do I say mid-sized? Well, in this story, a school counselor starts a blog writing about her most treasured East Coast city. It's the city of Hoboken, New Jersey.

She turns it into one of New Jersey's leading lifestyle websites. She now runs it full time with 20 freelance contributors, bringing in a six-figure income. I think mid-sized is key because if you're in a city like London or New York, for example, it's difficult to become the single authority site for everything going on. There's room for lots of different resources, but they usually need to specialize. Also, if you're in a really small town, then there might not be enough readers or enough business partnerships to make the whole thing worthwhile, at least to the level that this woman has been able to achieve.

But regardless of where you live, you should be able to learn something from this story. So stay tuned. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School, and the whole story is coming right up. Jennifer Tri-Puca is the founder and editor of the lifestyle website HobokenGirl.com. It covers all things New Jersey with a hyper-focus on Hoboken and Jersey City.

The blog tackles everything from the best brunch spots to vintage Hoboken boutiques to parenting tips for new moms. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. As she puts it, her team lives, breathes, eats, and drinks Hoboken and Jersey City lifestyle topics. What started as a personal blog has grown into a six-figure business with over 20 contributors and an audience of over 2 million readers. How did she do it?

Well, it started with a steamy love affair. Love affair with the city of Hoboken. Jennifer moved there over eight years ago and became enamored with the place. While sitting home one New Year's Eve with her then-boyfriend, who's now her husband, she confided she wanted to explore more of her local community and wound up buying the domain HobokenGirl.com that night. It began as a passion project to chronicle her adventures around the city from a female perspective.

She wrote about the things women would be interested in and discovered there weren't many sites around with the female voice. Her goal was to bring a fresh bin through her local blogosphere while sharing things that residents might enjoy. Find stuff like local events, things to do, culture and community, and all with a humorous tilt. It turned out that Jennifer liked writing. She liked it so much and was inspired by what she was creating that she decided to pursue it full-time, but not full-time with the side hustle.

She first left her job as a school counselor and landed a new job as a digital editor for Brides Magazine. While there, she learned a lot. She oversaw celebrity wedding content, crafted their daily newsletter, and grew the brand's Instagram and Snapchat presence to over 200,000 followers, all skills she later used to build HobokenGirl into a lifestyle enterprise. She's now grown her own substantial following of 52,000 people on Instagram, 18,000 on Facebook, and 12,000 on Twitter. She also has an insider's Facebook group where locals can connect.

Jennifer owes this growth to daily engagement with her audience, paired with fun features on her website, and creative takes on local news stories. It didn't happen overnight; it's been a slow and steady, seven-year growth spurt. Jennifer plans a monthly content calendar, two to three articles every day, seven days a week, of all topics to be covered. This includes her editorial calendar of evergreen content, unique happenings, and SEO-driven topics of what people are searching for around the web. Local happenings, unique experiences, and weekly news roundups all score big points with her audience.

HobokenGirl also hosts events in the community, including her biggest one of the year, the Hoboken Wellness Crawl, which has over 1,000 attendees and features over 100 businesses. It's like a bar crawl, minus the alcohol. Participants gain access to free fitness classes, nutritious snacking alternatives, and a host of other health and beauty treatments. The foundation, HobokenGirl Helps, connects readers with local community opportunities to give back. Hosting these events has allowed HobokenGirl to raise nearly $15,000 for charities over the past two years.

Starting up was cheap. Jennifer spent less than $150 on her website, which she built on WordPress, her domain name, and hosting. She hired an intern from a local graphic designer to create her logo, and just like that, she was in business. Since then, HobokenGirl has been steadily growing in the low six-figure range. The blog makes money through sponsored posts, brand and media partnerships, dedicated emails, and product advertisements.

She's hired several part-time team members, as well as 20 freelance writers who contribute to the site. What started with a couple of blog posts a week has now turned into this Garden State media juggernaut. In January 2017, Jennifer left her day job, the one with the Brides magazine, to go all in with HobokenGirl. She's since picked up another side hustle as a consultant in social media strategy and management. She's also working on creating a podcast called Tea on the Hudson.

Let's talk about all the things that Jennifer does right. I don't actually have any suggestions for it. I was just looking at the site to see if I did, and mostly I just went away with things that I thought were really smart. First of all, HobokenGirl.com. The content, the homepage, it's super snackable.

That's just the word that I had. I was like, "Oh, I feel like I'm going to try this article. I'm going to try this article. I'm going to click through over here." So it's very Pinterest style in that way, and that you just want to click on a bunch of stuff, and there's a post about a dog that's adoptable. "Come and adopt this cute dog, and here's all about this dog." Then you've got something else that's current, like 29 events in Hoboken happening this weekend.

Then there's some features like the HobokenGirl of the Week, or four binge-worthy books to read at the beach. Then in parentheses, it says Found Locally, so this hyper-local focus on all their content. Lots of stuff that's kind of, I don't want to say voyeuristic, but you just want to click. Here's inside so-and-so's gorgeous uptown Hoboken home. You're like, "Oh, I want to see what their home looks like, and I'll click and take a look at that." Then you've got stuff like a tour of the best grilled cheese sandwiches in Hoboken, and I'm like, "Huh, I'm curious about that.

I'm not anywhere near Hoboken, but I'm just wondering now what is the best grilled cheese sandwich in the city?" As I said, very snackable. You want to click a lot. Also really great that she has multiple sources of income, which of course is always smart for everyone, but I think in this case it's particularly important because sometimes people build up these kinds of sites or blogs, and it's all dependent on basically one source, usually advertising that's coming in from Google, and that can easily go away. She's built all these relationships, brand and media partnerships. She's got dedicated emails she can send out.

She's got the ads. She's got sponsored posts, so I think that's just really key for this kind of project. Also, Jennifer spent some time understanding SEO, search engine optimization, because it is important for this kind of thing to be ranked highly in search engines, but at the same time she isn't dependent on Google. The whole strategy of the site is not Google-based. She's actually really focused on building loyalty and just building local loyal readers who continue to come back.

To that end, she also builds local community offline with these events, with the foundation and so on. Really, if you imagine what is the perfect role model for doing something like this, I honestly think it's what she's doing. If you're in a mid-sized city or it doesn't have to be mid-sized, I just think that has some advantages, like I mentioned in the beginning. If you're interested in making some kind of content-driven media portal, this is a good one to look at. Congratulations, Jennifer.

Thank you for letting us share your story. And listeners, I hope you enjoyed it. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Today's shout-outs, including links to everything I mentioned, are at sidehustleschool.com/902. 9-0-2.

I'll be back again tomorrow with more. Thanks so much. My name is Chris Guillebeau, and this is Side Hustle School. From the Onward Project.