Business and Blogging

Blogging - a Smart Way to Make a Mark in the Travel Industry

by Des Walsh on January 13th, 2007

This post is about how anyone who lives in any reasonably interesting place anywhere in the world could use blogging  to build a business, without leaving home.

I don’t have any current plans to travel to Seattle, but if and when I am heading there, I will be making sure I read the posts on Mary Jo Manzanares’ The Seattle Traveler.

That’s not solely, or even mainly because The Seattle Traveler is, like this blog, part of the b5media blogging network. It’s more because what Mary Jo is providing is an independent insider’s information and commentary. That means she will - and does - write stuff which I think you would be unlikely to find in whatever online or offline media the Seattle or Washington State tourism authorities use for promoting their city or State.

Read, for example, Mary Jo’s post Snow in Seattle: Is This a Memorable Event?  She is basically saying, good time to stay away right now folks. Would we be likely to read something like that in an official tourism publication? 

But precisely because Mary Jo is independent, individual, entertaining and informative, I kept reading and found out about an interesting competition.

All you have to do is take a photo capturing a memorable travel moment (like getting stuck in the snow in Seattle), and upload it to the contest site, along with an explanation of why the memory is special for you.  Read all the fine print details here.  The top prize is a $20,000 dream trip to “anywhere on Earth.”  Right now, that would be anywhere other than Seattle!

Again, can you imagine a tourism agency representative issuing a press release in those terms?

That’s why, when the time comes for me to be heading for Seattle, I’m going to be more interested in what Mary Jo has to say than in any official publications .

And as Mary Jo attracts more readers like me, as she deserves to, that will surely attract also the tour operators and others with great products and services for savvy travellers, offering her advertising deals.

A tourism expert told me years ago that what most travellers want to know is where the locals go and that most tourists love to find the restaurant or the coffee shop or the off-off type theater all the locals know about but which doesn’t advertise in the tourist publications.

Considering my own behavior when I travel and the stories others tell me of their travels, that makes sense to me. Which is why I believe any city or township or region in the world that wants to attract tourists, conventioneers etc (is that thousands of places? or millions, more likely) can benefit from having a Mary Jo writing about their place, from the inside, with the hot news on where the best coffee shops really are, where the best places are to hang out and watch the passing parade, which art galleries are really interesting, which shows the locals are going to, or where there might be a local festival that will have mostly only locals participating. 

As long as Mary Jo and others doing as she does maintain their independent stance and are free to write about the lousy weather when it’s lousy, they will deserve to earn for their services, for example through advertising. That’s about blogging as business - but that could be an onramp to establishing a service business for travelers and then using the blog as a way of promoting that business, rather than just relying on advertising for income.  

Where I live, in the incredibly beautiful Northern Rivers area of my state, on the southern end of Australia’s Gold Coast, millions of dollars are spent by federal, State and local government authorities each year on promoting the region to tourists, meeting planners and holiday makers. Yet most of the websites geared to attracting those people are basically official brochures online - informative enough, expensive, but official. 

I have suggested to more than one local business person who wants to stand out from the crowd and attract some of the current or potential visitors to her or his establishment or service, that a blog would be a very cool and inexpensive way to piggy-back on the awareness created by the spending of all those taxpayers’ dollars. So far no one seems to have taken up the challenge.

We need a Mary Jo in these parts. 

Share This

Related Stories

• How Can We Blog and Protect Our IP?
• Blog Challenge #2 - A Quarry
• Starwood Hotels and Resorts: A Visit To theLobby.com
• Your Business Blog Does Not Have to be About Your Business
• Stumped for What To Write About? Five Easy Topics To Blog About Today

POSTED IN: General, Industries, Marketing, Small Business, Travel