If you want comments on your blog, be sure to comment on others. Find a few blogs relevant to your market, subscribe to their updates, and then comment on their articles.
Browse the web – especially the social web – for discussions that interest or affect you. Everything you post doesn’t have to contain a link back to you, but talking with others will raise your brand’s profile.
Guest post on other blogs for more traffic. Ramit Sethi credits this approach to boosting his readership 150,000 in 1 week. Locate other blogs where your target audience spends time, and pitch the blog editor with an article you wrote.
No blog is an island. Leave your little world, and participate in online discussions if you want to increase interest in what you write.
Adding an email delivery option to your blog could significantly increase your number of regular readers.
This chart shows my daily blog traffic over the past few weeks. Traffic spikes each Monday, when my Hotel Marketing Strategies weekly email summary goes out:
Could you try something like this for your blog?
It doesn’t have to be time consuming. I use MailChimp to automatically package my posts in a one-email-per week format. (I tried Feedburner, but felt daily updates would be too overwhelming…)
One year ago, I published my first article on my Hotel Marketing Strategies blog, titled Why You Need a Web Presence.
A lot has happened since then, and the growth on that blog has pleasantly surprised me. My readership has increased between 50-70% each of the past 6 months, and that figure is accelerating. More importantly, I’ve met some brilliant people and learned more than I ever could have without blogging.
I’m very grateful to each of you who read my articles, leave a comment, and send a tweet or email: it’s great learning with you. As a way of giving back, I wanted to share some lessons I’m seeing from this experience.
1) Listen to, and write for, individual people
In the first couple months of this blog’s existence, I actively solicited input from potential readers. I literally sat down with hotel owners and marketing professionals, and asked which topics they wanted to know about. The feedback I gathered in person, on the phone, and by email has added a lot of clarity and direction to my writing process.
Each time I sit down to write an article, I’m writing with specific people in mind.
2) Know why you’re blogging
Whether you’re trying to spread ideas or sell a room, this affects everything from the content and style of your posts to your marketing and distribution tactics.
My mission is to empower hotels with the latest internet marketing tactics, so they can book more rooms and serve their guests better. This gives me focus in everything I do.
3) Plan for search optimization from the start
More than half of my readers each day come directly from a Google search.
One of the reasons I named my blog Hotel Marketing Strategies was for the keywords. I wanted to be #1 on Google for that term, and was able to accomplish it fairly quickly. After that happened, I set my sights higher – to be the top results on Google for Hotel Marketing Blog. That too, I achieved.
Now, I’m the #2 website for the ultra-competitive Hotel Marketing keyword – competing with firms with millions in revenue that specifically target that phrase.
Most corporate blogging policies fail because they are simply a list of do’s and don’ts.
A great blogging policy goes beyond the simplistic list, and will include a number of good examples of what to do. These positive case studies can serve as guides to write better blogs. It shows your staff, what is possible when blogging is done right.
When you’re writing your hotel or restaurant blogging policy, be sure to include positive examples your writers can observe and learn from.
Currently we use 4 different types of blog formats:
1. Culinary Travel Blog (blog.austria.info, German language, started in 1/ 2007, goal: to inform potential short trip guests about good ideas for a weekend with friends, our first Blog experiment to find out if social web is useful for [...]
After last week’s experiment, several months of testing various Twitter integration tactics, and reaching 100,000+ people in 36 hours, I’ve learned some interesting things.
Twitter is the best social media marketing tool for bloggers
I started blogging in 2002, and have tested many different tools since then. Delicious, Digg, and StumbleUpon all have the potential of reaching [...]
If you want a higher level of reader involvement in your hospitality or travel blog, present the website as a place for the readers to connect with their peers — instead of just receive your messages.
People like to learn from other people like them.
The more you can move your blog towards becoming a community of [...]
More and more travel companies are realizing the power of bloggers in promoting their organizations online. YokmoK is giving free trips to select bloggers:
Ask yourself the following questions:
• do I have a popular blog? (typically a popularity higher than 10,000)
• does my blog relate to travel, adventure, adrenaline sports, adventure travel, or similar?
• do I [...]
When someone types a search query into Google or another search engine, they are giving you a problem to solve. The website that answers this in the fastest and most helpful manner will be the one that receives the business.
Use keyword research — a history of previous Web searches by other people online — to [...]
Most corporate blogging policies fail because they are simply a list of do’s and don’ts.