Encourage your visitors to blog about their experience to a huge online audience! Tourism BC offers an easy and free way for your visitors and locals with inside knowledge to blog about your community, destination or travel experience on its popular HelloBC website.

The HelloBC Blogs allow people who have had a great experience, adventure or holiday to tell their story and post a photo or video to tell the world.

This gives communities and tourism businesses in the Thompson Okanagan the potential to gain valuable word-of-mouth exposure to the more than seven million travel consumers who look at the HelloBC website each year.

To view all blogs on the HelloBC website, go to: www.hellobc.comBlogs. You can filter the hundreds of blog entries by Location (a Communities list), Activity and Media. To see blogs about visitors' travel experiences in your community, just select your community on the drop-down list at the left. If your community is not listed, choose a nearby community or type in your community name in the search bar on any page on the HelloBC website.

Hello BC blogs specific to your community can be displayed on your own community website through simple HTML code, which uploads a HelloBC blog widget onto your community website in the location you choose. Visit the following HelloBC page to see the sample designs and follow the instructions: www.hellobc.com/british-columbia/blog-widget.aspx. Tourism BC suggests that visitors or people in your community who are blogging on HelloBC should focus on the following:

• Make it experiential. Tell about something you, your family or friends did while visiting or exploring here.
• Make it unbiased.
• Tell about a great destination or event, even if the community isn't listed in the drop-down listing. Just choose the closest community on that list.
• Add photos and videos to make it visual. Visitors want to see what you experienced. Videos should be less than four minutes long. Upload the video to YouTube and then add the code to your blog entry.
• Make it conversational, short and sweet.

Communities and tourism businesses should promote the HelloBC blog link to their visitors and encourage their participation. Visitors who want to register to post a HelloBC blog, or those who have already registered and want to post additional blog entries, can go to: https://secure.www.hellobc.com/secure/log-in.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2fsecure%2fblog-entry-list.aspx#register-now.