“Resources for Promoting Your Work”
Summer is here, and travelers are on the move searching for advice and information. We can help, but only if they find us.
The BATW website seems to be a place that travelers are coming for leads. The counter installed on BATW.org in March has recorded more than 97,000 reads by 29,954 visitors in the last four months with 394 visitors on just the 1st of June. Less than half the visitors are U.S., with The Netherlands, Russia, Germany, France, China, India, Ukraine, UK and Romania also in the top-10 country list for visitors (in that order). Referrals are coming to BATW.org from Google, Facebook, and also from the Chinese and Russian equivalents of Google, Baidu and Site/ru, respectively. BATW seems to be a good way for members’ content to be “found.”
BATW Website (BATW.org): There are several ways to get “found” by readers at the BATW website: namely,
1) the “Members” tab with links to your personal website (doublecheck that the link to your material is correct; if not, notify the Webmaster, John Sundsmo, via email [email protected]);
2) under Blog&News/Member News with your news posts from the monthly website update (guidelines for submitting member news for the monthly website update are in the “Members Only” part of the website; send your news to BATW.org Managing Editor Carolyn Koenig; [email protected]); and
3) under Blog&News/Article Links. “Article Links” is the least utilized and easiest way BATW can help your material be found. All you have to do is send a link to your article to BATW Webmaster (John Sundsmo; [email protected]), and he does the rest. Terms and conditions: the article must have been published within the last 18 months; only one article at a time is allowed for each member; print publications are allowed if there is a link that allows online viewing.
BATW March Meeting: If you attended Lee Foster’s excellent BATW March meeting, then you are already aware of the need to re-evaluate your old website. If not, Lee has graciously summarized the meeting on his website www.fostertravel.com at http://bit.ly/2HPoVk0. The article “Does Your Travel Journalism WordPress Website Need a Refresh in 2018?” includes Lee’s verbal summary of his PowerPoint (and the downloadable Powerpoint itself), plus a YouTube video from presenter Jeffrey Samorano. Presenters Lee Daley/John Sundsmo also contributed their downloadable PowerPoint to the summary.
BATW June Meeting: Thanks go to Judith Horstman, who has posted a synopsis of her June meeting presentation entitled “Shameless Self Promotion” in the Members Only part of the BATW website; see under the tab “Forums/Professional Forum.”
BATW July Meeting: Following on the theme of Judith’s fine June meeting, the July meeting focused on the increasing needs to use social media, photographs and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in your article postings. Those are now needed for both shameless promotional purposes and also to improve your chances of being “found” by search engines like Google and Baidu. Presenters were Lee Daley, Carole Terwilliger Meyers and John Sundsmo. See Bob Bone’s recap of this recent meeting here.
-Lee Daley/John Sundsmo