Category: Howe News Bulletin

The Howe Enterprise is flirting with 700 visits today.  That’s already a watermark for the ‘new’ Enterprise.  That’s probably nothing to larger markets, but after a showing of 516 on Sunday, we’ve now had over 5,000 visits in our last 30 days.  The spike in readership is always much appreciated, and so are the businesses from Van Alstyne that have broken down the Blythe Road floodgate and are swarming in to market their business to the great people of Howe.

Remember, shopping locally with small businesses helps to keep our money local.  If you’re looking for a big ticket item like Dish, there’s probably a local guy (who is a Howe grad and advertises with your newspaper) who can sell it to you at the same price and it keeps your dollars in our local economy.  If you’re looking for chicken fried steak, there’s a really good restaurant in your home town.  If you’re looking for prom stuff, there’s a florist in V.A. that started marketing to you this week (about page 13).  Need to learn to fire a handgun?  Who better to learn from than our very own police chief, who owns Handgun Instructors of Texas (it’s always good to get to know the police chief).  Need premium coffee in a cool atmosphere? Check out the one on Jefferson in V.A.  Need a plant, or tree or flowers..front page.

Thank you all for your loyal support.  “The Great Mom & Pop Mission” continues…

New teachers to Howe ISD will be receiving these gifts from the Howe Enterprise. Welcome to Howe!

The newspaper business is one thing; the online newspaper business in an entirely different animal.  In traditional newspaper advertising, it’s completely subjective on how many people saw your ad.  And they like it like that because they can throw newspapers out to a different town for a week and claim a larger circulation.  However, in the online newspaper business, you can tell your advertiser EXACTLY what he or she is getting for their dollar.  Even in radio, they go by Arbitron Ratings.  Having been in radio for quite some time, I’m very familiar with the crapshoot that game can be when a small amount of people fill out a survey.  Television is the same way with The Nielson Ratings, which is the same company as Arbitron Ratings.

The bottom line is that when all of those subjective numbers look good for a radio station or TV, they boast about them.  And when they are not so good, people get fired and those numbers get hidden from their customers.  As mentioned before, an online newspaper has no excuses.  The data is at their fingertips if they are tracking it properly with Google Analytics.  If anyone is hiding their online readership, there’s probably a reason for it.

So with all of that said, the curtain is being pulled back and the readership numbers are being revealed to the general public and not just future hopeful advertising customers.  They say you’re only as good as your last 30 days, so here’s the last 30 days even without school having begun yet. I expect these numbers to have a significant jump starting next week (and keep in mind, Google Analytics didn’t pick up our readers for three days while the conversion was made to the new website last week) :

3,878 – Total visits to HoweEnterprise.com

2,082 users

7,361 page views

25-34 – the average age of the reader

54.15% – male readers