Dear Fabulous My Mountain Town Members!
It’s been a while since we’ve written, and we hope you are all well and ready to make 2017 the best yet! We want to catch you up on some of the exciting things that have been happening with My Mountain Town and where we plan to go from here!
Membership Growth:
Since we became MyMountainTown.com in July of 2013, we’ve continued to grow our membership and social media following. In 2014, we gained 334 new members on the website; in 2015, 522 new members; and in 2016, 693 new members to bring us to over 3,775. On Facebook, we’ve gone from 2,000 Likes at the beginning of 2015 to 3,400 Likes at 2016 to over 5,000 today. Because we've grown our page organically with good content and not by buying Likes, we have great Engagement, helping us Reach 12,000-30,000 people each week! As members, you are more than welcome to post to our Facebook page anytime or tag us in a Tweet, and let everyone know about road conditions, fires you see, pictures of our awesome wildlife, sunsets, etc - we are so appreciative of the first-hand info you offer because that helps everyone!
Stats:
- Website 3,781 Members
- Facebook Page 5,060 Likes
- Twitter 2,365 Followers
- Instagram 859 Followers
- Over 40 local advertisers
Mountain Weather
:
In July of 2015 our certified Chief Meteorologist, Steve Hamilton, joined us to provide daily weather reports customized specifically for all of our mountain towns - a service that can only be found at My Mountain Town! With his help, we contracted with a Colorado company to create our full-size interactive radar map that you can play with on our Expert Local Weather Page - zoom around, find storm-chasers, look at any warnings, get current temps, wind direction and speed, and track the snow down to your neighborhood.
Exclusive Webcams
:
We currently have 15 My Mountain Town webcams, and continue to add new webcam locations that you want most, including views overlooking Windy Point, the sledding hill at Meyer Ranch, and Evergreen Lake! These latter two have been requested by CBS Denver to use from time to time for their on-air weather forecasts and shared to their social media accounts with thousands of followers! Our webcams have been shown on Denver Channel 7 occasionally, and used by Jayson Luber for his traffic reports - look for us on the news!
![:) :)](/media/kunena/emoticons/smile.png)
John Morrissey who flies the KOA Jetcopter has been wonderful passing along highway accident info from us as well and helping get the word out there when there's a problem with your commute.
Whether you are traveling Hwy 285 or I-70 to get into the mountains or down to town, our webcam pages have the most comprehensive coverage of the highways, better than any other website out there, CDOT's included, because they don't have ours.
Investment in My Mountain Town:
In 2015, we spent almost $1,000, and in 2016, an additional $3,500+ updating the website and adding new features, such as our one-of-a-kind
Emergency Page,
customized
Community Calendar,
and dedicated
Community Classifieds page!
On the Profile Pages that each of you have (click your username to check it out!), you can now upload cover photos in addition to your avatars, create folders with your favorite videos, connect with other members, write your own blogs, see all of the forum posts that you've ever written, your Favorite topics, your Subscriptions, your Classified ads, and more!
What's really cool?
You can now upload photos into your posts simply by dragging and dropping them in!
No more tedious uploading to imageshack, photobucket, Flickr, or other image hosting site and copying some link or weird-looking code.
My Mountain Town is the only area community forum that is a fully mobile-responsive, “https” secure website. These two items are extremely important not only for your ease of use and security, but even more so for moving the info you post here up higher in Google searches! Topics that are started here on My Mountain Town are often ranked higher than identical topics posted on other sites, and especially so on mobile searches. If you are trying to sell something, you want a buyer interested in your item to be able to find you when they do an internet search, and we are the best at helping you do that.
If you run a business or nonprofit, every forum topic, Classified ad, and calendar event with links back to your website gives you a big search engine boost so anyone searching Google for your products or services will see your websites higher up in the search results - you always want to aim to be on the first page and at the top or as close to it as possible. Posting on our site, which now has over 41,000 indexed pages (which is huge for a website and means Google ranks us highly), and sending people to your websites from ours tells Google that you are important and should be ranked higher!
Giving back:
This past year, we sponsored a number of nonprofit organizations and events to give back to the community and help support our fellow businesses & nonprofits, including:
- Platte Canyon Area Chamber of Commerce (PCACC) Bailey Day
- PCACC Annual Bailey Car Show
- Conifer Area Chamber of Commerce (CACC) Annual Awards
- CACC Elevation Celebration Summer Street Faire
- CACC Holiday Wine & Dine
- CACC Conifer Christmas Parade
- Evergreen Chamber of Commerce Women in Business Luncheon
- Leadership Evergreen Class of 2015's World's Longest Picnic Table
- Friends of Staunton State Park
- Boys & Girls Club of the High Rockies
- 24 Hours to Give Where You Live: CO Gives Day Mountain Area Coalition
We are so very grateful that our local businesses and nonprofits choose us for their advertising needs because that allows us to give back and support community events and organizations that serve all of you! Please patronize our advertisers as often as you can, and let them know that you saw them here on MMT so they know it's worthwhile to continue investing with us! You'll see their ads rotating on the sides of our pages (no Google Ads or annoying pop-ups here, simply local businesses only!), or their upgraded Profile Pages displaying more information than just their name and phone number that the basic free listing provides.
Awards:
This past year, we were honored to be chosen by the subscribers of
Macaroni Kid: Evergreen - Bailey - Conifer
as a Gold Daisy Winner for
Best Mom-Run Business. My Mountain Town was also nominated for the
Evergreen Chamber of Commerce’s People’s Choice Award. Underway or starting soon will be nominations and voting for
The Flume’s People’s Choice Awards (we were the
2015 Best Local Website and hope to be again!), the Conifer Area Chamber of Commerce’s Annual Awards (which we've previously been selected
2012 Best Home-Based Business and voted
2014-2015 Ambassador of the Year), and the
Evergreen Chamber of Commerce/Leadership Evergreen Nonprofit Awards (2014 Leader of the Year Nominee with fellow 285 Tourism Co-Chair Marcel Flukiger). Please be thinking about those individuals, businesses, and nonprofits whom you think have done a bang up job this year who deserve to be recognized!
Future plans:
We have a wonderful problem that we've been so successful that we cannot keep up with the amount of information that needs to be shared daily along with marketing/growing the business and spending time volunteering in the community so we plan to bring aboard a social media manager to assist with all this! We intend to continue to provide you with the best service and the most comprehensive information so you don't have to look in umpteen different places for the info you want and need! Our larger goal is to expand into other towns and continue to build our membership - if you know of anyone living in other mountain towns who might be interested in becoming an affiliate, please let us know - we’ve had drawn up an Affiliate Contract, Operating Agreement, and Operating Handbook and are ready to increase our territory and connect with other fun towns!
Thank you for your membership and continued support of My Mountain Town! It has brought us joy to keep serving and investing in our community, and to grow to where we are today. We are looking forward to an exciting year ahead and we hope you will tell everyone you know to come join you at My Mountain Town!
With Gratitude,
The Staff and Volunteers at My Mountain Town