Travel Blogs

what is a blog?

A blog has often been a mixture of what’s happening in a person’s life and their environment.

Now we are seeing more businesses using blogs to insure information delivery,
interaction with customers and connecting with more viewers.

The case for blogs over emails

We all know to well how everyone is effected by spam. There are countless filters
and programs to block emails. And this does not include how many internet users
have had to changed their email address in the last year.

We can not control the inflow of informatin we recieve in our inbox.
However we can control the blog subscriptions we subscribe to.

If you are a company that depends on emails to get information to your target
audiences, you know the hurdles you need to make before that email gets passed
spam filters and email blockers. But once you do every thing that is required,
how can you be sure that email will end up in the inbox? You can’t.

When a customer or viewer decides to subscribe to your webblog, your articles
or posts, titles will be listed and clickable in their blog reader.

Adding a blog to your reader

You can see on the left hand column there are 3 buttoms (or clicklets) for
Google, Yahoo and Aol. If you use either of these for your home page, you can
add a feed to your front page to keep up with the new posts. It’s that simple.
The orange buttom will let you feed the posts to your blog reader
of choice, of which there are many.

Instead of going to web sites to see if there is a new article or feature,
viewers can use a News Reader to see every update in their list.

Like reading the newspaper, you skim the titles and when you see something
you are interested in you can click on the title to see the full story or view
the pictures.

Online Marketing with Travel Blogs

Right now there is no easier way to get your information out. Blogs are becoming
a stronger and larger part of every aspect of the travel industry.

• Tourist Boards- Monaco updates their posts monthly with plenty of activities and hotel specials.
• Car Rentals - Avis uses their blog to keep their customers updated with new services and products.
• Packagers - FunJet uses their Blog to show off their resorts
  down in the Riviera Maya.
• And their are plenty of travel agents using their blogs
  to show off their expertice and services.

Travel Agents
I’ve seen several nice cruise and river cruise videos that do a great
job showing expertice with plenty of information. There is so much available
right now to show that you’ve been there and know what you are talking about
it’s unbelievable. In the next month or so I will do a post on using Adobe’s
Photoshop Elements to create a photo story and travel photo album.

Resorts
What a great way to create a space for customers to come back and stay
updated with new additions, activities and to stay intouch and extend the relationships
they have already created created.

A Bermuda resorts has a monthly photo contest. What a great way to to keep
customers coming back and have them share their photos and vacation with their
friends, viral marketing at it’s best.

Travel Associations
Blogs are easy to put together. And offer ways for non web technical
members to add and edit information.

There are several free online services that will give you space for your own
blog.