ERIN RAUB - THE TRAVEL COPYWRITER - www.TheTravelCopywriter.com
Hi, and thanks for viewing this guide!
I’m Erin, The Travel Copywriter, and I wrote this for you. Yes, you. Because I’m a small business owner, too. I work with lots of small business owners. I know how complicated "content marketing” can seem.
I also know you want more bookings. So, this guide is about both those things: Using content marketing to get you more bookings.
And that's what we're going to do. But first, my rule of thumb: If any of this ever feels like too much, table it (temporarily). The goal is to get you content, not to overwhelm. Do what you can; it's better than doing nothing at all.
Content marketing can be complicated. But, it doesn’t have to be. Because, here's the thing – any content is better than no content. Of course, you don't want to settle for just "some;" we're aiming for great content – content so good, people would pay for it. (Even though you're giving it away for free.)
That's because free, no-strings-attached, high-quality, and unique information builds trust and authority. It's also the perfect way to spark a conversation with your guests, build rapport, provide dynamite information, and really showcase your company’s personality.
Not to mention, boost your SEO, snag great backlinks, build authority, and... well, you get the drift.
In this guide, we're tackling the topic of written content: your website pages and blog posts. Mostly blog posts. Why? Because there's a low barrier to entry: You don’t need to be formal. You don't need fancy software. There’s no real must-do or must- have. And, you can be yourself. Blogging is very informal, which takes the pressure off. Think of it as a written conversation.
My best advice? Let yourself write. (And, okay, do a little proofreading before you hit Publish.) Enjoy yourself! Have a little fun. Your future guests are going to love your content.
Thanks Erin
WHAT IS TRAVEL CONTENT MARKETING? Or, How Can Blogging Drive Traffic to my Website?
When we talk about driving organic (= non-paid) traffic to a website, what we’re usually talking about is content marketing.
In a nutshell, content marketing is strategic and guest-focused marketing that focuses on building high-quality content that your target audience (= your ideal guest) will find truly valuable.
ARE YOU "FINDABLE"? 95% of your potential guests only look at the first page of search results. If you're not on Page #1 of Google, you're not getting found.
ARE YOU TOP 3? Page #1 isn't enough. Half of all search engine clicks go to the top 3 results.
ARE YOU "SHAREABLE"? Blog posts are among the most shared content online.
HOW MANY DOORS HAVE YOU OPENED? The more content you produce, the larger your site grows. Having more web pages / blog posts is like having unlimited online front doors that customers can walk through. Content increases first-time visits and repeat visits.
ARE YOU "EVERGREEN"? Good news! Content that’s great today is great tomorrow. (This is called “evergreen content.” See pages 18-19 of this guide.) Build a blog rich in evergreen content, and you’ll reap the SEO benefits for years to come.
* For sources and more content market stats, click here.
THE SIX ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS OF TRAVEL CONTENT MARKETING
1. KNOW YOUR GUEST
Who are your ideal guests? What do they care about? What are they looking for in a vacation? What are their pain points? What are their passion points?
2. DECIDE ON A STRATEGY
Content strategy is the careful, strategic approach to your content: what you create and where you publish it. Your strategy forms the very foundation of your content marketing efforts.
3. CHOOSE YOUR CHANNELS
Know your goals. Then, align your goals to your content and your distribution channels. And, whatever you do, be sure you own your content and your follower list.
4. RUN A CONTENT AUDIT
Chances are, you have some good content already floating around – Welcome Books, attraction information, “favorites” lists, and other text just begging for some attention.
5. FIND YOUR INSPIRATION
Seek inspiration (but never copy) from the travel sites you love – the ones that inspire wanderlust, that excite your desire to travel, and that you would most want to share.
6. START CREATING!
You're now ready to begin creating content. But wait! You don't want miss this simple (I promise) checklist of 11 essential elements to improve, optimize, and promote your stellar content.
1. KNOW YOUR GUEST
Before you type one word of content, you must ask yourself, “Who will read this?” This isn’t a rhetorical question; it’s critical thinking and you need to do it.
Step 1: Develop Personas
Create real, live personas – the marketing version of imaginary friends – that describe your core demographic(s). Define a few distinct personas, but for sanity's sake, try to keep it under 5.
For example: Your vacation home attracts mostly large, often multi-generational families looking for together-time. It's usually the mom who contacts you first, but sometimes it's the grandmother because the grandparents are footing the bill. Here's your persona:
Emma Hard-Worker: Emma's works long hours and she really looks forward to the annual family vacation, during which she and her family try to keep their screens off. They deeply value "family time" and need a home that offers ample opportunity for bonding.
Emma's looking for a lake home with lots opportunities for time together –kayaks, SUP boards, a pool table, board games, etc. – but that's also large enough to provide privacy for her and her husband, their three kids, and grandparents.
Step 2: Understand Pain Points
Now, it's time to flesh out your personas' "pain points":
Pain points are your guests' problems and concerns. Travelers have many, many pain points – everything from travel logistics (what’s the cheapest/shortest/easiest flight?) to packing the right activity-relaxation balance into their vacation itinerary. Chances are, you’re already intimately familiar with your clients’ pain points: the questions they ask, over and over, in phone calls, emails and other communications.
Pain points are a major foundation of your blog. (Side note: So are "passion points," the happy-go-lucky flip-side of pain points.)
Pain and passion are what you’re going to write about, because solutions to common concerns will generate great SEO (and provide all those other benefits we’ve discussed). So let’s pop back up to Emma Hard-Worker: What are her pain points? (Example: She's worried her kids will be bored, her parents' will be irritated, and that they'll spend the whole week arguing over what to do.)
Step 3: Offer a Solution
Great content lies between your personas’ pain/passion points and your solutions. Solutions create value for your guests; they’re the reason they read your blog, subscribe to your list, and ask you to stay in touch. As you develop your personas and explore their pain points, you’ll find plenty of areas of opportunity. These are your blog posts.
Remember, blogging is all about sharing. Free and open sharing. Blogging builds trust and goodwill, and give travelers a reason to keep coming back – and to think of you first when they start planning their next vacation.
HOMEWORK
Carve out some time to get to know your audience (personas), explore their pain points, and develop solutions. You don’t need to flesh out those solutions, just jot down a few ideas.
2. DECIDE ON A STRATEGY
First things first: Content strategy is not the same as content marketing.
Think of your strategy as an orchard: Every seed you plant is the promise of a future harvest. If you sow haphazardly, your orchard will grow up to be a crowded, poor producer. But if you plan your orchard carefully and nurture it along the way, you can create a space – big or small, depending on your goals – that is fruitful for years to come.
Continuing the metaphor, the method in which you plan your seed-sowing and nurturing is content strategy; how you use the fruits of your well-tended orchard is content marketing. Make sense?
So, What is Content Strategy?
Content strategy is not a single solution. It’s not a piece or even a type of content, like blog posts or travel guides or posting your links on Twitter.
Travel content strategy is the entire process, starting from the very beginning: the mission statement, your raison d’être, the editorial calendar – all of it. Travel content strategy is the why and the how of creating information that is eminently sharable and completely inspirational.
Step 1: Define Your Content Marketing Goals
Your content marketing goals are the foundation of your content strategy. Ask yourself, who do you want to reach (answer: your personas), and what do you hope to achieve? Do you want to rank better in the search engines? Do you want to build your email list, so you can nurture and convert interested travelers? Etc. etc.
Your goals are the key to defining your content strategy. Going back to my metaphor, this step is the equivalent of mapping out your orchard before the first seed is even purchased.
Step 2: Take a Content Inventory (a.k.a. Content Audit)
Chances are, you started creating content before you even heard the term content marketing. (That’s a good thing; it just shows how natural this kind of marketing is.) Remember, content can be anything from your Welcome Book info to that list you always email guests about your favorite local restaurants.
Now’s the time to organize all your previously created content, from travel guides and blog posts to newsletters and photo galleries.
Step 3: Get Your Team in Place (or Hire a Team)
This is one of those things that sounds complicated but doesn’t have to be: The only requirement of your “Content Team” is that all members have the time and energy to produce high-quality content. That can be you, it can be your spouse, it can be your property manager. You can also hire out your content. (Hi there! I dothat! Want to email me?)
Remember, content marketing is not about quantity (oh hey, look! we post every day!); it’s about quality. You need to create inspiring, kick-butt content that furthers your goals. (See Step 1.)
Step 4: Brainstorm Your Content
The travel and hospitality industry was made for great content: blog posts, photo slideshows, travel guides, wish-you-were-here’s, and everything in between – these are natural stories inherently interesting to your guest personas.
Pro tip: Don’t take on everything at once. Define a few areas for content implementation – say, your blog and a slideshow series – and take it from there. Starting small allows you to devote more energy and resources into creating a few pieces of truly inspirational content, instead of creating oodles of boring sludge that never gets any traction.
Step 5: Get Social
If content is king, then social is its crown prince. That makes social sound important, right? Well, it is, but here’s something you’ll probably love: the secret to social is, you don’t have to be on every social network. In fact, you probably shouldn’t be.
Each social network has its own personality, so choose the ones that your audience frequents. Keep your chosen networks pared down, so you can really rock each. Study how they work – e.g. Pinterest loves photos while Facebook likes to chat (albeit often about photos) – and devote yourself to building an engaged audience on your networks.
HOMEWORK
Yes, another assignment! It’s pretty straightforward, though: Reread Steps 1-5 and jot down your answers. Sleep on them, then go back and refine them. Discuss them with your team members. (Solopreneurs, I feel your pain!) And most of all, have fun with it!
CONTENT STRATEGY HACK:
HOW TO RANK ON GOOGLE PAGE 1, TOP 3
In today's digital world, it would be pretty tough to rank for high-volume (= lots of searches) keywords – you know, things like "Las Vegas travel guide" or "best beaches in Hawaii."
If you want the biggest SEO bang for your content buck, go for “long-tail keywords.”By definition, long-tail keywords contain more words (ex. "beaches on the Big Island where you can rent beach chairs") and target a niche audience. We're no longer casting a wide net to catch every, single traveler; in most cases, there's simply too much competition for that to work.
So, instead of trying to rank for the best beaches in Hawaii, you'd blog about 3 Beaches on the Big Island Where You Can Rent Beach Chairs. You'd blog about 5 Beaches on the Big Island Where You Can Order an Oceanfront Cocktail. Etc. etc.
And here's the magic of the long-tail keyword: You can rank for these keywords – quickly! So, even if only 50 people a month search for "Big Island beaches with beach chairs," your website can pull most of those 50.
That's 50 visitors a month and 600 travelers a year. All, from one blog post. One evergreen blog post (see page 18.)
Choosing long-tail keywords is all about being the big fish in a small SEO sea: You’ll pull more traffic ranking #1 for a low-volume search, than you would if you were on page 12 for a high-volume search.
My Favorite Tool: The Yoast SEO Plugin
SEO (= search engine optimization) used to feel like a mystical art and, to some extent, it still is. But for most of us, basic SEO is pretty simple and straightforward. And that’s why I love – LOVE! – the Yoast SEO plugin.
Yoast is a free plugin for WordPress. Its sole purpose is to help you focus every piece of content you write, on a set list of must-have SEO elements, including: keyword density, page title, page URL, post/page length, image meta data, and meta title and description, among other elements.
If all this sounds complicated, don't worry – Yoast makes it easy. In simple language, it will tell you what to do (and where), for every page or post you optimize. In no time at all, you'll be ranking for all those long-tail keywords!
Bottom line: Yoast is your WordPress cheat sheet for every piece of content you create. And it works!
3. CHOOSE YOUR CHANNELS
By now, you know your audience. You’ve started developing your travel content strategy. So it’s time to talk content types and distribution channels. We’re getting close – so very, very close! – to actually writing, snapping photos, and shooting video. I promise.
First things first: You absolutely, positively must keep your content goals in mindthroughout this process. What is the purpose of your content marketing?
One of your goals must be to build your email database. Remember that with social media accounts and even RSS followers (if you still have any), you don’t own your follower list. You don’t have access to their direct email addresses or phone numbers. But with an opt-in database – say, when travelers exchange their emails for your regular emails with updates from your blog – you slowly build this incredible, amazing business asset: a list of warm leads from travelers who have sought you out.
The second thing to always keep in mind is that your content strategy for each channel is a miniaturized version of your overall travel content strategy.
Before you launch (or revamp) your blog, your newsletter, your travel guides, or any other content channel, ask yourself the following questions:
Who is my target audience? These are the personas you developed back in Part 1.
What are my personas’ pain points? These are your personas' concerns and anxieties – the problems that you will solve.
Where are my customers? Use your own logic. Where and how do you think travelers seek the kind of content you produce? What social networks and other distribution/marketing channels are ideal for your content?
What is my story? This is the message you want to communicate to your readers.
What’s the point? What are your goals for this content? Do you want to attract subscribers, build your reputation, or promote your destination?
Once you’re clear on your answers to these questions, it’s time to talk content channels – and decide which ones will work best for you:
Your Blog
Blogging is one of the most versatile content channels in existence, and is especially powerful for travel content marketing. It is an informal, fun and visual platform that allows you to build community and rapport, establish thought leadership, promote your destination and services, execute sophisticated SEO strategies, and so much more.
Your Website
You can also build deep content – for example, a highly detailed travel guide – as part of your core website.
Other Channels
For the purpose of this guide, I’m sticking to content marketing in the realm of blogging (and/or website pages), but you can also build content as travel guides, video, eBooks, email newsletters, testimonials, podcasts, and so much more.
HOMEWORK
Woohoo, assignment time! It's just this: Where do your travelers live online? Brainstorm the most effective content channels for your business.
4. RUN A CONTENT AUDIT
We’re almost to the actual content! But not quite. A content audit comes before content creation.
Before you write one new word, you must first review everything you’ve already written – your existing content. Because unless your company is brand new, chances are you have some good content already floating around – Welcome Books, brochures, attraction information, “favorites” lists, and other text just begging for some attention.
Now’s the time for a content audit – for sorting through all your raw materials and evaluating each on its performance and effectiveness. This is the time to repackage, rework, and rewrite the best of the best. This is the time to ask yourself:
Does my content speak to my personas' pain and passion points?
How engaging is my content?
Is my content sharable?
The goal: Understand what kinds of content you’ve already created, determine whether this content is effective at driving bookings and engagement, and figure out what content gaps must be filled.
Step 1: Take Inventory
The first step of a content audit is to take an inventory of your existing content. And I mean that literally – an actual accounting of all your content.
Gather up every scrap of content – digital and paper – you have ever created: Welcome Guides, brochures, travel guides, packing lists, destination & attraction descriptions, blog posts, welcome emails, videos, photos, etc. (Remember, content is more than text; it includes photos and video, too.) Everything.
Yay! You already have content.
Step 2: Analyze Your Content Performance
When it comes to content, there’s a big difference between quality and quantity. Simply having content does not mean that you have effective content: In order to be effective, your content should always work for you.
A major goal of your content audit is to gather the information you need to make good content decisions – in other words, to determine what types of content work best for you. Several metrics can help you determine content performance, among them:
Engagement: Does your content touch on travelers' passion and pain points, to the point that they comment, ask questions, and otherwise interact with your brand?
Searchability: Does your content rank well in the search engines?
Shareability: Do travelers share your content on social networks or via email?
Accuracy: Is your information accurate and up-to-date?
Awesomeness: Yes, this is a stick you must use to measure your content: How awesome is it? Does it kick your competitors’ content butts? Because if you’re not dedicated to creating absolutely incredible content, then you should spend your time and resources elsewhere.
Step 3: Evaluate Content Performance
The next step in your travel content audit is to evaluate current performance:
Internal Links: An internal link strategy is integral to link-building: where does your content currently link, and where else could it link?
Broken Links: Run a URL validator to find broken links – then correct them.
Meta Information: Make sure to optimize your on-page SEO, including meta description, title tags, and meta keywords. (Pro tip: The Yoast SEOplugin for WordPress is perfect for this!)
Keep Current: You should update travel guides, destination & attraction info, and other content at least once a year. Do the required legwork – call attractions, double-check phone numbers & emails, etc.
Calls-to-Action: Be sure that all your content has strong calls-to-action that target your current goals. (Read more about calls-to-action here.)
Once you’ve checked and corrected any problems with your content performance, it’s time to talk potential. Brainstorm with your team the who, what, where and when of your content:
Which personas will each content item best engage?
How should you repackage each item into content that touches on traveler pain and passion points? Which content channels are most appropriate for distribution? When should you roll out your revitalized content?
Now ask yourself, what content performs best? What has the best conversions or sign-ups or social shares? And what content needs more development? What are your content weaknesses – do you blog too sporadically or do your travel guides need a complete overhaul? Because these questions – your best performances and greatest weaknesses – are the foundation of new content creation.
HOMEWORK
Do a content audit. Go through each of the above bullet points one-by-one. It's worth it!
5. FIND YOUR INSPIRATION
Travel content marketing makes magic, but there’s no actual magic involved.
They say imitation is the greatest form of flattery. And, while I wouldn’t recommend copying or duplicating your favorite travel content marketing, you can certainly take inspiration from others.
After all, travelers like what they like: they click and share and follow for epic photos, awesome checklists, and free content so good, they probably would have paid for it. With content marketing, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel; you just have to decorate the wheel with your own brand of creativity.
HOMEWORK
Google, google, google! Start hunting around online for content you love. Content that you would share, were you traveling to a given destination. Content that has great voice. Content that excites you.
Get inspired. And then, ride that inspiration: Jot down ideas that come to mind. Build, add and refine your list of great content ideas.
NEED SOME INSPIRATION?
26 IDEAS FOR EASY EVERGREEN CONTENT
1. List Posts: Everyone loves a good list, and travelers are list fanatics. A Top 10 is easy to pull together, but don’t box yourself in to just “top” lists – expand into other types, like 5 Iconic Animals of Belize or 3 Hidden Waterfalls in Montezuma.
2. How To’s: Alone in a foreign land, there’s a lot of “what ifs?” and uncertainties travelers need answered. Be their beacon – the guru with all the answers. Examples: Everything Your Need to Know to Navigate the Streets of Rome or How to Find an Authentic Hawaiian Luau.
3. Best of: Like lists and how to’s, best of posts are always a hit. You can take this from basic, like The Best Spots for a Caribbean Sunset in Costa Rica to pinpoint specific, like The 3 Best Ceviche Stands in Puntarenas.
4. Mini Travel Guides: You’re the local expert, and an online travel guide gives you the chance to showcase your knowledge. You can do a general guide post, like An Introduction to Granada, Nicaragua, or you can even create a weekly series: Places to See in Granada, Colonial Churches of Granada, Scenic Viewpoints of Granada, etc.
5. Upcoming Holidays: Grab the calendar and mark down the year’s most interesting holidays – especially the ones that draw tourists. Post about the holiday’s history and cultural significance, and highlight local festivities.
6. Hotel Spotlights: Hotel spotlights work for more than just travel agencies. If you partner with hotels, or have friends or acquaintances with an exceptional offering, show a little link love. Obviously, only highlight places you’ve vetted personally and that you’d recommend to your closest friends.
7. Tour or Attraction Spotlights: Like a hotel spotlight, highlighting a nearby activity or attraction, whether you sell it or not, is a great way to engage your readers. Travelers travel, and you can help guide them where to go.
8. Themed Roundups: There are infinite themes you can cover in your posts, from The 10 Most Romantic In-Room Fireplaces in Virginia to 12 [City] Restaurants with Rooftop Dining. These work really well when you tease out an unusual element – just think of difference between 10 Romantic Hotels in [City] and 10 Romantic [City] Hotels with Five- Star Room Service.
9. Packing Lists: You can tailor these to traveler type, like Packing List: Essentials for Adventure Travelers in Costa Rica or Packing List: What to Take for a Family Vacation in Costa Rica.
10. Useful Travel Apps: This one walks the line between evergreen and not, since apps come and go. Make sure to update this type of post every 6-12 months, and when you do, add a blurb to the beginning of your old post with a link to the new.
11. Language Guide: Everyone loves to learn some foreign lingo. You can create a crash-course in the local language, or even produce a monthly series with themed language posts: Nicaraguan Spanish: At a Restaurant or Crash-Course Italian: Lingo for Cruising Venice’s Canals. Slang guides are a perennial favorite.
12. Q&A or FAQ: If you get a lot of blog comments (or emails in your inbox), consider answering them in a blog post. You can also create your own list of travel-based FAQ, and answer questions about potable water, required vaccines, etc.
13. Photo Slideshow: Chances are, you have great photos of sights, activities, hotels and other points of interest. Install a slideshow plugin and showcase those images!
14. Expert Interview: Whether you’re a travel agency or a local business, interview a local expert – a travel agent, hotel manager, etc. – about your area. Be sure to ask job-related questions, like “What is the most popular activity in [city]?” or “What is your favorite part of the job?”
15. Travel Stories/Trip Diaries: If you’ve visited your home, explored your destination, or taken a FAM trip or CPL lately, parlay the getaway into a post (or a few) about your day-to-day activities.
16. Recipes: Posting traditional recipes and and spotlighting local ingredients (think exotic – things your travelers don’t often eat at home) add flavor to your blog posts.
17. Special Deals & Discounts: It’s okay to be self-promotional once in awhile, but don’t try to hide the fact that you’re advertising a service; it comes off as disingenuous and will turn travelers away.
18. Customer Testimonials: Client testimonials are awesome: they’re real, they’re engaging, and they’re a natural way to sell your services. Present your client’s story, and then let his or her words do the talking.
19. Video Montage: If you ever record video, throw together some of your favorite clips into a themed video.
20. Company News: Save new hirings for press releases; this kind of blog post is about news that affects your customers: when travel agencies sign with a new hotel or tour companies offer a new day tour.
21. Tips & Hacks: Everyone wants to travel better, smarter and easier. Let your local guru shine through with your best tips, like 5 San Jose Airport Hacks for a Smoother Flight.
22. Awesome Travel Gear: Globetrotters love their gear, and are
always searching for the newest, coolest gizmos to improve their travels. Show them your favorites, and tell them why you love them.
23. Local Legends: Many travelers are interested in local culture, and legend and lore is some of the most enticing. You can even pair legends with upcoming holidays or seasons. For example, Costa Rica’s version of La Llorona is perfect for a Halloween post.
24. Life Lessons: Travel teaches us some pretty awesome, incredible things about ourselves. Share a few of your favorite tidbits, like The World’s Worst Cup of Coffee – And What it Taught Me About Life’s Precious Moments or How a Summer in Costa Rica Changed My College Major – And My Life!
25. Bucket Lists: Create a bucket list of activities – things everyone should see and do before they die – for your location.
26. Humorous Posts: Everyone loves a good laugh once in awhile. If you have a well developed funny bone, infuse a bit of humor into your blog. Just make sure to keep posts light and fun, not heavy on complaints or off-putting imagery – think The Grossest Foods I’ve Ever Eaten – And Loved! not Food Poisoning: A Portrait of Puke from Around the Globe.
6. Start Creating
You now have the basic tools to make the leap into successful travel content marketing.
Now, it’s time to create compelling, actionable travel content. It’s time to use your words to paint vivid mental pictures with brushstrokes so bold, they’re almost fluorescent. It’s also time to leverage some simple principles of travel copywriting to guide your site visitors to click, to inquire, to book, to call – to do whatever it is you want them to do.
But before you dive into the writing wilds, I’ll leave you with this travel content marketing checklist – 11 essential elements to include in every piece of your content marketing:
#1: Write Well
The cornerstone of great content is good writing. Bring your destination to life with your words. Put your readers in the moment. Create a picture so striking, so completely irresistible, that anyone who reads your words will be convinced –convinced that you are the one, the only answer to the question, “Where should I travel next?”
#2: Pinpoint Your Target Persona
Your content strategy may target more than one travel persona, but each individual marketing piece – each blog post, each travel guide, each newsletter article – should target just one. Before you write one word, choose your target persona and then write for that, and only that traveler.
#3: Define Your Goal You should have a specific goal for all your content. Perhaps you want people to read more of your blog posts, or sign up for email updates, or maybe even make an inquiry. Whatever your goal, define it clearly before you begin writing a blog post, a newsletter article, or a travel guide. Remember: your end game will define what you write and how you write it.
#4: Insert Your Call-to-Action
And speaking of your goal, all content should have a call-to-action (CTA) that guides visitors to fulfill the goal of your content.
#5: Add Internal Links
Link to other blog posts, guides, and content on your website – and choose your anchor text (linked words) wisely; the best anchor text is natural (read: not strange phrasing written for the search engines) while incorporating targeted keywords and phrases.
#6: Choose Incredible Photos
Content is better with images, so always add one (or a few) to your blog posts, newsletters, guides and other content.
#7: Forget the Hard Sell
Never, ever forget that your content isn’t about you: it’s about travelers. We live in the sharing economy, and travel content marketing is all about sharing the best of your destination, your hotel, your offerings – but in a natural way.
#8: Run the AIDA Test AIDA is a time-tested copywriting formula; its acronym stands for Attention,Interest, Desire, Action. You don’t have to become a top-notch copywriter to do content marketing right, but it is a good idea to keep AIDA in mind as you write. Your headline, your introductory paragraph, your content, and your CTAs should all pass the AIDA test.
#9: Optimize Your Content
For blog posts, travel guides, and other content that lives on the web, be sure to do some basic search engine optimization (SEO): Choose your keywords and key phrases wisely, and write optimized titles and meta descriptions. Then get started on check point #8, so other websites will link to your content (backlinks are one of today’s most important factors in boosting your search engine rankings).
Pro tip: I'm a huge fan of the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress. In a nutshell, it
helps you focus every piece of content you write, on a set list of must-have SEO elements, including: keyword density, page title, page URL, post/page length, image meta data, and meta title and description, among other elements. Basically, it’s an SEO cheat sheet for every piece of content you create. And it works!
#10: Share, Share, and Share Again
Despite the title of this guide, content marketing is no Field of Dreams: Even if you build it, they won’t necessarily come. Yes – done right, your content will create great SEO and you should see an upswing in organic traffic. But there's a "but"
You must also spread your content across the internet: Share on Twitter, post on Facebook, upload to Instagram. You should comment on popular related blogs, especially those that show you comment love (share your latest blog post with your comment). Participate on related forums. Leverage your email list, and share new blog posts, latest news, and other tidbits as they come. Build relationships. That's what it's all about.
WHAT ARE CALLS-TO-ACTION?
Do your website and blog inspire travelers to trust, remember, and interact with your brand?
If your answer is “I don’t know” (or worse, “no”), then Houston, we have a problem.
The good news: There’s an easy solution to that problem. And that solution is to deploy powerful, engaging travel calls-to-action throughout your website.
A call-to-action is nothing more than a button, a link, or other digital instruction, paired with action language, to nudge your site visitors in the right direction. The sole purpose of a travel CTA is to help travelers do what they already want to do.
They’re already interested in your destination, your inn, your itinerary, your vacation rental, your fill-in-the-blank. So, if they’re looking for more information about your bed & breakfast, then your CTA should direct them to more information about your bed & breakfast. If they’re hunting down great travel advice for your area, then your travel call- to-action should link to your downloadable travel guide. Etc. etc.
Why Do Calls-to-Action Matter?
A large number of the visitors to your blog and/or website aren’t yet ready to book.
They came for the info you offer. They searched Google for the best restaurants in Orlando, or the most romantic wedding spots in Turks and Caicos, or the best hiking trails in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The truth: They’re not here for you.
And that means, once they’ve absorbed the information you offer, they’re gone. They’ve clicked over to a new browser tab, or hit the back button, or returned to Google.
And they’ll probably never think of you again.
Whoosh! <– That the sound of a booking, disappearing into the Land of Lost Opportunity.
That is, unless you have effective calls-to-action in place. If you don’t, well, you’ve already missed your chance. You’ve failed to direct interest to other parts of your site, or to get a new Facebook Like, or to earn your way into a traveler’s email inbox.
Worse, you’ve lost your opportunity to convert this I-might-someday- be-interested-but-right-now-I’m-still-in-the-planning-phase traveler into an eventual okay-I’ve-made-my-decision-and-I’m-ready-to- book traveler.
All because you failed to implement strong, well thought-out travel calls-to-action. It could have been simple, if you had just asked: "Would you like weekly travel tips emailed to your inbox?"
Make it Simple: How to Write Powerful CTAs
The good news: This isn’t hard. We may be talking about 9 how-to's, but they’re all simple and easy to implement. They are:
Use Action Language
Think Benefits
Reduce Risk
Be Helpful (+ Persuasive)
Keep Them Short & Sweet
Go Bold
Make Them Clickable
Location, Location, Location
Test Regularly
