Today we’d like to introduce you to Suzanne Taylor and Michelle Knapp.
Suzanne, Michelle, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
While no one can argue that downtown Atlanta has unmatched attractions, we wanted to know more about the up-and-coming downtown areas of OTP cities. There was little information available in 2012 about local events, new businesses, quality restaurant reviews, and family-friendly attractions.
For 18 years, we’ve both lived with our families in Canton. From there, we often found ourselves traveling a good twenty minutes in any direction — Roswell, Milton, Acworth, Marietta — for a variety of reasons. We enjoyed exploring these places and discovering unique shops, restaurants, and local businesses, and in doing so had become a resource for our friends. So, we created Scoop OTP — the insider’s guide to living outside the perimeter — and sent our first e-newsletter in October 2012.
Since then, we have evolved and adapted our categories toward our reader’s top interests: new construction, events, restaurant reviews, and the scoop on movies filming locally.
It’s exciting to report the latest information on what is opening in town and what events are coming. We love being a reliable resource for our community, and work to keep our (now half a million!) readers happy.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
As with anything that deals with technology, we have learned to adapt as we go. We have also listened to our readers to see what stories they enjoy and share the most, and then try to give more of that.
We’ve tweaked our categories a bit since our initial launch — our top category is now called The Dirt, which primarily covers new construction. Then, as the local filming industry grew, we started sharing information about movies filming around town, as well as local casting calls. These categories weren’t in our original business model but have become an integral part of what we share.
Like all businesses, we had some missed opportunities in the beginning. For example, we didn’t capture emails when we first started — a rookie mistake!
One ongoing struggle is simply trying to keep up with the scoop around the clock. The news is always breaking! We work hard to share exciting stories as timely as possible, but that means working and staying connected at all hours. But, being digital, the advantage is that we have no print deadlines, and we publish 24/7.
Also, finding and writing the scoop takes the majority of our time, so it’s been difficult to make time to spread the word to new advertisers. We are fortunate to have had supportive businesses contact us to advertise, but we need to prioritize more the “business side” of Scoop OTP.
Please tell us about Scoop OTP.
We provide the local Scoop on restaurants, retail, events, family activities and more. We are proud to have started something from nothing. This was our idea, our baby, so to watch our number of readers grow from zero to half a million has been super exciting!
Our “5 seconds of fame” came in 2015 when the Sunday AJC featured us on the front cover and called us the “Ambassadors of Suburbia.” We were also featured on local radio, Business Radio X, and Optimist TV.
We share the Scoop via social media and an e-newsletter every other week. Our site is easily accessible through desktop or phone to get up-to-the-minute Scoop.
We focus on more than just one city or topic. We believe if it’s interesting to us, then our followers will want to know about it too. Helping people learn more about their communities and neighboring cities is what we do best. Collaborating with our communities, sponsoring local events and spreading the word on both big and small happenings has been so rewarding.
Our website serves as a collection of the best stories from relevant blogs, government sites, newspapers, magazines, key business people, etc. Everyone is busy these days, so we try to keep our stories short and succinct. Sometimes we are the first site to share a story, while other times we share what we have read from another source.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
We have been learning on the job, but as mentioned before, capturing emails right away would have been beneficial. Recently, we started working with a calendar integration system which auto inputs some events saving us time; we should have started that earlier too. As technology changes, there always seems to be something we should have known yesterday regarding Word press or our Hosting site, but that’s what keeps it interesting! If we knew we were going to have a huge story that was going to crash our site, we would have increased our allowed hits beforehand.
Additionally, we have started selling OTP themed apparel that we did not do when we first launched. We figure if we are proud to be OTP, so are our readers.
We do our best to stay up to date with the ever-changing, fast-paced world of technology. Digital media’s presence continues to grow with more and more readers getting their information online versus print, and we plan to be there for them.
Pricing:
- Advertising Rates begin at $150
- Newsletter Sponsorships $100
- Business Directory Listing for a year $100
- Article up to 400 words with links and images $150
- Social Media Promotions $50
- Contest Giveaways $50
- shop.scoopotp.com Prices Vary
Contact Info:
- Address: Corporate Office located at 3760 Sixes Road Ste 126 #112, Canton, GA 30114
- Website: https://scoopotp.com/
- Phone: (404) 919-2247.
- Email: info@scoopotp.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/scoopotp/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ScoopOTP/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/ScoopOTP
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/company/scoop-otp/
Image Credit:
Smax Photography http://smaxart.com/
Photos from us around town “Scooping”
Getting in touch: VoyageATL is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
