How to get the most out of your blog as a tour operator

A guest blog by codeless.co

Here’s an interesting fact: close to 90% of all travel planning is conducted online. So, if your digital footprint is minimal and you’re not capitalizing on the key role of social media in tourism marketing, you’re missing out on lots of opportunities.

Blogging, in particular, is essential in the tourism industry because it allows tour operators to tell their stories and engage with potential customers. Blogs help to explain destinations, attractions, and charges involved in greater detail. They’re like the vehicle of the tourism industry, meaning they have the capacity to play a powerful role in your business plan as a tour operator.

As with most bloggers in other fields, getting the most out of your blog is critical. A lot is at stake especially if you’re looking to generate sales and reach a larger target market. In this article, we will explore 5 blogging tips in detail on how you can make the most of your blog content. Let’s dive in.

1. Find your niche

Finding a travel niche makes it easier to find an audience and a touring agency willing to work with you. Although it can be, your niche does not have to be rare or complicated to succeed. It just has to be something you’re passionate about.

After finding a niche worth blogging about, you should start a WordPress blog. This will make blogging more straightforward and efficient.

Use the right keywords

Using the right keywords increases your blog’s rate of success in search engines like Google. This way, when tourists search these keywords on Google, your blog will appear on the first pages. For example, if you blog about main attraction sites in Italy, an excellent phrase would be “Top attractions in Italy.”

Keep in mind that as many as 92% of people don’t get past the first pages of Google. So, you need to conduct extensive research. Many people choose Google scraping to analyze keyword positions or fetch any other information from search engine results pages.

Define all the categories in the chosen niche

To get more relevant content for your blog, ensure you explore all categories in your chosen niche. Doing so increases the ranking of your content. Some varieties of the niche that you can include are tips, travel arrangements, attractions (including seasonal attractions), budgeting and finances, etc.

2. Have great content

Having great content is often overlooked. Yet, it can either make or break the progression of your blog’s success and even contribute to the success of your overall pricing strategies in tourism. Bringing people to your blog won’t mean much if they don’t stay. So, you need to capture their attention with what you write and how you write it.

Organize your texts

Your blog should be simple and easy to read. Avoid using long, complex sentences that make comprehension difficult when you want to explain something.
Instead, write shorter, meaningful paragraphs and connect the entire piece using subheadings. Most people only skim through the content, and having subheadings in your blog will make it more understandable.

Have fun and be authentic

Most people prefer reading an authentic piece and getting new information over repeated details. Also, ensure you have fun when writing about various topics. Blogging is all about emotion; people don’t buy the product; they buy it hoping that they will experience the same feelings.

Keep in mind that readers can discern a piece that the writer had fun writing and is passionate about. And fun pieces will likely convince them to get the package since they assume they will have as much fun as you doing the things you are writing about.

Include photos

Using catchy attractive images and vector graphics to break the text flow makes it easy for readers to digest the content. You can get high-quality photos by either taking your own, working with local photographers, or from royalty-free images online.

Include a text for each picture added as this increases the post’s ranking on search engines.

3. Promote your blog

Think about why you invest in most of the products and services… It’s probably because they are promoted endlessly. So, if you want your content and services to reach a broad audience, you have to be relentless in the way you promote.

You can promote your blog in the following ways:

Build a strong social media presence

Having a solid presence on most of the most popular social media, such as Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok will enable you to reach a broad audience. Pinterest is also an excellent site for promoting your blog using good photos of travel destinations or products.

Ensure you link your social media accounts on your blogs to let readers know where to find you.

Share your content everywhere

By everywhere, I mean everywhere. You never know where your next client will come across a link to your blog. And sharing across a wide range of sites increases the chances of that happening.

Share posts more than once

It doesn’t matter whether you think you have posted twice or thrice on the same social media site, post some more. Posting frequently ensures that the blog reaches more people.

Include a call-to-action

Your blog should be a vehicle to travel destinations and other tour packages. It is meant to motivate/ drive the reader to make a purchase. Therefore, you should include a call-to-action (CTA) for readers that link them to your website or another website with the critical information they need to proceed.

Including a CTA on other pages should be a priority for tour bloggers since most people might be too lazy to find the page themselves. It also increases the probability of getting clients to purchase travel packages.

4. Network with other parties in the tourism industry

Networking is everything, especially in the tourism industry. The more people you know, the more clients are likely to be sent your way. The best part is that it’s not hard to do so since most people in the industry are also eager to network.

Join a forum with other tour operators

One of the best ways to network and get closer to people in the tourism industry is by attending online forums. Most people in those forums join with the aim of networking and will therefore be open to working with you.

If they’re bloggers, the better, a link to your blogs could gain you more followers, garnering more sales.

Collaborate with other touring websites

Most touring websites are pretty open to working with a tour operator. You can contact and negotiate with vendors on their behalf, provide marketing information, and inform them of the costing and pricing of various packaging tours at a fee.

They can also feature your blogs on their website and link you to clients. In order to do this properly, make sure that you have a clear and concise privacy policy on your website that details what you can and cannot do with your visitor information. This will make it so that you can’t get into any legal troubles if you’re sharing any user information in your partnerships like email addresses.

Invite a guest blogger

Having a new voice in your blogs may bring you new traffic to your site, especially if they’re well-known personalities. They break the monotony of the blogs and invite their followers to your blog. Guest bloggers also make your blogs more credible and popular.

Offer a newsletter for your popular followers

Your followers might not be up to date on all your recent blogs or may be too busy. Having an automatic newsletter/cold email sent to your followers every time you write a blog will keep them updated and prevent them from missing out. Just make sure your email deliverability is on point. Setting up your newsletter campaigns incorrectly might cause your emails to be delivered to the spam or promotions folder.

It would be best to ask followers for their consent before sending them the newsletter.

5. Use the traffic from your blog to make money

Take advantage of the traffic you have and use it to make money. You can do this by affiliate marketing, posting ads, selling your products, and featuring brands and destination campaigns. The products you advertise or promote do not have to be linked to tourism, but it would be better if there were.

Get into affiliate marketing

Technically, blogging as a tour operator is a form of affiliate marketing. However, you can diversify the range of products and services you choose to feature and advertise on your blog. For example, when writing about summer activities in a hot destination, you can include a sunscreen brand that tourists can use.

Place ads

WordPress pays bloggers based on the numbers that advertisers decide to bid on ads featured on the blog. Adsense is a feature by Google that allows you to place ads on the website and get paid when people click on them. Therefore including advertisements on your blog is a great way to get paid.

Feature brands and destination campaigns

Featuring brands in your blogs pays well and is also a form of affiliate marketing. Sunscreen, hats, outfits, and travel bags are just some examples of what you can feature on your blogs.

Destination campaigns are typically done to encourage people to travel to a specific destination by listing the benefits of the location. It could be a country, city, island, town, or even a holiday resort.

Launch your products

You can sell almost anything so long as you have a platform. And as a tour operator, you are most likely to know the gaps in that specific market. Most of your followers might also be your first clients.

Following you means that they already trust your judgment and will feel confident recommending it to their friends, family, and followers.

Are you leveraging the benefits of blogging for tour operators?

Blogging is the key to a successful career as a tour operator. Your potential clients are likely to contact your services after reading your blog. You just need to do it right by appealing to their emotions and needs. Showing your skills and human side is also the key to reaching out and convincing people that you are worth their money.

If you’ve had challenges getting the most out of your blogs, these blogging tips should come in handy. Apply them to your blog and watch it flourish.

Once you have your blog up and running, some readers might be inclined to take the next step of booking your services. Having an online booking software such as Rezdy will ease and smoothen the transition from blogs to bookings.

With a booking software like Rezdy integrated into your system, when your readers land on your website to place a booking, they’ll be able to easily process their bookings instantly. This is possible due to features such as a real-time availability viewer, payment gateway integrations, and automatic communication.

Curious to see how Rezdy will fit into your business? Start your FREE 21-day trial or book a demo today.

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