Why You Should Be Blogging for Your Travel Company

As part of our newest blog series, Blogging for Travel, where we interview and spotlight travel companies who are successfully blogging for business, this post focuses on the successes of travel company, Adventurous Wench.

Offering a wide variety of women-only trips and tours, Adventurous Wench provides the perfect vacations for single women and solo travelers.

In the below interview with Deanna Keahey, founder of Adventurous Wench, Deanna shares her effective blogging for business strategies.

Below is the interview:

1. What is the purpose of your blog? Specifically, who is it for and what does it provide to readers?

There are multiple audiences for our blog and various benefits for each of them.

• For our previous travelers, our blog provides an on-going occasional stream of interesting tidbits about the places they’ve visited. This reminds them of their vacation and feeds their interest in that place. For instance, when I recently wrote an article about the Blasket Islands, I got responses from people who had been there on our Ireland trip, remembering how much they had enjoyed hiking around the island.

• For future and prospective travelers, the blog provides a couple of different things. First, it gives them some concrete information about the destination, and what we do on our trips there. For instance, if you’re thinking of going to Sedona, on our blog you’d find a number of articles about the region and about our past trips there. This can give people a better idea of whether this destination and trip are what they really want to do. Second, less concrete but equally important, the blog gives them a sense of our company, approach, personality, and values. Reading our articles on a variety of topics can help convey these intangibles better than a sales page about “our values.”

• For anybody, whether they’ll ever become a customer of ours or not, it can provide the same informational benefits, if they have questions about a place that we cover.

• Also for anybody, I use this as another way to share my general philosophy of life, adventure, exploration, and fun. Along with informational posts, I include some inspirational thoughts and topics. These aren’t about promoting our company, but they are about the ideas behind the company.

2. Why did you decide to blog for business?

I was getting more and more involved in reading other people’s blogs at the time, and I saw a lot of value in it as an informal and flexible means of communication. It gives me a medium to write about anything that catches my interest, rather than having to fit into a structured website. I also like the informal, conversational feel of it. After seeing the benefits on other blogs, I decided to go for it myself.

3. Do you believe that blogging for business has helped you to express your brand message? If so, how has your blog helped you?

Yes, it has definitely helped. I think it helps in a couple of very different ways. The first is simply offering another communication channel to share pieces of that message, which combine to convey an overall impression of the brand. I think people are more likely to read material that is interesting and beneficial to them, with the brand personality and values communicated in a tangential way, than they are to read an obviously self-serving “this is our company” page on a website. It’s less direct but can come across as more honest, if you consistently convey a certain brand personality across many articles.

Second, writing the blog has helped me to clarify some of my own thoughts and develop my voice. Just sitting down and doing it makes a difference. Answering these questions for this very post is helping me to clarify some of my thoughts that were a bit hazy. And the more I write, the more I develop my own style and voice—which ends up being the voice of the company and voice of the brand.

4. How do you come up with your topic ideas?

I get topic ideas from a variety of sources:

• Some posts are about an experience I just had. If I’m in Greece, I might write something about the island I’m on.

• Some are related to a favorite photo. I’ve got thousands of trip photographs, and many of them have a story that goes with them.

• Some are related to a recent event. When swine flu fears were rampant, I wrote about travel insurance and swine flu.

• Some are related to a post on a different site—something I found interesting and wanted to link to and add my own comments.

• Some are “behind the scenes” posts—something about my life and running the business.

• Some are related to an inspirational quote—something I find meaningful and want to share.

5. How does blogging fit into your overall online marketing strategy? Where does your blog rank in terms of the most successful marketing strategy you have?

Blogging isn’t a stand-alone strategy; it ties other things together. One example is our monthly email newsletters. If we have a newsletter about the San Juan Islands, I’ll link it back to various interesting blog posts about trips to the San Juan Islands. The newsletter becomes more multidimensional, while the blog posts get new readers.

Another example is our Facebook page. Our blog posts also show up on Facebook, and we often have more interaction on Facebook than we do on the blog itself. The Facebook page benefits from the content in the blog, and the blog benefits from the exposure on Facebook. Because the blog is so intertwined with our other efforts, I really can’t separate it out for a ranking. I can say that if we cut out the blog, it would have wider ramifications than just the blog itself.

Deanna Keahey

About Deanna Keahey and Adventurous Wench:

Deanna Keahey is the founder of Adventurous Wench, a company with the mission of inspiring and facilitating adventurous travel experiences for women. Find adventurous trips, travel-related products, and, of course, Deanna’s blog, at www.AdventurousWench.com.

Did you find this post helpful? Let us know in our comments section?

If you like this post, you might also like:

1. Travel Professionals: Do You Know How Your Travel Blog Fits Into Your Overall Marketing Strategy?
2. How to Achieve Blog Success: Interview with Baby Boomer Travel Blogger
3. Professional Blogger Shares All About Successful Blogging: Part II
4. Proven Remedies to Common Blogging Challenges: Part II
5. Business Coach and Consultant Shares Marketing and Blogging Tips