Lansing City Pulse launches Local Experts

Lansing City Pulse, an alternative weekly in Michigan, has launched a native advertising program on Wehaa Local Experts platform, which creates a microsite on the Pulse website, and reverse publishes to print.

The first group of ten annual advertisers includes a real estate agent, beauty stylist, credit agent and a doctor. All of whom rotate their monthly column in the homepage ad and are published in the newspaper and Facebook with other advertising packaged in.

Here's  what the Local Experts page looks like online on the Wehaa platform:

You can see the “Local Experts” banner ad in the right rail, that alternates between all the experts. When you click on each one, the landing page is a short profile:

Clicking on the “home” button in the top navigation takes the user to the Local Experts area where all the local profiles are housed. Wehaa also reverse publishes a page or more of columns monthly for the print edition.

Pulse publisher Berl Schwartz said he employs freelancers to write monthly columns for each expert, although two of the ten initial customers are writing their own.

There are three types of packages sold in the program. The Diamond package, at $159 a week, includes one column a month online and in the paper, starting on page three, plus three print ads, 10,000 online ads on the weekly's website, and 20,000 programmatic ads. The columns are also posted on the Facebook page.

The Platinum package at $139 reduces the print ads to two, and the Gold package is $99 a week with two ads and no programmatic buy.  

Since all the contracts are annual, the agreements range from $5,200 to $8,268 per year in annualized revenue. Wehaa is charging $45 per advertiser a month or $540 per year per client, providing a great margin.  

Schwartz said he employed the Blinder Group to send a rep to train their teams, help with packaging and participate in the first week of the rollout.

So far at least one customer has mentioned having a “fantastic response” from people mentioning they saw the columns, and the write-ups are showing up on page one of Google search results.

Wehaa is best known for producing a platform for virtual automotive sales, real estate and other custom initiatives. The Local Experts platform launched this year.

Stay tuned for more results from this initiative.