By Hank Schrader, Visit Dream Destinations, LLC and member of The Travel Institute’s Professional Educators Program.
This is a follow-up post to the Friday Five previously written by Hank in February.
We have learned by trial and error which techniques produce the best results. As long as you remember that you have two goals for writing the blog – demand generation (awareness) and lead generation (get more clients), your blog should achieve both goals if it is well written. Success in our business is 1. the right product; 2. to the right people; 3. at the right time. The secret of why blogging works is you never know the right time, and consistent blogs remind your readers you are there to provide expert help when the time is right.
Here are 5 of our best practices tips:
1. Commit to writing on a consistent cchedule and have a good method to send it to your database. In a world where all of us seem to get endless ads, we think about either a weekly or bi-weekly blog, not more often, is the right amount. We publish our blog on Thursday at 3:oo PM Central Time to our folks who have signed up for the blog. You must get potential clients to opt-in to avoid spam laws. We use MailChimp in an RSS feed (Really Simple Syndication) as our distribution method. Some experts say to try various times to see the best results, but we never bothered to do this because we found this was the best time for us to complete a good blog, and it works for us.
2. Use a consistent format because it helps your readers become accustomed to your ideas and topic. Ours is as follows:
The heading contains the title of the blog, our author summary, and our website (example Why You Should River Cruise; by Hank Schrader USMA ’71, Europe Destination & Europe River Cruise Expert; by Anne Schrader, Certified Travel Counselor & Certified Luxury Specialist; www.dreamdestinations.com). If you think this is not the most important real estate on the blog, we differ because these few words emphasize what we are writing about, and it reminds our readers that we are there to help them when the time is right. We have already raised awareness about us. I have read advice that some titles work better than others, but just let the reader get a clear picture of the content and don’t waste time trying different titles.
The body has three to five Headings in Bold to make it easy to read. The body is where we educate, inform, and make the case for our services in an indirect way.
Final thoughts, which is a quick summary of the blog and a brief description of our services and the benefits to our readers. We then conclude with our short bios and our pictures—never send out a blog without a personal photo of you, even if it is the only picture in the blog, because it helps the readers feel more connected to you.
3. Make the content worth reading so folks want to look forward to your advice, expertise and help. It is time for your personality to shine – write it like you were talking to a friend, use a lot of white space and remember it is not an English paper. I often write one or two sentences and then put in a spacer before the next sentence. Folks tend to avoid long paragraphs because they can be intimidating.
Write to your audience about your specialty – ours is luxury river cruisers, and we write about routes, companies, food, excursions, ship life, pre and post extensions, you get the idea. Our most read blogs are comparisons and route guides. Our readers love personal examples, as it makes the blog more authentic. Often what makes our blog so successful is our pictures (Anne takes impressive pictures) which are more in-depth than an ad or brochure, and now we have added value to our readers!
4. Your blog must be posted on your website because it is the only way to increase your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) results and eventually raise your profile in the digital world. Trust me, for 2 years I wrote on a different site and wasted the benefits of this tip. Remember, each blog creates a new page on your website. Folks always want to know the secret of SEO and I don’t know the answer except that good content gets results. Longer blogs usually rank higher than short blogs, maybe in the 2,000-word range. Long tail keywords work best for search engines – you probably will not rank for terms like Europe River Cruise (this is dominated by the larger companies that sell river cruises) but we rank between 1 to 3 on Google for European River Cruise Company Comparisons. Don’t expect immediate results.
We advise against having a service write your blog, as our readers want to know if we really know our subject, and if they contact us, we can answer their questions. If you don’t know the subject in detail, they will quickly move on to other advisors.
5. Blogs work if you are persistent and have good content. When our blog was not posted on our website, we had about 3,000 blog opens a year. Last year, 57,303 visited our website and viewed 77,122 pages, according to our Squarespace analytics. In 2024 we sold 55 river cruises and this year we have 37 booked with deposits (92 in one year is good for a 2-person agency). Since we do not advertise at all, the only possible answer is the success of our blogs and website pages. Not only do prospects find us, but many also want our help to book their trip. This is the ultimate demand and lead generation machine. This won’t happen overnight, but if you are persistent, it will make you a subject matter expert and help you find the right clients.
Bonus Tip: we are soft sell masters. Seldom do we talk about a specific date or tell our readers they must react immediately. Here is the difference – Hurry, Sale Ends Today. We might say there is limited availability, and we can help if this appeals to your travel plans. We usually don’t even go this far, as contacting us if you need our help is much more friendly and our usual approach.
You can make significant money from a successful blog – we are making a lot of money, and you can do the same, so take our advice – Start Blogging Now!
