Image Source: ‘Business Calendar & Schedule‘ by Flickr user photosteve101 under CC BY 2.0.
By this point if you own a tour company or tour business, are just starting out or planning to launch a new business soon you’ve been hammered by the idea that you need a blog. While this isn’t necessarily true for every business, it’s actually rather important for a local tourism company, especially if you own a bike/bicycle, food, boat or bus tour companies. Having a consistent blog gives you content to share with customers in emails and on social media, plus contributes to local search results.
That being said, the hardest part about developing a blog that actually does all those things is creating consistent, quality content. When faced with an empty blog calendar it be difficult to figure out what you can possibly write to fill it up.
Fortunately there are some easy post types that you can use to fill out your content calendar without ending up with something no one wants to read. Each of the below ideas is a perfect way to create content you can specifically tailor for your tourist & local audiences.
1. Weekly Curation Post
If you’ve started following along with our blog, you probably noticed we just did a monthly curation post for February. This is a post style we use, and it’s also used by some of our Food Tour Pros students’ tour blogs (see Taste of Catalina Food Tours & Foods of New York Tours) and we think it’s a good one.
Catalina Island Food Tours Round Up Post
A weekly curation post is simply a list of articles, videos, news and more from around the web that’s relevant to your audience. It’s your way of collecting the best stuff for your readers. When you find something you want to include add the link to the post along with a summary written by you. We also suggest inserting your thoughts and opinions on whatever the topic is to really make it your own.
Doing a weekly curation post is an easy way to have consistent, weekly content on your blog. If you’re already doing social media or following local food and event news you can easily take the best of what you’ve seen and curate into a Friday post every week.
The beauty of weekly curation posts is that you can share a variety of items to reach both the tourist and local audiences. We highly recommend including information on local events and timely attractions. This information is relevant to locals looking for something to do, and travelers planning out their upcoming trip.
Ideas for what to include:
- Travel/attraction news & updates
- Local upcoming events
- Foodie articles
- Local food and restaurant news
- Photo posts from your tour goers
2. Best of The City Guides
Chicago Food Planet Guide Blog Post
You’re running a tour company, which means you’re highly familiar with the city in whatever your niche. In the culinary industry that niche is food. “Best of” lists once again are a solid go-to post because they speak to both tourists and locals. It’s simple content and makes a useful quick guide for readers. Plus posts like this support local businesses and attractions too! Doing so can help you build better relationships with your fellow business owners, and of course help tourist and locals discover new parts of your city.
3. Tour Stop Highlights
You likely already have a wealth of content and information at your fingertips about each of the stops on your tours as well as background history on your city. Build new content off of what you already have by repurposing that information into blog posts. For example, highlight the history of one of the restaurants on your tour, a famous monument you point out to tour goers or a neighborhood you tour. It’s a simple way to subtly show hint at what your tour experience offers, while giving deeper insight.
4. Q&A Posts
Q&A posts also make use of what you already have at your disposal. Do simple interviews with owners of the stops on your tours and even your tour guides. It’ll offer insight into local cuisine or give a behind-the-scenes look at your tours while adding both unique content and personality to your blog. To put this one into action, simple write out a set of standard questions that cover the basics, along with some personal questions to help readers get to know the interviewee. You can conduct these via email, or even record the conversation and post that alongside the written transcript.
5. Tour Guide Written Posts
This last one is less of an actual post, and more of a way to come up with new post ideas and also take some of the pressure off yourself to write. Invite your guides to help contribute their own posts to the blog. This will vary the voice and subject matter, help readers get to know your tour guides and assist in spreading out the writing work amongst your team.
We recommend using the above post styles to fill in the gaps in your calendar to allow you time to focus on other more specialized posts. So we want to know, how do you keep your schedule full of quality content? Let us know in the comments!