The following excerpt is from Top 10 SmartCollegeVisit Blog Posts on SmartCollegeVisit.com.
In the three-plus months we've been creating content on the topic of college visits for you to read here on SmartCollegeVisit, it's been a pleasure to draw attention to some of the exceptional opportunities and people we've found involved with the colleges and universities we've been fortunate enough to get to know.
It's not exactly a news flash that people are full of surprises, but when my HARO query for the Smart See, Smart Do column on SmartCollegeVisit targeting colleges and universities asking for input about what not to miss during a campus visit resulted in responses from people other than admissions and public relations officers, I admit the "other responders" surprised me. In addition to responses from my target response group, I also received responses from tourism departments, alumni and community citizens.
Tourism Departments and Visitor Bureaus
As I read through the emails from these other responders, I realized how fortunate are the schools who work closely with their city or state tourism office. By working together, the school gains a powerful ambassador of good will, often with access to resources outside the realm of traditional college PR.
Alumni
There's nothing more heart-warming than to read a response from a school's alum sharing his or her opinion on what prospective students should see or do when they visit campus. This opens up a whole new aspect to college visit promotions. The information comes from someone who has "been there, done that," loved it, and hopes you will, too.
Community Citizens
It really speaks volumes about a place when someone not associated with a school is moved to voice an opinion about what should not be missed on a visit to campus. Knowing that people outside the college environment also love the campus and live in the college town or city adds value to the overall package represented by the school.
What all of this shows me as a content creator, web site developer, marketer, and founder of a startup to promote college visits, is that if I'm to provide a valuable service to college-bound students and their families, that even I need look beyond the traditional college PR channels so I don't overlook the extended community that helps make the college visit experience the best it can be.
SmartCollegeVisit launched November 9, 2009.
The post Top Content by Top Content Creators for Handshake 2.0 lists the titles and authors of articles published in 2009 that attracted the most visitors to the site. It's exciting to see that several of the posts I wrote made the Top 10 list for the year.
Knowing this fuels my confidence as a writer and as a content creator. It makes me think that if I can create good content for Handshake 2.0, then I can do so for my own business, SmartCollegeVisit.
My writing experiences over the past year have taught me that writing just to be writing (which was the reason I launched my very first blog years ago) is just blogging. Later I figured out that creating content means blogging with a purpose. To me this means delivering useful, or perhaps insightful, information in a way that tells a compelling story.
In the month that SmartCollegeVisit has been live, I've worked to deliver content in a variety of formats ranging from the retelling of parents' stories about visiting colleges with their children to showcasing a single interesting place unique to a particular school. The post with the highest traffic thus far is Student Panel Highlight of Radford Open House. We'll have to wait 11 months to see if it holds on to its First Place title.
