“Beautiful wood floors, great breakfast, clean rooms,” proclaims this TripAdvisor review headline. “We chose this hotel as our base of operations for our stay in Aguas Calientes,” the review continues. “The hotel premises are modern and clean. Almost felt like we should be in Thailand as opposed to Peru… Breakfast included scrambled eggs cooked to order, cold meats and cheeses, various pastries, juices, cereal, etc. Nice! The staff was friendly. Their English adequate to very good…Compared to other hotels in Aguas Calientes, I would go back to this one in a heartbeat.”

1,662 people read this review between August 2014 and May 2015. It’s my most popular TripAdvisor review.

In the 11 months I’ve been writing reviews, over 18,000 (eighteen THOUSAND!!!!) different readers have scanned or read at least one of the 50 reviews I’ve posted. That’s THOUSANDS more than have read this Weekly Sales Thought column during that time.

I am far more widely read and, perhaps, better known as a reviewer of restaurants and hotels than I am as a writer about sales and marketing.

My reaction, when I read the readership numbers was … incredulous.

I’m getting more readers by casually writing 100 words after nice meal experiences than I’m getting ‘slaving over the hot keyboard” in my consulting business. S E R I O U S L Y ????

What do I have to do to get THAT kind of readership for the stuff that I do professionally?

It turns out that there are many reasons why more people read meal reviews than Weekly Sales Thoughts. Trip Advisor is a popular site, a magnet. The potential audience is millions, globally. I’m writing about one of the hottest topics on the planet – food! I generally write engaging, entertaining reviews (‘though the hotel review above is more “useful” than “entertaining”).

So, from the perspective that “Social selling is here to say” and “content is king,” we (Royal “we”) need to learn that the job is to attract people to us through the content we write or share, however we can do that. First attract…then engage…then qualify….then sell…. rather than chase, chase, chase, chase.

From Trip Advisor we learn: Post on sites that attract people. Choose topics that our target readers find interesting. Be entertaining. Be useful. Show up frequently.

If the bait happens to be restaurant reviews vs. discussions about our particular businesses….. that may not be what we wanted… it may not be what we anticipated… and if it attracts attention from the people whose attention we want to attract, I’m thinking, “we’ll keep writing reviews!”