blogging – Creative Assets Inc Blog

Is Your Vacation Rental Blog Ignoring Half Your Customers?

A blog that only caters to part of the clientele for your vacation rental management company is not really doing its job.

If you are a vacation rental management company, you know your business has more than one type of customer. You perform transactions that are both business to customer, B2C, and business to business, B2B. You do one with your Vacation Rental Guests and the other with your Vacation Rental Owners. Just like you, your blog needs to cater to both types of clientele. You wouldn’t let an employee ignore valuable customers. Why let your blog get away with it?

Blogs Generate Sales Leads

A blog attracts valuable attention to your website and to your business. Few things receive organic responses as well as blogs do. When you write regularly and stay on the key topics of your vacation rental business, pretty soon you will have a lot of key words that lead right to you. Search engines will respond, and so will those who are browsing the Internet. The question is, who does your blog cater to, your vacation rental guests, or your vacation rental owners?

Your Vacation Rental Blog Should Target both B2C and B2B Clients

Your blog should cater to both guests and owners. The first thought that might spring into your mind is that attempting to appeal to both clienteles might get your blog ignored by one or the other. If a person is dreaming of a vacation, an explanation of what lock to put on a vacation rental might not have a good appeal. Therein rests the problem that you need to solve. How do you cater to both?

Blog visitors tend to behave in similar patterns. If they find a blog they enjoy, they are likely to read another topic on that same blog site. You want them to stay on your site.

Below is a pair of possible solutions.

Two Options for Building a Vacation Rental Blog Targeting Both Guests and Owners

Creating Two Stand Alone Blogs

While this option is possible, it is not the easy route. To create two separate blogs without downloading WordPress onto your hosting site twice, you will need one of two things, some programming knowledge, or a contractor with programming knowledge. You can see an explanation of how the process is done here. It’s called MultiSite and is available through WordPress plugins. That’s a more complex route and that option is not covered further here in this blog.

A simpler option does exist. It’s one you can do on your own.

Use Categories to Divide the Topics of Your Blog

You can use the category feature to separate the topics on your blog. Categories are a commonly-used and handy feature of WordPress blogs.

On WordPress, if you go to your blog Dashboard, you will see the the option labeled Posts and under it a few options that includes one labeled Categories. If you click on Categories, you will see a form to create new categories for your blog. Create one for Vacation Rental Guests and another for Vacation Rental Owners.

Be sure your Widgets are set up to display Categories. You will find Widgets in the drop down under Appearance in your dashboard.

When you post your blogs, select the appropriate category.

Go back through your previously posted blogs and add check marks for your Guest and Owner categories on each blog.

If a blog applies to both categories, go ahead and check both.

Categories Help Marketing Goals

Following those steps, all by themselves, you will divide all you posts into two main categories. Do so regardless of what other categories you created and regardless of how many additional categories each blog belongs. By putting each blog in either Vacation Rental Guests or Vacation Rental Owners, you’ve accomplished two important things:

Readers will see that you have organized your blog with a category aimed at their specific interest
Search engines will see the words Vacation Rental Guest or Vacation Rental Owner as keywords on every one of your blogs!

Create Links to Your Blog Categories

An added bonus comes with categorization. You can create links that go to your categories. That means you could put a link for your vacation rental guests onto social media, like Facebook. When Facebook fans follow the link, they will arrive at a page that displays only the blogs from your Vacation Rental Guest category. You can use a link to your Vacation Rental Owners category in the same fashion.

With the categories in place and checked off on every one of your blogs, you will have an interest-targeted links that you can use as often as you like. The uses and locations for those links are as broad as your imagination.

A Well-Organized Multi-Purpose Blog

Creating categories on your blog is the easiest way to divide your blog between Guests and Owners. Once you have divided up your posts in that way, you can then share them with your separate clienteles.

Cater to Both Vacation Rental Guests and Vacation Rental Owners

A blog that only caters to part of the clientele for your vacation rental management company is not really doing its job. A vacation rental management company needs to appeal to both owners and guests. By tweaking your blog using categories, you can serve up targeted blogs to both audiences. The change will also inform search engines more precisely what it is that you do and that will make you more discoverable. With your WordPress blog as part of your main website, it will lead the blog traffic right onto your site. Once you have them there and interested, converting them into a customer is only a step away.

Cheating Time to Make Dated Blog Posts Evergreen

Modern technology has a very simple answer to the problem of stale blog posts.

Blogging about local events is a great idea to focus attention on your activities. Unfortunately, those blogs go stale shortly after the event ends. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a way to recycle those old posts to bring new value to them again?

Can Dated Blog Posts Ever Be of Value Again?

When you blog about something such as a 4^th of July show, a Mardi Gras parade, or a Christmas event, you have an opportunity to use those posts over and over again. It remains true that they will never really be evergreen, of course. Few people take interest in holiday promotion when holiday is six months away. However, the 4^th of July will be back and so will all the other yearly events. That provides you with an opportunity to breathe value back into those posts.

When to Promote Event-Based Blog Posts

The key to a successful re-sharing of those old blogs relies on timing. You will want to promote them anew about 30 days or so before the event occurs again. The nature of the activity will determine variations in the adjustment of that date. If a Christmas parade happens the first week of December, you might want to break the “Thanksgiving barrier” and promote a bit earlier.

Promote Blog Posts Per the Schedule of Your Industry

Special circumstances will change the dating of your blog revitalization. For example, in the vacation rental industry, a leading time of 3 to 6 months is not a bad idea. That would make a Christmas post in July make sense. Just make sure to headline your re-sharing of the post with an explanation of why they should take notice now. “It’s time to book for December vacations!” With many rentals scheduled a year ahead of time, you could even try it in January. Label that one very well. Folks are a bit tired of Christmas once January gets going. A text-heavy promo might do better than a holiday image. Regardless of the challenges or the industry you work in, the promotion is worth it and you should have a timed promotion plan.

Your calendar won’t mind when you mark events a year in advance.

Use Technology to Help Schedule Blog Post Promotion

Modern technology has a very simple answer to the problem of stale blog posts. Digital calendars and planners serve the purpose fantastically. They’re nothing new, but not everyone uses them. A generation gap certainly applies, with adoption of the tech slower among the “more established” age groups. The revitalization of old blog posts makes digital calendars worth trying, though. A simple entry into a planner, such as Google Calendar, can create alerts that appear in your Gmail or which pop up on your digital device. Plenty of other digital planners and calendars are available that offer similar features. For the die-hard paper calendar users, marking your promotion dates when you buy the year’s calendar works just fine too. You will just have to make that little chiming sound on your own.

Use Social Media to Revitalize Those Old Blog Posts

Share your old blogs on all the relevant platforms such Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, and so on. You should see a spike in views of that blog. Use the text space provided on the social media platform to explain why the blog is currently relevant. When you need to share them far ahead of the event date, explain to your followers why the should take heed. When the date is within 30 days, you won’t have to work so hard. Those old posts will get your followers reading your blog again. If the event has changed calendar dates, post the new dates.

Statistics demonstrate that once visitors arrive on a blog, they will often move on to read further posts inside the same blog.

Make Dated Blog Posts Serve You Again

If your blog is part of the main site for your business, and it should be, you will generate new interest not just in your blog but in your business. That’s the reason you have a blog on your site in the first place! Use those old, dated blog posts all over again when the time is right. You will take a previously wasted resource and breathe value into it all over again.

Blogging Creates a Bigger Footprint

A blog is a repeated message that leads to your website.

Website search engines are looking for you. Help them find you. One of the best ways to do that is a blog.

Websites Can Get Lost in the Woods

Imagine being lost in a forest while a search plane flies over. The most likely scenario is that the plane doesn’t see you. You decide to take action. You tear off a piece of your yellow blanket and tie it to a tree top. When the plane flies over again, your chances are improved, but not by very much. Left alone in the woods another night, you come up with a new, better plan. The next time the plane flies over, fifty trees have yellow strips of cloth flying in their upper branches. The search parties find you.

Communicate in Volume

When you publish your website, you’ve put out a single ribbon in a tree. Even with a five page website, you still only have five ribbons. Better, surely, but that’s just not enough. You want that rescue plane to see a swath of color. You want them to know, without a doubt, that you are there. A blog serves that purpose. It is a repeated message that leads to your website.

Blogs Present a Beautiful Opportunity to Reach New People

The more blogs you post, the more messages you put out there. Those blogs will each cover a different topic or, at the very least, a different nuance of a topic. With each post, you increase your chances of being found. With every blog, you create a new category of interest. Someone out there will be looking for just that thing. With lots of blogs, you will hit lots of interests for lots of people.

Central Theme Keywords

I once watched a gardening segment on the news where a woman described that you should plant flowers with the same colors in groups. That way, instead of one lone flower struggling to create an impression, you would have a whole set of them, creating a swath of color that you couldn’t miss. The same is true of using the same key words repeatedly in your blog. That will create a footprint for visitors and search engines. It will establish you as the expert on that subject. It will tell search engines how to categorize you.

Peripheral Topic Keywords

The guideline for repeating keywords has a flipside. Alongside your main keywords, use one or two others that are new and specific to each blog. That way you reach into one new niche after another to draw fresh visitors. With your central theme intact, you will consistently spread you influence.

Establish Yourself as the Authority

Another fantastic result of blogging is that you establish yourself as a subject-matter expert. Who knows more about your product or service than you do? Show off your knowledge. Introduce new technology. Provide solutions. Answer questions. Before long, people will see you as an expert in your industry. That is a position you want to be in. Authority translates into sales of your product or service.

Use Blogging to Reach Your Potential Clients

Blogging is a simple means of telling the world more about yourself or your business. It helps to brand you. It also creates repeated communications that will increase your chances of being seen. Use those posts to establish your brand with search engines and the general public. A volume of quality information on a subject will place you as an expert and inspire customer trust. Blogs do all of those things. They offer a solution that not everyone knows is there. Take advantage of what blogs can do and let searchers find you!