The Return Of The Blog

Use it as part of your overall web strategy

By Andrew Townsend

Your camp almost certainly has a blog. But when was the last time it was updated? What type of content are you posting and how often? For years, blogs have languished as an afterthought as busy camp directors focused on video content, mobile-responsive websites, and social media. But blogs are back! And they are an important part of a camp’s overall web strategy.

Illustration: © Can Stock Photo / greyj

There is a wide range of technical reasons why blogging—done well—helps to positively affect a website’s relevance to important search engines. For the sake of this article, let’s assume you accept that a blog is worth the time and energy.

Camps have a story to tell, and camp people tend to be good storytellers. Many brands struggle to tell a warm, engaging story. Whatever great new widget they design might be popular and sell like hotcakes, but few consumers will really care about how it was invented, or which overseas factory made it. But your brand has a place, a history, people, and, very likely, an amazing amount of goodwill in the community. These are the pillars of good storytelling.

Among your customers are some fiercely-loyal brand ambassadors. You already know this and probably leverage this loyalty in many ways. The reality is the number of unique page views (the number of readers) your blog attracts is largely irrelevant. But good blog content is easy to share, and your camp evangelists will share it.

Search engines want updated content. They favor this content in the mystical algorithm that ranks search results. A blog is the easiest way to show search engines that you have fresh content. It’s hard to change the main information pages of a website. People get used to the flow of the main site, and constant changes are detrimental. But a blog can be updated as often as you like.

Most camp directors are aware of these reasons at some level. The reasons that blogs typically are not updated are because they seem difficult and time-consuming, but they’re really not.

Begin By Answering Questions

First, make a blog calendar. You or your team (if you have one) need to sit down and make a calendar. Start by posting once every two weeks. That’s only 26 articles each year. Brainstorm topics. Ask questions like, “What interesting question did we receive from a camp family this week?” Maybe it was to do with getting to camp, or whether you offer tours during the off-season, or if you allow campers to keep their phones at camp. These questions become blog posts:

• Traveling to camp—five tips to make the journey part of the adventure

• Six things you’ll see on your next camp tour

• How your teen will benefit from two weeks without a phone

You already have answers for these questions; now you can just publish them.

Consult Your Calendar

Consider your calendar to see what holidays or special occasions are covered. This leads to more blog posts:

• Top 10 Valentine’s Day movies to watch as a family

• Your guide to local Easter Egg hunts

• Give the gift of camp this holiday season

If you really can’t come up with 26 blog post titles on your own, use Google. Enter any search term related to “summer camp,” and browse the results.

Be Confident

So, you have a calendar of 26 blog post titles. Now what?

You need absolutely no credibility or journalistic training to write a blog post. This was a lesson I had to learn early on. You don’t have to have any credentials to make a list of your favorite camp-themed movies, or to share how to make a lanyard. Just crank out 500 to 800 words on the topic. If you really can’t do this, search for someone who can. Blogging works best when it’s relevant, local, and sincere, but any of the freelance sites, such as Fiverr.com, will produce content at a low cost. Even better—put out a call to camp families asking for help in creating content. I don’t want to minimize the time and effort it takes to write content. It’s easy for some and truly difficult for others. But you create content multiple times every day. You write emails, post to Facebook, update your Instagram. You are already a content creator; this is just redirecting that creativity.

Here are a few good tips in creating effective blog posts:

• Write for your audience, which is composed of camp folks: parents, campers, staff, alumni, donors, volunteers, board members, etc. What they have in common is they like your camp. A good blog post tells the audience a story about your camp. A great blog post makes those people realize that camp has things to offer in other aspects of their lives. For example, a good blog post might describe the end-of-day routine at camp. Readers will be interested in what time kids go to bed, or the traditional song you sing, or how counselors ensure that campers brush their teeth. A great blog post will connect bedtime routines at camp with how parents can implement similar routines at home. The great posts do take some experience and confidence to make these connections. But a good post is just a story. Start with that.

• In simple language, craft a solid introduction. You have only a few seconds to make someone want to read further. Here are the opening sentences to our most-read blog post:

“This past season, there was a new camper who had never done chores at home before. When the cabin counselor handed her a broom and asked her to sweep under the bunks as much as possible, she actually smiled. By the end of the camp session, the counselor said that, of her entire group, that camper was the most enthusiastic about chores.”

The blog post was about making a chore wheel to use at home, but the opening lines told a story and made people want to keep reading. All camp directors can tell a story like this.

• The internet loves lists. Top Ten, Six Best, Seven Tips for X, etc. You are not delivering this information under oath. You can make up any list you like. Don’t claim it’s scientific or true; just publish a list.

• Include links to your own website in the blog. For example, a blog on “Five favorite summer-camp breakfast cereals” can have a link to your page on food and nutrition.

• Include some key search terms in the post, but do not overdo it. Search terms (or keywords) are the words people enter into a search engine when they want information. For example, a common, broad search term for summer camp is “great summer camps.” So you might include that phrase in your post. For example, “Here at Camp XYZ and at other great summer camps, you can always find a good selection of activities.” It takes some work to figure out effective search terms to include, but some are pretty obvious and worth including occasionally.

• Post engaging images as part of a blog. Another great asset of almost all summer camps is good imagery. Use it, but make sure you have a complete release for any identifiable people in the photos. If a release is not part of your standard registration terms and conditions, it probably should be.

Finally, how and where are you going to post this content? If you use Wordpress, originally designed as a blogging format, it is perfect for your new blog. Other website frameworks will have different set-up requirements. Whoever updates the website should be able to easily add this content. The key is to make sure it is internal to your site. In other words, you don’t want a generic blog address, such as blogger.campxyz.com. You want campxyz.com/blog. This will make sure that any traffic directed to your site can then easily navigate deeper into the site as the content is read.

Now, all you have to do is hold yourself and your team accountable and gather content. Make sure to have a season’s worth of posts written by April, so you can continue to post all summer.

A long-term goal can be to start providing content to other blogs, websites, and publications. This provides an opportunity to insert links to your own site that will appear on the other sites. These backlinks (links back to your site) are invaluable in terms of search-engine optimization. It may seem a stretch to think you could ever write content for someone else. But, if you get into the habit of creating content, maybe a well-known industry publication will send out an email looking for articles, and you might reply, “I could write an article about creating summer-camp blogs if you are interested.” The response might be, “Sure, how about 1,200 words?” You submit an article, and suddenly there it is on the internet with your name and a link to your website.

Andrew Townsend is the Director of Kennolyn Camps, based in Santa Cruz, Calif. Reach him at kennolyncamps.com.