We have been focusing on our blog in recent years. In 2020, we posted 28 blogs, and in 2021, 25 blogs. Our goal for 2022 was to post at least one blog per week so we would double what we had been doing by the end of the year. We held planning session in January and mapped out what and when we were going to post with flexibility for a variety of things throughout the year. We have posted 44 to date and have four more scheduled for the year. We wrote several features in this year’s visitor guide and used those 12 features as blogs to begin our schedule since this content was already created. With some of them, we pulled in additional photos and added a few things to beef it up. This helped us maintain consistency between our blog, website, and visitor guide. We also have a local company that writes one blog per month for us. Then, we fill in the rest of the weeks with blogs about festivals and events, new development in the county, new initiatives at the bureau, etc.
Check it out at https://www.homegrowngreat.com/blog/. We tried to also get away from the “typical” attraction/event blogs with topics like Crazy Plant People, Get Crafty and Photo Fun.
We are happy with the positive response we’ve received so far on our blog. We are consistently getting feedback from people who saw and enjoyed reading the blog. We are continuing to build better relationships with the businesses, attractions, and partners that we feature on the blog. So far this year on Facebook, we have reached over 32,400 people with our blog, and we have seen 2,945 engagements and 73 shares. In addition, we feel it is extremely beneficial and efficient to utilize content we are already creating for other products or initiatives because it helps us maintain consistency across our website, social media, and print products.