Why you should start a blog for your business

Welcome to the Boosie Podcast. My name is Mark Simpson and I've got something special for you today. So recently I was invited by Hostfully to come and do a special webinar for them and we talked about direct bookings. We went for a good hour, it was really good. And I reached out to them afterwards and saying, could I please have a copy of that? I would love to turn that hour into a couple of short episodes of the Bruce Lee podcast. And you know, I know a Hostfully well. And they said yes. So I have got a little segment of our chat to share with you now. What I love about it is that Hostfully are also sponsoring this episode. So if you're wondering who is Hostfully, then they are one that you should get on your radar. They are the market leaders for the online digital guidebooks. Please, in 2021 get a digital guidebook. The cool thing is this is free. So F R E E. We know you love the free stuff. So go to hostfully.com go get your free digital guidebook. If you ever want to upgrade and get more digital guidebooks then you do have to pay. But it's a very low cost and if you put in Boostly 2M, you'll even get a little discount which is exclusive to team Boostly people. They also do PMS software, property management software. So if you're looking to change and you want to get a good one, they are one of the best multiple award winners. Our website that we create at Boostly links straight into Hostfully. It's fantastic. We love it, it's fun, it's really easy to use, really easy to set up and your guests will love it too. So please do go check them out and do mention that you came from Boostly because they will look you for that. So let's get on with it. You're going to go straight in and.

What we're going to talk about today.

Will be something very much direct booking related. The next person that you will see will be myself. You'll have David Jacoby and you'll have Brad from Hostfully. So let's get on with the show.

There's a really clever guy in this industry called Alan Egan. He had a company called Vacation Suit but I think he's stopped doing that now to build houses in Denmark. Last time I checked in with him it was busy. Loving that life. But he described this really well, is that every website should be sticky. So what that means is that if you really want to be seen on Google, if you really want the Search engines to pay attention to you. And this, this works not just on Google, it works on everything. So Facebook, Airbnb, booking.com, vRBO, Instagram, LinkedIn, you know, whatever platform, YouTube. The way it works is that the longer you can get a user, let's say your future potential guest, as Danny from Optimize My BNB likes to call it Future Potential Guest fpg. The longer you can get an FPGA future guest to stick around on your listing or on your website for longer, then the more you will get rewarded in the long run. And the best way to do that, the simplest way to do that, is to write content that your future potential guests will want to see and stick around. A blog is a great way of doing it. Now, you've got to weigh the pros and the cons. It is very time consuming to sit down and write a blog. A lot of people who are watching this can't even write a social media post because they go, I don't have the time. I don't have the time. I literally, I'm spinning all the plates. I don't have a time. And I get it, you know, Busy hospitality owner. I had two kids.

I've now got three kids.

I went one one more deep, doing literally all of the things, working with my parents, working with my wife. So awful combination. I don't recommend it, having the kids doing all of the things, Loads of staff members and all of that. But, yeah, I still managed to find the time to put a blog together. I mean, it was shocking. My writing is terrible, but I did it. And I did it enough that I got over the initial annoyance of it. And it's just like anything, if you do something consistently on a repeated basis, it doesn't become a pain.

I'm trying so hard not to swear.

I'm really trying. A pain in the bum. It doesn't become a pain in the bum. It just becomes a routine. It just becomes like brushing your teeth and you've got to stick at it consistently. I think, what is it like, 362 or 80 days consistently? If you do something consistently, actually becomes a routine and you will be rewarded. Now, if that sounds like an absolute torture to you and you don't want to do it, the best thing to do is outsource. There are amazing writers and the way the world is now, it's so easy to find a content writer to do blog work for you. They don't have to be writing every day. They can be doing it once a week or once A month. And again you can pay dollars, you know, not a lot, not a lot of dollars. You can pretty much pay under $20 for it for a pretty well put together blog. Now the there's other ways to make your website sticky. Number one, have a virtual tour. So a virtual tour, if anybody doesn't know what that is, you know, when you go on Google street map and you can literally follow your street down and you can spy on the neighbors and all of those sort of things, that is a virtual tour and you can get them for your properties. And I think that virtual tours are really, really, really good. Especially if you have got a property that's kind of unusual or if your customer avatar is families. Because when they're going to spend maybe 1,000 or €2,000 or pounds or dollars on a, on a week or two weeks day to come and stay with you and say they've got their family and they're bringing in another family and another family, they need to know layouts, you know, because they've got to make sure that Auntie Susan's not sleeping next to the other auntie that she doesn't like, you know, and all those sort of things. So virtual tour is really handy for that because they can literally walk around your property on their self on the sofa while they're watching Disney plus So and again, if you think about it, you sit your virtual tour on your website. Now when they come onto it, you can literally lose yourself on a virtual tour for 5, 10, 15 minutes. And that still is the equivalent of someone sticking around on your websites. Now the if you compare that to a blog, you're never going to get someone sticking around reading a blog for like more than three minutes on average. You know, you'll have someone maybe a minute max, two minutes on your website before they bounce or leave or do something else. So you just got to try and figure out what you would like to have on your site. Blogging is a expense wise is about here. Virtual tour, they can get quite expensive unless you want to go out and get the kit and do it yourself. So you just got to try and weigh it all up. The most important thing that I think everybody should be doing is that you should be posting something every single day online. Now that may again sound daunting, but it really isn't. Even if it's just a post, a story or just doing something consistently every single day, you will stay top of mind because every single one of you, you are an ambassador of your local area. There are some fantastic examples out There on the land of Instagram and Facebook who are doing it really well, hosted, do it really well talking about the local area, places that they like to go, places like, like to see. Because again, at the end of the day, if you can get someone to keep coming back and checking in with you on a daily basis, you're making your account sticky. And again, you will be rewarded in the algorithms. But most importantly, you're staying top of mind. So right now everybody is planning. So they're planning on where they want to go, planning on where they can travel to. You know, they're sort of doing the things because even, even though the world is starting to open up again, there's still so many people who are waiting for maybe vaccines, waiting for the nod from whoever, waiting for the nod for to go and actually make that booking and go do the traveling. And those of you that are sitting on your hands and doing nothing can just being reactive and just waiting for the, for the email to ping to say you got a booking, then it's going to take a lot longer for you to get those bookings compared to everybody else who's using this time to be super proactive, posting about the day to day of the business, posting about things to do or what you're looking forward to doing in the area. And you do that consistently every day and you'll be top of mind. And then when you get the green light and people are confident to travel, you, you post that you're taking availability, then your inbox and your bookings will be just so much more active than those that are being reactive. So whether it's a blog, social media post, whatever you do, just do something consistently and daily and you will get reap the rewards.