How to Blog - O'Rourke Interview with Juli Lederhaus about Hotel Blogs

http://blog.orourkehospitality.com/ Tom ORourke interviews Juli Lederhaus, General Manager of the historic Hawthorne Hotel in Salem, Massachusetts about how blogging has affected her hotel business. Juli is a pioneer in blogging and has written a post every day since 1995. Considering the many benefits of blogging, we expected that the majority of hotels would have a blog, however our research this month revealed that 95.7% of First Class and Luxury New England Hotels dont write blogs!

Tom asked Juli what inspired her to start writing a blog and she replied, "Ever since the internet came around I always wanted to have a way to talk to our guests directly. The whole HTML thing was so complicated so I was looking for a way to do that and I went to a seminar and thought this is exactly what I need. So I came back to the hotel that day and I set up our blog and Ive been blogging every single day havent missed a day in over 4 years!"

We were also interested in finding out what kind of an impact blogging had on her business and she emphasized connections and new bookings, "It connects us to our guests in many different ways. It connects us to groups, it connects us to regular guests who follow us on our blogs and read it every day."

"In addition to our daily blog, we also do a wedding blog. Our brides and grooms are thrilled when we ask if they want to be on our blog. They are all about it. It actually has resulted in us booking weddings, many weddings, because people go there and they see different peoples ideas, they see the letters of recommendation, they see pictures, people really enjoy it," says Juli.

Finally we wanted to know if she found blogging difficult or time consuming, and this was her response, "Writing a blog post is no more difficult than writing an email. I spend between 15 to 20 minutes on the blog every day. I think that finding 15 to 20 minutes that has a direct result in a connection with our guests is an important thing."

For more information on blogging and Hotel Internet Marketing, visit our website http://www.orourkehospitality.com or call us at 978-465-5955.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• How to set up a blog
• Hotel Internet Marketing
• Hotel Blogs
• Hawthorne Hotel
• Juli Lederhaus
• Blogs
• Blogging
• Social Media
• ORourke Interviews
• Tom ORourke