Hostel Blogs

[Hostels]

Here is an example of one way that blogs can increase traffic. I can't post the best case studies at the moment, but here are two quick examples.

The first image below is a graph showing a site with almost no traffic. 3 blog posts later and it was passing 2500 page views per day. (blue = visitors, orange = pages viewed)

The second image shows a niche Web site that was getting about 350+ visits a day from search engines, that had a blog added to it. It almost immediately peaked at 4000 visitors per day (about 12,000 page views). This was also about 3 blog posts into the project. More quality blog posts = more traffic.

The red arrows show where the blog has increased traffic.

These examples are just from a few blog posts -- there really isn't a limit with what can be done...

The two major sources of traffic for hostel blogs are search engine traffic and from "Web 2.0" viral marketing and social media traffic.

Search engine traffic is long term and gets visitors who are directly looking for something that you are talking about on your Web site - like a specific event or activity in your region, or keywords relating to hostels in your city.

Social media traffic comes in shorter bursts, but the traffic numbers can be very high. If you are creative you can get visitors who may be interested in staying at your hostel in the future. This kind of traffic helps give visibility to your hostels name/brand so that people will recommend your hostel(s) and/or stay at them the next time they are in your city.

[Green Mango]

my apologies, I'm not so internet savvy, how could I start a hostel blog? Is this better than a hostel website or both the same?

pls email me at gh_realty@yahoo.com

or reply here...

Thanks!

Green Mango Inn, Manila, The Philippines

[aboriginalhostel]

Originally Posted by Green Mango

my apologies, I'm not so internet savvy, how could I start a hostel blog? Is this better than a hostel website or both the same?

pls email me at gh_realty@yahoo.com

or reply here...

Thanks!

Green Mango Inn, Manila, The Philippines

I think the easiest way is to register yourself on one of the blogging sites. There you get a website for your blogs what you can update any time, although I would keep it for news, comments, stories, etc. I suggest you still need a website where people can book, check your prices, pictures, location, your offers, etc. Also you can optimize it for your city keywords, hostel name, etc. So use both!

[Hostels]

Originally Posted by Green Mango

my apologies, I'm not so internet savvy, how could I start a hostel blog? Is this better than a hostel website or both the same?

There is some information on the Wiki page about hostel blogs.

You can get a free blog on http://wordpress.com/. Your blog would then be located at a URL like myhostel.wordpress.com.

If you have your own Web site you can put it at example.com/blog/ (where "example.com" would be replaced by your hostel's Web site). The advantage of putting the blog on your own Web site is that when someone links to an article on your blog, it increases the rankings of your main Web site in Google.

If I had a hostel I would make two blogs -- a highly-optimized main blog at the hostel's main site (example.com/blog/) that is designed to attract links, and a more casual blog at example.wordpress.com where staff could post about fun things that they were doing at the hostel. Similar to what aboriginalhostel mentioned above...

[Hostels]

I've added a couple more hostel blogs to HostelBlogs.com. If I've missed any blogs on that site, let me know and I'll add them. Non-English blogs are OK too.

[Scotch Argus]

I'm interested in putting a blog on my site, but I'm unsure of the best way to go abot it. My web hosting company has a facility included with my package that gives 10mb of space (too small?). I think if I use that the address of the blog would be http://blog.example.com rather that http://www.example.com/blog. They don't make it totally clear. Does this make any real difference. I'm only guessing again, but I think they might be using wordpress to lay it all out.

I guess my biggest issue is content. I don't really want it to be an online diary of my day to day life, I'd rather it be about the local area/ attractions/events etc. However I wonder if I'd have enough to post regularly. A lot of blogs I've seen seem to start out for a few weeks/ months with a flurry of activity, and then die down or die totally. If it's personal then that doesn't matter, but if it's linked to your business website then I think it can look unprofessional if it's not kept updated.

I quite like this one of a hostel also in Scotland - gives people ideas about the local area and outdoors - also shows the managements outdoor interests.
http://invergarry.blogspot.com/

[Hostels]

Originally Posted by Scotch Argus

... if I use that the address of the blog would be http://blog.example.com rather that http://www.example.com/blog. They don't make it totally clear. Does this make any real difference.

I think in the case of a hostel it's best to put the blog at example.com/blog/. The reason for that is because the ability of a website to rank well in search engines is partly a result of getting links from other websites. A blog can be used as a "link magnet" or viral marketing tool.

A subdomain (e.g,. blog.example.com) is often considered a different website in the eyes of Google. If your blog on a subdomain gets inbound links, those links may not help the rankings of your main site. If you put the blog in a subdirectory (folder), those inbound links will help your entire site rank better (e.g., example.com/blog/).

There aren't many good blogging packages for Microsoft IIS servers. If you have a Microsoft server one option would be to sign up for Blogger.com. Blogger lets you publish your blog posts to your own website. Blogger.com software isn't as good as blogging systems like WordPress or Drupal, but it works.

It's possible to run WordPress on Microsoft servers, but it's not ideal because of some limitations with Microsoft servers.

Originally Posted by Scotch Argus

I guess my biggest issue is content. I don't really want it to be an online diary of my day to day life, I'd rather it be about the local area/ attractions/events etc. However I wonder if I'd have enough to post regularly.

A hostel blog can be about anything. A blog doesn't even have to say "blog" on it -- it could say "Scotland Travel Guide" and you could modify the template to look like a travel guide rather than a typical "blog".

You don't have to post regularly in order to get traffic. I have a neglected tech blog that gets about 3000 visitors per day, mostly from Google.

Originally Posted by Scotch Argus

I quite like this one of a hostel also in Scotland - gives people ideas about the local area and outdoors - also shows the managements outdoor interests.
http://invergarry.blogspot.com/

That one is a Blogger.com blog. You could use the same blogging system and have it post to your domain name (example.com/blog/)...

If you go to Blogger.com and signup (or just sign-in if you have a Gmail account) you'll see something like the following screen with a link for advanced blog setup:



The screen after that gives you options to host the blog on your own domain by giving Blogger.com FTP access. If you go this route and would like help setting it up I could walk you through it over IM or Skype:

[Hostels]

Originally Posted by Scotch Argus

...I think they might be using wordpress to lay it all out.

I was just re-reading this page and saw that you mentioned Wordpress. The reason I was saying that it's more difficult to run Wordpress on Microsoft IIS servers is that IIS doesn't have something called mod_rewrite.

mod_rewrite allows you to have clean URLs -- so instead of blog URLs like example.com/blog/?p=123 you can have URLs like example.com/blog/category/post-title. Search engines prefer the latter type.

I just looked it up to see if the new version of WordPress has any new features for this problem and I found this page:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Per...ut_mod_rewrite
There are a few options there for getting clean URLs with WordPress on Microsoft IIS servers. It's more difficult than on Linux servers, but it's possible.

[Scotch Argus]

Thanks a lot for all that information - it has been very helpful and informative.

Due to the ability to use ftp publishing to my site, I decided to go with blogger. I found out after a while that to use ftp publishing you have to use old or classic blogger - one of the old templates, not the new blogger fancy templates. This means I have to do most of the tweaking myself in the HTML editing. But with a lot of searching, I finally got it looking something like I want it to. If you'd like to have a look it's at:
http://www.greatglenhostel.com/news/news.html
I haven't linked to it from the main part of the site yet as it's not ready totally - I just wanted to make sure that I could get it something like I want it.
There is still a small border around my header image that doesn't want to go - I got rid of most of it. It's days are numbered!

My idea is really to use it as a location for providing information about events in the local area that are coming up. Ideally I'd like to have a static landing page with pictures just stating what the page is about and have a list of local events sorted by date in the column entitled "local events". I'm not sure how to make the first page of the blog static yet - it seems to always just come up with the latest entry I make.

I'm sure I'll get there though -eventually.

[Hostels]

Looks great!

Let me know when it's "live" and I'll add your site to Hostel Blogs if you would like...