But how do they get it?

You can buy attention (advertising). You can beg for attention from the media (PR). You can bug people to get attention (sales). Or you can earn attention by creating something interesting and valuable and then publishing it online for free.

David Meerman Scott

Today, we are ditching the first three methods and talking about blogging.

If someone has ever told you that blogging doesn’t work for hotels, they are wrong! 

Because this blog is going to be a complete hotel blogging strategy guide that actually works.  

Why is Blogging Important for Businesses?

It is important for almost every type of business to have a strong web presence to engage and communicate with their customers.

A website is definitely the key component. But then how do you get traffic to your website?

This is where blogging comes into the picture. The benefits of blogging for hotels is immense. It is one of the most effective and inexpensive ways to make people visit your website.

That’s not all. Blogging has other benefits too.

• Blogging helps in maintaining your marketing strategy and structuring relevant content.
• It boosts your website SEO efforts.
• It helps in attracting new customers and strengthening relationships with existing ones.
• When you have a hotel blog along with a strong strategy, you establish yourself as a leader in the industry.
• Blogging also helps you in creating a brand that people trust.

These are just to name a few. The importance of blogging for hotels goes beyond all the defined benefits and advantages.

Strong Statistics on Blogging

To emphasise the importance of blogging, here are some stats by HubSpot:

• 80% of internet users interact with both social media sites and blogs.
• 59% of marketers find blogging valuable.
• Companies with blogs produce 67% more monthly leads than companies that don’t blog.
• Businesses that blog get 55% higher website visitors than businesses that don’t. 

Does Your Hotel Need a Blog?

Without an inch of doubt!

Blogging has been a mystery to the hospitality industry for a long time. But not anymore. Today, it is a critical element for any hotel.

Every hotel’s end goal is ‘heads in beds’ and blogging, to a great extent, helps in achieving just that.

However, the problem is, many hotels have still not realised how prominent it is. Either they do not have a blog, or do not have any hotel blog ideas, or they have one but never add new content to it.

If your property has also shied away from producing valuable content, it is high time to invest in a robust hotel blogging strategy.

What Makes a Good Hotel Blog?

Now that you have decided to start your hotel blog, you must be wondering what all you need to make your blog stand out.

It’s no rocket science!

A good hotel blog (or a blog, in general) delivers value to its readers.

Further,

• It speaks to a target audience;
• Contains all the information about the topic;
• Is easy to read;
• Is SEO optimised;
• And never compromises on the quality.

That’s not all. A good hotel blog also follows a robust strategy; which brings me to my next point.

A Strong Blogging Strategy for Hotels

If you’re wondering how to write a hotel blog,  it requires a good amount of effort as it takes into account several aspects.

To make your job easier, I have divided this entire hotel blogging strategy into five sections.

• Analysis, brainstorming, and essentials
• Technical aspects
• The writing phase
• SEO activities
• Promotion and distribution

1. Analysis, brainstorming, and essentials

Determine your target audience

Before anything else, you have to determine your target audience.

When you define a target audience, it becomes easy for you to set yourself apart and compete with large businesses.

Meaning, you can better focus on the needs of that targeted segment which in turn helps in developing an effective strategy while saving time and money along the way.  

Example: Sophia is a hiking enthusiast. Recently, she started a small hotel on a hilltop. She’s been welcoming and hosting a good number of guests from the get-go. However, she now wants to tap more into hikers and adventurous tourists.

She started a blog and can already see amazing results.

Sophia knew her target audience which enabled her to come up with effective hotel blog ideas and curate exclusive content. However, that doesn’t mean she is eliminating people that do not fit your criteria. It’s just that she’s enhancing her strategies and generating more business in an efficient, affordable manner. 

Identify what sort of content other hotels are publishing

Keeping an eye on your competitor is extremely important. If someone has told you otherwise, you know what to do.

Once you decide to start blogging for your hotel, analyse what your competitors are writing. If you know who your competitors are, what type of blogs they are producing, and everything in between, it will not only help you get started but also make your blog stand out.

Word to the wise: Do not blatantly copy. The idea is to take the cue and advantage of their weaknesses and improve your own performance.

List out the categories for your hotel blog

One of the prerequisites also includes the categorisation of blogs. You must decide the type of blogs you’re going to produce.

Remember the target audience aspect? It’s going to help you here.

Further, if you top it up with a little more analysis such as determining the content they consume, you can come up with better hotel blogging ideas.

Here are some of the types of blogs you can write:

• Listicle blogs
• ‘How to’ blogs
• Opinion pieces
• Guides
• Interviews

However, there are no hard and fast rules that you have to stick to. You can always explore and try different approaches.

Keep all the necessary writing companions handy

To write blogs that deliver value, you are going to need some companion tools.

No, I am not talking about Microsoft Word or any other generic writing tool. I am rather sharing some of the other tools that will help you in all the aspects of writing better blogs.

For keyword research

• Ubersuggest
• Google Keyword Planner

For SEO

• Ink
• Detailed SEO Extension

For better writing

• Grammarly
• Power thesaurus

2. Technical aspects

Make the blog interface engaging

You must have heard that we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. But do we follow this religiously? Not everyone and every time, I suppose. Because the design does matter.

Blogs are no exception. 

The design of a hotel blog can have a significant impact on the first impression of new visitors. When it looks elegant, people tend to pay more attention to what the blog says or offers.

Therefore, make sure you have a good design for your blog. If you can’t get it done yourself, consider hiring a professional. 

Just make sure the design aspect holds significance in your hotel blogging strategy.

Choose the right CMS platform

CMS stands for ‘content management system’ and it helps in managing and publishing web content.

If you have a blogger, you don’t have to give her/him access to the whole website. With a CMS, you can allow them to contribute, create, edit, and publish blogs, that too without having to beg a developer.

Some of the best content management systems are:

• WordPress
• Joomla
• Drupal

Go through each of their websites or try and then decide which suits you the best.

My personal favourite is WordPress.

3. When Writing

Now that you have completed all the prerequisites, it’s time to get started with writing the content.

To write a blog on hospitality that provides value to the readers, you must follow a number of steps.

You’re sure to drive better results if you follow them sincerely.

Find the topic

Being a hotel, your blog topics have to be from the exact domain. 

If you have something in mind, you can go ahead. Or, you can also take the help of Ubersuggest and other hotel blogs.

Conduct thorough research

Be it checking facts or statistics, do not leave any stone unturned in learning about the topic. A good blog never preaches, rather it speaks facts.

The more in-depth the research, the better the content.

Further, I also suggest that apart from checking online sources, you can also get in touch with experts from the hotel industry to get better insights.

Create an outline

The next thing you must do is create an outline of the blog. It is basically about knowing ahead of time the general idea of what you’re going to write.

Not to mention, having an outline (or a road map, skeleton, structure, whatever you want to call it) helps you save time. As you don’t have to go back and check what all you have to cover.

Craft a captivating blog headline

Your blog headline has to reflect the actual value of the content and at the same time, capturing readers’ attention is important.

Note: I prefer to do this after completing the blog. However, you take your pick.

Write an interesting intro

A huge number of readers opt out of a blog right after reading a few lines. But if your blog introduction has a hook, you can make your readers stick a bit longer. 

So make sure you spend a good amount of time writing a captivating introduction.

You can also refer to this blog by the blogging wizard to understand better.

Include a table of content (ToC)

A table of content is like a magic wand. It does wonders to your blog.

It is basically a small piece of content in a tabular form that helps the readers understand exactly how you’ve laid out the content. Also, most of the ToCs today allow the readers to jump to a section in the article.

That’s not all. A ToC is also used by search engines like Google to show search engine results specifically for these links as rich snippets.

Word to the wise: The ToC also depends on the structure of the blog. So, your blog structure has to be neat and clean.

Include stats in the blog (if required)

One of the best ways to make your content authoritative is by including statistics. Numbers speak volumes. When you add stats, it makes your blog more reliable and informative.

However, do not forget to cross-check your stats before getting the blog live. Also, ensure that the sources of the stats are reliable.  

Illustrate your point with images or gifs

One more thing you have to do is to make your blog fun to read. 

It is a good practice to illustrate your content with the help of multimedia items like images and gifs.

Make content skimmable

Big paragraphs are scary. They kill the entire mood to read.

Today, people don’t read content pieces that are full of words and sentences. They need some breathing space.

The solution to this issue is skimmable content.

Your blog could be the most informative hotel blog in the industry, but if quality content is also not living up to expectations, you need to make some changes. Be it reducing the font size or increasing the white space.

Upland has an amazing blog on this topic, explaining everything about making skimmable content. 

Don’t be a perfectionist

Many bloggers (mostly newbies) tend to go all out and overstress themselves in making the blog as perfect as possible.

Hold on!!! Relax!! You don’t have to be a perfectionist. Let the blog take its flow if you’re not able to curate it according to the way you decided. Just make sure your sentences and paragraphs are short and simple, your facts and stats, and the blog is well proofread.

If you try to cover everything under the sun in one blog, you might end up making it less effective.

Include all the relevant CTAs

Your blog is also going to be a lead generation resource. And for that, you need to add relevant CTAs to your content.

CTA stands for ‘call to action’. It is a marketing prompt to encourage the reader for an immediate sale or any other desired action. 

Write a compelling conclusion

A conclusion is a prominent part of the blog. It provides the reader with a simple yet effective glance at the contents of the blog along with the bigger picture.

Not just that.  It is also used to inspire, leaving your readers energized to make a decision and wanting for more.

Therefore, the conclusion has to be compelling.

4. SEO activities

Now that you have learned almost everything about creating a blog for your hotel, let’s look at the ways of optimising to get better results.

Your blogs should be SEO optimised to show up on search engine results. For that, I am mentioning the SEO activities you can do.

• Before writing, you need to do some keyword research. When you list out the relevant keywords, you need to insert them in your blog. The tool that I have mentioned above — Ink, is going to be of great help.
• Make sure you insert the keywords strategically. Do not stuff them just for the sake. Include keywords only if they are relevant and fit naturally.
• There’s something called ‘long tail keywords’. Try to include at least 1-2 long-tail keywords in the blog. They present better opportunities to rank.
• Meta description and meta title are extremely important for your blog. When your blog appears on the search results, that’s the first thing people read. Make sure they are compelling and include the focus keyword.
• Then comes the URL of the blog. Keep it short and simple. It will be better if you also manage to fit in the focus keyword.
• Before uploading any images, make sure they are compressed and of appropriate data format such as PNG. This will also help you make your page load faster.
• Last but not least. Make your blog mobile-friendly. Meaning, when someone opens your blog on a mobile device, it should look better without any issues.

Note: These are some of the basic SEO practices considering you are new to the domain. If you want to have a broader view, you can read the hotel SEO blog.

5. Promotions and distributions

Your job is not over yet. Once you’re done creating and publishing your blog, you also have to promote it.

How are you going to do it? For the initial days, stick to mainstream methods.

• Share it on social media platforms
• Get it delivered to your readers’ inbox through email marketing
• Use WhatsApp marketing strategies
• Run ads on social media and Google

How to Analyse Blog Performance?

You have successfully created your hotel blog and you’re producing all the best quality content. But are you going to measure the performance? Worry not, I will help you with that too.

Again, I am considering you as someone new to blogging, so I am stating only one tool to analyse your hotel blog’s performance.

Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google. This tool lets you track almost everything on your website.

However, initially, you don’t have to dig deeper and overwhelm yourself. Of course, you can explore the tool going forward.

To determine how your blogs are performing, there are several metrics but you can stick to a few for now.

You can keep a track of the following:

• Overall Blog Visits
• Blog Homepage Visits
• Average Time on Page
• Traffic Source Breakdown
• Top Viewed Posts
• Returning Visitors
• Conversion Rate

Moreover, you can also check all the analytics of your social media shares.

What Should Be Your Goals for Blogging Strategies?

For efficacy, it is important to have realistic goals for your blogging strategies.

But what kind of goals? Well, it depends on the hotel and its expectations. If you don’t know what to consider while setting these goals, I have got some for you.

What is the number of blogs you are going to produce every month?

• How many bloggers are you going to hire?
• What is your budget for blogging — bloggers’ salary, tools charges, ad budget etc.?
• What is your project organic session for your blogs?
• How many total sessions are you expecting?
• What is your projected number of leads?
• What is the ROI you are expecting?

Once you have set these goals, compare them with the results you get. This will give a clear picture of how your strategy is faring.

People usually don’t consider in-depth planning. But it is a must if you want better results.

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