Q: What’s new and coming to The Apopka Voice?

Reggie and I are excited to share some improvements and new features on The Apopka Voice. Our hope is that each feature will give more opportunity for your voice to be heard, your events attended, your garage sales, house sales, car/boat/household items selling, and your creative endeavors inspiring Apopka and beyond.

Here’s how we want to help you do just that:

1. New Feature! Polls, Surveys, and Questionnaires in The Morning Voice Newsletter

The Apopka Voice wants to hear your voice, thoughts, and opinions on important issues affecting the city and your neighborhoods. We switched to a new platform for our newsletter so we can do just that via polls, surveys and questionnaires. We’ll collect your responses, tabulate the results, and share the outcomes. It’s one more measure for you to share your opinion and weigh in on the weightier matters, which will hopefully help provide some insight to decision-makers and impact directions for the better.

If you haven’t signed up for our free newsletter, please take a second to do so here: Sign up for the newsletter. All we need is your name and email. You’ll get a confirmation email to verify that you want to subscribe, and once confirmed, we’ll start sending you the day’s top stories via The Morning Voice Newsletter. This comes straight to your email every Monday through Friday at 6 am, rain or shine.

To make sure the newsletter doesn’t get lost in your spam/junk folder, add info@theapopkavoice.com to your email contacts.

2. New Feature! Your content published on The Apopka Voice and shared on social media: For the community, by the community (for FREE!)

This feature was first noted in the Make Room for the Fire article, outlining that it would be a place “where you can share your sparks and dreams-in-action, creative ideas, writings, photos, “local hero” stories of neighbors who make a difference, give a kudos/thank you to a local person or business, or pass on the good news that needs to be celebrated.”

This feature is now live and ready, so if you’re happy and you know it – write it down and share it! Joy shared = joy magnified.

Graduations are coming, so this would be the perfect spot to say congratulations, share your hopes and affirmations for your student, and with a few key photos, you’ve got joy wrapped up in a published article.

Father’s Day is next, making this section ideal for you to write a tribute to your dad.

Think anniversary love stories, a book club with open invitations, or your own travel narrative about the day you spent in that cool Apopka location.

If you’re happy and you know – put it into words and photos and paintings and videos – and share it!

Here’s how it works:

1. Select Submit Content in the dropdown under Faith & Inspiration on the navigation bar of our Homepage;
2. Enter your first/last name, email, and city/state (required to help keep out the bots). All other details are optional;
3. Write your content & attach your photos/video;
4. Click submit at the bottom of the page.

Your new content will be sent to us for review and approval. Once approved, we will publish it on our site, share the live link with you, and if we have your permission, share it on our Facebook and Instagram pages as well. You are welcome to share the link on all your socials  as well!

3. Community Calendar

This isn’t exactly a new feature – but we haven’t really talked about it since we launched it a few months back.

If you have a local event that is open to the public, consider adding it to our calendar.

While the Your Content feature above is for personal – not business – content, this Calendar feature is for all of the above: business events, personal events, nonprofit events, City-sponsored events.

If the public is invited and it’s a local event – you can post it here.

There are both free and pay options. If you choose one of the pay options, we’ll also share your event on our social media pages as well.

Here’s how it works:

1. Click on Calendar on our Homepage navigation bar;
2. Select Post Event on the top right of Calendar page;
3. You will need to be logged in to your Apopka Voice account. If you haven’t set up a free account yet, it will guide you through doing so;
4. Select a calendar posting option: Bronze, Silver, Gold or Free;
5. Complete the details, attach photo(s), click submit.

The calendar event will be reviewed, and once approved, will go live on our calendar page, as well as listed on the sitewide calendar located on the right hand rail of each article page.

4. Classifieds

This feature was launched several months back as well, but again, is likely new to many.

If you’re a business with a job posting, a For Sale By Owner (FSBO) trying to sell your house, or an individual holding a garage sale or selling other items – our Classifieds are for you!

There are both free and pay options here, as well. And again, if you choose one of the pay categories, we’ll also share your posting on our social media pages to get the word our further.

Our classified categories include:

• employment,
• garage sales,
• general items for sale,
• boats,
• cars,
• free items,
• FSBO real estate listings.

You will need to login before posting, and like the Calendar, you can click through the steps, sharing descriptions and photos to help promote your sale. Once approved, your listing will go live, and as an account holder, you will be able to edit your listing as needed.

If you are posting a garage sale, or are a FSBO, your listings will be mapped out to make it easier for prospective buyers to find. Here is an example of what a FSBO listings page would look like, and would look the same for garage sale listings. Once you click on an individual listing / garage sale, it will open to its own pop-up page for a full description with additional photos.

We hope you take the opportunity to explore these new features on The Apopka Voice and allow your voice – and joy and events and sales – to be magnified and shared far and wide. Together as a community we can keep our friends, neighbors and city better informed, engaged and inspired toward greater good, opportunities and possibilities, thanks to all of us sharing together.