What is the point of blogging?

The time has come to investigate the actual benefits of all that time put into blogging.

I must admit, I have been entirely remiss in my absence of blogging activity recently. Mainly because we are incredibly busy building the best adventure travel site in the world. Still I'm turning over a new leaf and am determined to make sure my blogging activity delivers a positive return.

What have we gained from writing this moderately successful blog?

• A tiny amount of SEO juice
• Free passes to several expensive industry conferences (the joys of the bloggers pass)
• Introductions to contacts within the industry (although arguably twitter is more productive to this end - probably the two in unison is best)
• Provided a personality perspective to people who have come to the main Tourdust site and clicked on the blog

I'm fairly sure we've not gained any customers who have found the blog first and then gone on to buy a holiday on Tourdust. This is because we've written a fairly mixed bag of content covering

• Opinion on business, ecommerce and the industry
• Reporting from events (you know, those events we got the free passes too)
• Occasional product related news from Tourdust

So we've decided to be a little more structured about how we go on with this whole game. From now on we are making a concerted effort to blog about adventure travel and cultural travel over at the new Tourdust blog. Please take a look, I think it looks stunning and I'm really proud of James (our developer superstar) for the integration of the blog through the site. e.g. take a look at http://www.tourdust.com/products/europe/france to see it in action. Basically we can bubble up blog posts onto any specific page or combination of pages on the site, making sure we are only ever suggesting relevant blog posts to users as they browse the main site. If you want to know what we'll be writing about in the new Tourdust blog, read this.

Over here at the trailbeater, I intend to keep on blogging. My main objective will be to write about the art of marketing and selling specialist travel experiences, but will probably stretch to cover more general ecommerce and travel topics.

Please add the new Tourdust blog to your reader at http://www.tourdust.com/blog/posts.rss