Your resort’s blog is the ideal platform to showcase your property, draw attention to interesting local events and demonstrate the more human, less corporate face of your business. By inviting comments from readers, a blog also opens up the lines of communication between you and your guests, while offering a valuable opportunity to target relevant keywords, insert calls to action and score points with Google’s new fresh content policy.
Once you’re blogging consistently as part of your online marketing campaign, you need to expand your blog’s reach to get it seen and subscribed to by as many people as possible.
Here are four simple tactics you can use to drive traffic to your blog and build your readership.
Email Reminders
One simple but effective way to drive return blog visitors is through an email reminder or newsletter. You can set up email updates so your guests are alerted every time a new post is published, or opt for a weekly or monthly email featuring a list of blog posts published recently - simply add an opt-in form to your resort’s website to encourage sign ups. This way your readers don’t need to keep checking back on your site to look for new content. If your resort already sends out a regular newsletter, you can easily use it to spread the word about your blog by including links to popular and important posts.
RSS Feed
An RSS feed or Really Simple Syndication is another great way to expand your subscription base. As the name suggests, this is a pretty straight forward tool to get to grips with. Readers simply enter your feed’s URL into a mobile or web-based feed reader to receive automatic updates each time you publish a new blog to your site. The update will usually either contain the blog’s title and a brief description or the entire post – it’s even possible to include ads in a feed.
Make this tried and tested tactic part of your blog marketing strategy by including an RSS feed icon on your resort’s website, ideally near to your social media and other ‘share buttons’.r
Sharing Platforms
In the last few years the internet has been flooded with sharing tools, which makes life a lot easier for bloggers trying to get their content seen by as many pairs of eyes as possible. Social bookmarking platforms like AddToAny and ShareThis make it quick and easy for you and your readers to share your blog posts across a large selection of social media sites including Twitter, Facebook and crowd-sourced news aggregators such as Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon. Again, both AddToAny and ShareThis offer buttons you can add to your site to encourage your guests to do the sharing for you.
Update All Your Social Network Communities At Once
You probably already use social media to alert your followers to new blog posts (if not, you really should!). This is a great way to drive traffic to your content but can easily become time consuming if you’re juggling a handful of accounts across different social network platforms. Sites like Hootsuite speed up the process by allowing you to update all your communities with a link to your latest post simultaneously. Such tools are free to use and many of them allow you to schedule your posts in advance so you don’t have to worry about promoting your blog posts during particularly busy times. Although you can update all the social platforms you use at once, don’t forget that it might not always be appropriate to post exactly the same message. For instance, you may need to use abbreviations to squeeze your message into Twitter’s 140 character limit, but writing what you have to say out in full will look much more professional on Facebook.
Are you using any of these tools to expand your blog’s reach?
