Tourism Internet Marketing U

Setting up Your Podcast

Podcasts take planning and commitment but with the following tips, tools and techniques you will be able to establish a professional and informative podcast:

1. Decide on Content and Frequency

Decide weather you want to record audio reports that do not require constant updating or if you want to provide the latest information on your packages, destinations or services.

2. Develop the Format

The most basic and most successful format for any podcast is to first have a great opener that grabs the readers’ attention. Then provide the content. Always make sure the content is informative, relative and useful to the listener. And last, but not least, the close. Always close with a reference to your Web site, contact information and of course a call to action.

3. Gather Your Podcasting Equipment
 
• A laptop or desktop computer with an Internet connection and a sound card.
• A microphone.
• Audio recording software. There are lots of downloadable, free and paid, audio software programs online. Be sure to pick one that will satisfy all of your needs as some of the cheaper recording software does not offer many editing options while the more expensive ones allow you to edit the audio, enhance the sound quality and even add music.
• An MP3 encoder which will convert your audio into an MP3 file. For example iTunes can convert audio content to an MP3 file, or there are a number of popular free encoders online.

4. Recording Your Podcast

Once you have your content prepared, you will plug your microphone into your computer, start your audio recording software, and record your podcast. Always record your podcast in a quiet location. Save your podcast as an MP3 file. When naming your file, consider including your important keyword phrase, where appropriate, for search engine optimization purposes.

5. Publishing Your Podcast

Once you have finished recording and editing your podcast you can upload (or FTP) the file to your Web site host and make it available online.

Interested in learning more about Podcasting? Check out my new book, 101 Ways to Promote Your Tourism Business Web Site, there is a whole chapter dedicated to the subject!

Written by Susan Sweeney, CA, CSP, HoF

Planning Your Web Site: Streamlining Your Marketing

When you’re planning your travel and tourism web site, one of the goals that you should be taking into consideration is the ability to streamline your marketing efforts. Simply put, when you plan your real estate website well, you will find that:

• You are able to reach out to multiple target markets and to still provide the information they are looking for
• You are able to offer a larger variety of travel packages, knowing that each will appeal to a different group
• You are able to get more of your prospects visiting the site and finding the information they need in the process
• You are able to connect with your customers and prospects in a more effective, more interactive way

Therefore, when you are planning your travel and tourism web site, you’re going to want to be sure that you are looking at your options; you’re going to want to be sure that you are creating a “hub” where you will be able to keep your blog, gain addresses for your permission based marketing lists, to make sales and to spread the news about your business.

When you know that you will be able to streamline your marketing, when you’re able to connect with your target market more effectively, you’ll find that the time and effort that went into planning your web site will be well worth the effort.

Benefits of Mobile Marketing

The different mobile marketing applications provide a variety of benefits to the travel and tourism industry:

• Mobile marketing allows direct, personal communication in real time with the opportunity for immediate, direct response.
• By building a customer profile, you can be very targeted with your vacation packages, campaigns or offerings
• Brand awareness can be increased
• Messages can be sent through this medium very cost-efficiently
• Traffic to web sites can be increased
• Customer loyalty can be enhanced
• Sales can be increased when you provide the right vacation package at the right time to the right customer
• Interactivity - the target customer is engaged using this technology
• The number of potential customers you can reach with this medium is staggering. There are over 1.8 billion consumers with access to this technology
• Two way dialogue between marketer and target market allows one-on-one marketing
• Immediate impact
• Personalized messages get a much higher response rate than generic messages.
• Sponsored messages can be provided
• Messages are delivered instantaneously
• This medium makes it easy for people to spread the word quickly and easily.

With the increase in the number of 3G devices that are becoming more mainstream and the number of marketers becoming more savvy, the mobile marketplace is significant.

Great Content Doesn’t Just Market Your Business

When you are focused on including great content on your travel and tourism related web site, it’s important to be sure that you are thinking about the big picture. Simply put, when you are looking to create great content for your web site because you want to be sure that you are marketing the travel and tourism products and services that you have to offer, you don’t want to focus exclusively on your marketing message.

Creating great content, after all, is about more than making a sales pitch. When you want to create great content, you’re going to want to focus on:

• providing the information that your prospective and current customers are already looking for
• including information about your destination or a given travel or tourism package without making it look like your only goal is to sell the reader something
• finding out what information would benefit your site

Great content is not simply developed in one setting; on many levels, creating great content is all about looking at your options, talking with your current customers, asking questions with surveys and being willing to make changes or additions from time to time. When you want to be sure that you are creating effective content for your web site, you aren’t just going to want to make a sale, you’re going to want to be sure that you are showing your prospects and customers that you care about them and that you are looking at building relationships.

Focusing on relationship building an information is often more important than your marketing message; the more that you are able to provide the information that your prospects need and that you care about them, the more that your content will help you to grow your business.

My book, 101 Ways to Promote Your Tourism Business Web Site, has tons of information when it comes to building great content. It’s also now in its second edition! Get your copy today!

-Written by Susan Sweeney 

Blogs and Wikis: Avoid Classic Blog Mistakes

While blogs can be an easy way to communicate with your target audience, there are still many common mistakes that people make when taking on such an endeavor.

Underestimating the Time Commitment

One of the biggest mistakes people make when deciding to start a blog is under estimating the time commitment. While it’s convenient to know that blogs can be updated from anywhere, it is more important to know that they have to be updated.

Blogs should be updated at least three times per week, and you need to have the discipline to keep it current. That means at least three times per week you have to research your topic or put your thoughts into words in a way that is interesting to read and post them online.

Overestimating the Market Impact

The second biggest mistake people make when deciding to start a blog is overestimating the marketing impact. It takes time and effort to build an audience for a blog - again, when was the last time you bookmarked a blog and went back to it on a regular basis? And if you did - did it influence you to make a purchase?

Irregular or Infrequent Updating

Users must be able to anticipate when and how often updates to your blog will occur. People are busy and they do not have the time to keep checking your blog to see if it has been updated - always provide an RSS feed.

Your readers need to know that every day, or every two days or what ever the case may be, there is going to be a new post that they can read. Otherwise you will lose many of your readers. Pick a posting schedule and stick to it - a blog that isn’t updated regularly will simply be ignored.

Writing for the Search Engines and Not for the Blog

There is a growing tendency by many bloggers to write for the search engines rather than focusing on the needs of their “human” readers. Putting search engines first rather than putting your readers first will almost certainly lead to bad decisions that will make your blog less usable, even if it is optimized for search spiders.

While blogs can be a great way to speak to your target market and keep them up-to-date on all the latest news in your travel and tourism business products and services, you must determine if there is a more effective, time efficient way to communicate.

Still not sure of what to do when it comes to blogs? Why not pick up a copy of my book, 101 Ways to Promote Your Tourism Business Web Site? I know you’ll love it!

-Written by Susan Sweeney 

Great Topics for Travel and Tourism Blogs

Blogs are a great tool when it comes to marketing your travel and tourism web site and business; however, those who are using blogs to market their web sites sometimes get a little bit stuck on finding those things that they can write about that will get the job done.

Fortunately, there are a lot of great topics that can help you to get your blog up and running and to stay on top of fresh ideas that are relevant to your web site:

1. Request Google Alerts relating to your location, your destination, travel and tourism in general and other topics that are relevant to the products and services that you offer. By setting up a comprehensive alert, you can be sure that you know what others are blogging about and which web sites on the topics are getting the most attention. It can also light a spark that gets you thinking about something you’d like to write about.
2. Respond to questions that you’ve had from prospective clients or customers and elaborate on those answers.
3. Consider adding posts to your blog that are based on feedback that you’ve received from your clients and customers after they’ve taken the trip.
4. Create blog posts that help to generate more interest in a particular travel package or tourism destination that you’re trying to emphasize with your business.

The above are the best ways to come up with that flicker of motivation that will get you writing to your travel and tourism blog. Just be sure to also include links to your web site - links that take readers to the right landing pages so that they will be able to find the information they are looking for.

Looking for more advice and tips on blogging? Luckily for you, I’ve got a whole webinar devoted to it!

-Written by Susan Sweeney 

Really Simple Syndication: Benefits of RSS

The benefits of RSS are many:

1. You are guaranteed 100 percent delivery. Spam filters are not an issue. This means that your marketing and other messages to customers and potential customers are getting through.
2. You can quickly and easily get exposure on other sites that have the same target market you do by having your content published on those sites through content syndication.
3. Through your RSS feed opportunity, you can build your targeted database.
4. You can improve your search engine ranking through providing keyword rich content that is distributed to other sites with links back to your site.
5. You will increase targeted traffic to your site.
6. You will increase your brand awareness.
7. Through distribution of great content, you can establish yourself as a great resource.
8. You have a great potential to increase revenue through your use of RSS with the delivery of coupons, specials, and promotions with links back to your site.
9. You don’t have to worry about compliance with legislation, privacy policies, spam or age guidelines.
10. You will build trust, your reputation and credibility.
11. RSS feeds are significantly less work than maintaining and promoting through private mail lists. You don’t have to worry about cleaning lists, running your content through the spam checker or removing bad email addresses.
12. RSS is seeing significant click through rates.

For more on RSS feed and how helpful they can be, pick up a copy of my webinar that discusses not only RSS, but also blogs and wikis!

-Written by Susan Sweeney 

Effective Offline Promotions: Getting the Word Out

When you have a business that falls in the travel and tourism industry - whether you primarily offer travel packages, aid in helping business travelers to plan their trips or you are in charge of marketing a particular area- you’re going to find that getting the word out is important. More than that, you’ll find that there are offline promotions that can help to ensure that you are able to drive targeted traffic to your travel and tourism web site.

Think about it: do you send out direct mail campaigns? In most cases, the answer is going to be yes because direct mail is an effective promotional tool. When you’re already marketing your business, a product or a service, you can take advantage of the moment to direct recipients to your web site where they can learn more information.

Similarly, do you take out print ads in local newspapers or magazines? If so, shouldn’t you take the time to add a couple of extra lines of text to promote your web site where readers will be able to go to get more information, to learn about other deals that you have available or to learn more about your business.

Effective offline promotions can have a dramatic impact on the site traffic that your travel and tourism web site receives; by baiting your prospects - at least to some extent - you will find that you are in a position to draw traffic, which will allow you to do more to make the sale in the end.

For more information, pick up a copy of the new edition of 101 Ways to Promote Your Tourism Business Web Site!

-Written by Susan Sweeney 

Increasing Traffic Through Online Publications: Providing Articles and News Releases to Ezines

Besides advertising, a number of other marketing opportunities can be explored with ezines. Once you have found the ezines that cater to your target market, these ezines could be fruitful recipients for your news releases. You might be able to incorporate information on your travel and tourism organization, your destination or packages in an interesting article that would fit the editor’s guidelines.

There are many ezines looking for great content. If you can write articles for them that provide great content for their readers and at the same time provide a little exposure for your travel and tourism organization, it’s a real win-win situation. You’ll want to target those ezines that have the same target market you do and have a broad subscriber base. You’ll want to make sure the ezine includes a resource box at the end of the article crediting you as the author and providing a hyperlink to your web site or your email address. Having articles published enhances your reputation as an expert, and people like to do business with people who are experts in their field. You might see if you can be a contributing editor or have a regular column or feature in their ezine.

Besides sending your articles directly to targeted ezines, you can also submit them to article banks online. Article banks are online resource sites for ezine publishers. Ezine publishers search through the banks for appropriate articles for their ezine, and, if they use one, they include the resource box for the author.

Still want to learn more? I’ve got a fantastic webinar, all about Online Publications and Ezines! Take a look!

-Written by Susan Sweeney 

Great Content: Knowing What to Write

One of the things that you’ll discover - both when you are initially planning your travel and tourism web site and when you are looking into the options that you have for expanding your site - is that having great content is essential. While the content that you use in your site is going to include images, text, video, possible sound and a combination of elements, one of the biggest things that many in your position find is that it’s hard to know what to write (or what to focus on in terms of images or audio content for that matter).

So how do you decide what to write when you’re looking to add great content to your travel and tourism web site?

First, look at the pages on your web site - or on your competitor’s web sites - that get the most page views; that’s going to give you a sense of what your prospects and customers want, and that will help you to determine what you should be giving them more of. Then, look at your blog and focus on addressing questions raised in your most frequently viewed posts. Stop in on forums, look at other blogs focused on your destination and you’ll be able to start sorting out what information can be expanded - what information will make great content for your web site.

Why settle for just adding text (or other content) to your web site when you can make an effort to add great content? Why focus on just getting the word out when you can be sure that you are able to provide the content that your prospects and customers alike are looking for? After all, great content isn’t just about making sales or getting site visitors; providing great content is about being there and forming relationships.

Still wondering about what makes great content? Check out my book, 101 Ways to Promote Your Tourism Business Web Site!

-Written by Susan Sweeney