If you’re interested in how to make a hyperlocal news website work, please take a few moments to read the transcript of the chat I did with several other news entrepreneurs for the ASNE yesterday. ASNE put together a panel of half a dozen journalists who are running hyperlocal or start-up websites and asked us how we make these things work.

Here’s an important point I’d like to give a bit more time than we had in the chat:

If ads aren’t selling themselves, you’re not ready to sell

The question: “Can a journalist learn to sell advertising?” My response? Ultimately, you don’t need to. Not the way that most journalists (in my experience) envision what “selling advertising” to mean.

Our first advertisers on my family’s websites came to us. They were members of the community, loved what we were doing and wanted to make sure that we had the commitment and the resources to keep the site going. Other journalist entrepreneurs I’ve met have had the same experience. If you build a large enough community of readers, who are engaged in the topic or neighborhood you’re covering, advertisers will come to you looking to get access to those readers.

Believe or not, some businesses really do take the long view. They understand that anything that helps promote the health and prosperity of their community helps their business in the long run. Businesses do better when they’re surrounded by other successful businesses – not isolated in some uninhabited backwater. So if you’ve built a resource that’s helping to engage and strengthen the local community, these businesses will want to help you to succeed, as well.

Many advertisers are also desperate to find effective successors to the local newspaper ads that they (or their predecessors) used to place to connect with engaged local consumers. If they see you as reaching the potential customers they need to reach, they’ll come looking for you, checkbook open, trying to place an ad campaign.

If that’s not happening? Well, that’s often a sign that local businesses don’t yet see you as a valuable community resource, or attracting a significant number of consumers they want to reach. So instead of spending time on the uncomfortable task of pitching skeptical local advertisers, work instead on building your readership community. When your site gets to the point that money’s coming to look for you, that’s when you’ll know you’re ready to turn your site into a business.

This is why it’s important to either start your site before you need it as an income source, or to put away enough cash to live on for a year before quitting your job to start a site. Twelve months seems to be the consensus – among the chat participants and other others I’ve met – on how long it takes to build a commercially viable readership community around a start-up local news website.

If you’re worried about how much to charge those first potential advertisers, why not take some time to look into what other websites covering your community (or comparable nearby communities) are charging? Consider yourself a potential advertiser on their sites, then call and ask for a quote. You’re not being dishonest – heck, if someone can make you a deal, maybe it’s worth the investment to promote your new site. And your research moight help you to decide what would be a fair and competitive rate for local Web advertising in your community.

Another question: “How did you learn to close the deal?”

My answer? I just had to learn how to shut up. Hey, these businesses wanted to support our site. They wanted to order a campaign. Instead of saying, “Thank you! I’ll send the invoice today!” I was engaging them like I would a news source, probing them to see if they really meant what they were trying to say.

Nice technique for a reporter. Stupid, stupid, stupid technique for a publisher. Just shut up and book the deal.

Now and then someone will come to you who’s not a good fit for your site. Perhaps they sell something you know your community won’t accept. Or perhaps you suspect that their margin’s too thin to be able to afford your ads, given the response you think they’ll get. Different advertisers have different needs, which is why I think it’s important for news publishers to diversify their ad products. On our violin site, we created a (relatively) low cost directory listing for shops and smaller businesses who couldn’t always afford our display banner ad rates, but who still wanted contact with our community. And I have suggested to some potential advertisers that they might find other communities that are a better fit for their products. (I always phrase it that way, rather than saying “No.” Perhaps my aversion to the word “no” is my Disney training talking.)

Ultimately, you’ll need to engage advertisers and potential advertisers – to learn their pains and talk frankly about the ways you can, or can’t, help them build their businesses. But when you’re starting, and booking your first few customers, just shut up (save a “thank you”) and let them help you help your community.

If you want to run a journalism business, you can’t keep thinking and acting like an employee.

When you’re a newsroom employee, your “customer” is you boss. That’s the person who approves your check, after all. So you do things to please that boss. And your boss is doing things to please his or her boss. Eventually, there are people in the advertising and circulation departments who are trying to please readers and advertisers, but with the exception of some commissioned sales reps, no one in the company is getting paid by them. That’s why so many newspaper companies can’t react to changing markets. Everyone within the company is just too isolated from the readers and advertisers whose needs the company is supposed to be meeting.

Go to work for yourself, and the lines on the org chart separating you from the community go away. So stop thinking about pleasing a now-imaginary boss, and instead start focusing more on the needs of the people in the community you’re covering.

We’ve written about a community-focused approach to news entrepreneurship before, but today I want to offer one qualification – a point of advice that I hope can keep some beginning journalism entrepreneurs from losing their way.

Don’t forget that it’s still your site. You can’t lead a community if you’re simply reacting to it. You’re a servant, not a slave.

When you don’t have a boss to manage your time and create a structure for your workday, it’s way too easy to let yourself get distracted by every phone call, tweet, email and text message that comes your way. My wife talks about the freelance musicians she knows who will drop everything to take a gig when a contractor calls. The gig always gets top priority, even over teaching commitments, personal obligations and family relationships. So many of those acquaintances end up divorced, estranged from children and without students – but they see that as the price of getting gigs.

Those musicians are thinking like employees, always working to please the “boss”. You could do the same with your website, always jumping to respond to every pitch, tip or query that comes your way. That might keep your blog filled with fresh posts and even might help keep some income flowing, too.

But are you really going someplace with your website, or are you just running in place?

Growing a business requires saying “no” now and then. Or at the very least, “not now.” It requires taking the time to look at what you’re doing, think about where you want to go, and to plan how to get from here to there.

For those of us working in niche media, I think this process gets a bit easier, because we had to make some decisions about focus when we started our sites. But news entrepreneurs covering geographic communities still need to think about focus, as well. What do you cover best? What are the real needs that your customers feel? How can you best be of service to your community?

This is where I find helpful to remember a few practices from life in the newsroom. With no printing press deadlines, it’s tempting to think that you can run a website without any schedule or story budget. Just post news as you get it.

You can do this, just like those freelance musicians keep taking those gigs whenever they call. But you can do so much more to grow your site – and its business – if you plan more aggressively instead. Long-range planning allows you to take on more complicated reporting projects, instead of limiting yourself to chasing daily commodity news blog fodder. Planning recurring features on your site encourages readers to come back on a regular schedule, making visiting your site a habit – which helps your traffic grow. Thinking about focus allows you to avoid wasting time on things that don’t serve your audience or your customers.

So set aside time for regular story budget meetings, even if it’s just time alone with yourself and a notepad. Create deadlines for yourself and impose structure on your workday. And don’t neglect to reserve time for your private life, as well. While you’ll need to react if truly important news breaks during your personal time, set that bar high enough so that you’re not giving up all the time you need to live a life. (And be sure to empower your community to cover breaking news, too, for those time when you can’t get online right away.)

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If you’d like to hear more about news entrepreneurship, I’ll be one of the guests on ASNE’s weekly online chat Tuesday, Feb. 21, at 2pm ET. We’ll be talking about lessons from hyperlocal and start-up news sites and the line-up includes several other journalists who’ve made the jump from print and broadcast newsrooms to running their own online news businesses. I’d like to invite you to follow the chat on the ASNE website. The Twitter hashtag will be #ASNEchat.

Let me take one more swing at killing the zombie belief that “No one can make money online.”

Consumers are spending billions of dollars online each year, with $165 billion by U.S. consumers on e-commerce alone, back in 2010. And if people are spending money, someone else must be making it.

So why can’t we slay this zombie? Perhaps the reason why so many print veterans continue to peddle the line that money’s unavailable online is that so many of them are infatuated with getting people to pay for one of the few things that the public shown it won’t pay for online:

Webpage content.

Perhaps it’s too late to try to convince anyone at one of the big newspaper chains to quit blowing so much time and money trying to craft a paywall strategy that isn’t a total disaster. But here are five alternatives to paywalls that are working right now for content publishers who are willing to look instead at revenue streams the market is supporting.

Advertising

With nearly $40 billion being spent on online advertising this year, someone’s cashing in on ad sales. And it’s not all getting divvied up into infinitesimal amounts by an infinite number of publishers, either. CPMs of $10 and more are easily achievable online, but only for publishers who deliver a community of readers that advertisers want to reach.

Publishers who complain about sub-$1 CPMs too often are putting up pages that fail to gather any community of readers, getting instead only itinerant hits from search engine users, who bounce away as quickly as they find the site. (I wish those publishers would learn to shift resources from obsessive SEO tweaking to true community-building instead.)

You don’t need a high-priced (or high-pressure) sales team to earn ad income, either. In fact, in my experience I’ve found that the harder you work to make a sale, the more likely that advertiser will be to decline to renew the contract. Build a large, engaged community of readers, and advertisers who want to reach those readers will come to you. And stick with you, too.

eBooks

Yeah, I’ve been hammering this topic for the past year. But that’s because it works. So let’s say it one more time: Apps are for functionality – eBooks are for content. If you want to do in-depth, original reporting – different from the day-to-day commodity blog fodder that fills so many news websites – eBooks can be your savior. This is the medium in which people willingly pay from $.99 to $19.99 each for high-quality, long-form, readable reporting.

Sure, it’s more work to edit your in-depth reporting into eBook form. But a good evergreen title can continue to earn you money for years after publication. Newspapers have been turning top content into books for years. EBook publishing reduces the cost barrier to entry for this market, allowing reporters to turn out more titles and at lower cost than ever before.

The challenge? As always, marketing. You’ll be lost in the depths of Amazon’s and Apple’s listings unless you can get your title onto its category bestseller lists. So you’ll need to make an immediate impact with strong initial sales to your website’s readership community. For an online journalist, that community of readers – familiar with and loyal to your work – is the asset that gives you the advantage over other eBook writers.

Videos

The online video market isn’t as developed as the eBook market, but people continue to pay for high-quality original video content via Blu-Ray and DVD. If you work in video, and have the ability and patience to edit your best work into Blu-Ray/DVD packages, many in your community will be willing to pay to own a high-quality version of your best work. Keep your eye on direct download sales through Amazon and Apple, too.

As the line between video journalist and documentarian blurs, video journalists have an opportunity to make some extra money repackaging their work for a growing market of documentary fans. (And if you don’t believe that market is growing – ask people you know how many non-fiction films and TV shows they watched before the Internet, including Netflix streaming, versus how much they watch now.)

Merchandise

Yeah, opening a CafePress store with your brand logo is cliche. But if you’ve built a true online community (there’s that word again), people in that community will gladly pay to have high-quality merchandise that identifies them as a member of the community. Think about stuff that members of your community use on a daily basis, and consider what might appropriately carry community branding. (An example? For our violin website, we’re ordering tote bags for sheet music – from a local silkscreener, not an online on-demand printer such as CafePress.)

Sure, this is ancillary revenue. But putting your community’s identity physically on community members helps promote and expand the community. Which then helps make your site that much more attractive to advertisers while expanding the market for your eBooks and videos. Merchandise is an important step in the synergy of community building.

The key is, again, having a real community to which members feel loyal. No one cares about “branding.” They care about “identity.” If people identify with their community, they will buy, wear and use your merchandise. If not, don’t expect people to bother promoting your brand.

Events

Wearing the T-shirt helps people feel like they’re part of a community. But attending a community event confirms it. People crave community and often want to meet in person the people they’ve gotten to know virtually online. In most online communities, this will happen without your guidance or participation. But there’s money to be made here by being the one who makes it happen.

Again, you don’t have to see events as revenue sources on their own. Simply holding free events helps strengthen your community’s loyalty, which encourages members to spread the word. But if you want to take it up a level, event management can be a lucrative part of your offerings, depending upon the interests and affluence of the market you serve.

See a constant here? See a consistent element in all of these economic possibilities? See a word I keep typing, again and again?

Yep, it’s community. All of these revenue streams open to a journalist who stops thinking narrowly about his or her job as news publishing and starts thinking about it more broadly as community leadership. Reporting the news ought to remain the focus of your work – fresh information about the community will be its primary draw. But don’t let your job end there. Don’t just think about the news your report. Think about the people who read it. What do they need? How can you help them make their lives easier, more fulfilling and more rewarding? How can you relieve their pain?

Answer those questions and you’re taking the step from mere news publisher to community leader. Not only will you be doing more good for that community, you’ll be opening up new worlds of revenue potential for your business, as well.