Bang for the Buck: Madville Times Outperforms Marketers with Budgets

While working on a RealMadison.org story on the city budget and tax dollars used for advertising, I thought I'd check Alexa.com rankings for various local sites promoting Madison and Lake County. I ran these numbers in December and found that the big-budget operations (o.k., "big budget" here just means "having a budget") didn't do much better at establishing Web presence than my own free Blogger site. How do those numbers look now?

• Lake County government: 20,259,990
  
• RealMadison.org: 14,876,503 (this after two months of existence!)
  
• City of Madison: 9,708,673
  
• Madison Chamber of Commerce (set up by the professionals at Credit Soup): 8,467,845
  
• Madison Daily Leader: 4,160,592
  
• MadisonSD.com (Credit Soup): 3,946,241
  
• KJAM Radio: 2,150,725
  
• Madison Public Library: 1,008,025
  
• Madville Times: 981,232

As the city reviews the proposed 2009 budget and asks for hard numbers on the return its getting for the money it spends on advertising, it should keep in mind that sometimes all it takes to get your community's name out there is a free website and some interesting, authentic content.