Promote your tourism business on TripAdvisor

In Australia and USA, TripAdvisor is possibly the best known online reputation checker. For those who do not know, TripAdvisor is an Internet site that allows anyone to comment about their experience at any tourism/hospitality related business.

I am asked every other day for a step by step guide to TripAdvisor. As I did not seem to find a 101 Guide to TripAdvisor guide for tourism business owners, I thought I would fill the information gap!

image credit Steve Crane

Every established web surfers will check what is being said on TripAdvisor about the property he is about to book. Some even first start their search on the TripAdvisor site. What is fantastic (for those businesses who have a reputation management strategy in place) is that it can work as your best ally in terms of promoting your business. TripAdvisor has got such a strong online presence that your property’s page on the site will appear on the first pages of Google when your business name is keyed in the search field. Even before your own website sometimes (yep!)

TripAdvisor negative reviews : why you should be aware

image credit this is your brain on lithium

TripAdvisor can also kill your best marketing efforts - that is, if you have not yet tackled the challenge of online marketing or have chosen to stay “passive”. Why? Well, because anyone can say anything about anyone (aka: YOU) on the Internet (this is formally known as User Generated Content). Let me give you an example:

I was conducting an online marketing training session the other day with tourism operators. Part of the workshop included the review of what potential guests might have said about their experience at your (accommodation) property on www.TripAdvisor.com. You should have seen the facial expression of a member of the audience, aka the accommodation property owner, when she realised that a past client has written an extremely negative review about her business.

If you are a tourism business for instance and decided to stay passive and not tackle the online world just yet, you are not simply staying in passive mode but doing your business some damage. People are most probably writing about you somewhere on the net. If not on TripAdvisor, probably somewhere else.

How can I take advantage of TripAdvisor to promote my business?

1. First of all, you need to get listed on TripAdvisor. You can get listed as an accommodation provider, an attraction, a restaurant or a resource such as transport provider, information centre. You will be able to write a short review about your property, add a photo as well. Now, you have done the easiest bit. (if this is too complicated or you are starting to pull your hair out, drop me a line I just love to do all this stuff!). But how to get client reviews??
2. How about about you ask each and every one of your client to visit TripAdvisor (make it easy for them, send them an email with the link to your property - just my 5 cents). If they have had a great experience, I am certain that they will be willing to help you out with your strategy a little. They can even upload their photos you know. If you would like more insight about this, contact me and I will give you a great little story!
3. Next thing you can do is pull the testimonials of TripAdvisor straight into the homepage of your website so that any potential client can read about how much fun past clients had at your proterty! This is done using RSS feeds. This is how you add your trip advisor reviews to your website.

What will I do if someone writes a negative review on TripAdisor about my property?

1. DO NOT STAY PASSIVE! Act! Respond to people’s reviews, and say your side of the story, and what you tried to do to fix the problem.
2. You can also contact the unsatisfied client and offer them a free night at your property for instance. The end goal is for other TripAdvisor readers to see that you are aware of this unfortunate exception and that you are reacting. This is a very old term used in hospitality and called Service Recovery. You have most probably be doing so in the offline world. Now it is just time to realise that there are many more people reading and hearing about you online!

Most searchers limit their quest to first page of results

The latest study from Jupiter Research found that most searchers limit themselves to the first page of results. Meanwhile, the number of searchers that are willing to venture beyond that page, to either the second or third search engine results page has declined again.

Only 17% of searchers head to the second page–and only 7% will venture to the third page.

Why do searchers stay on the first page?

shorter attention span? The Sesame Street factor?

better search results?

How many pages deep do you search?

What page do your search results appear on?

Online booking continues shift to supplier Web sites

According to another comScore report, supplier websites account for 72 percent of online hotel spend as of first quarter 2008, a 3-percentage point increase in dollar share from the previous year. Hotel market share through online travel agency sites (e.g. Expedia and Orbitz) is now down to 28 percent, 3-percentage points down from a year ago.

This trend continues to underscore the importance of every travel related service to provide the option to check availability and continue to the booking, including processing payments from within their own web site.

Marketing

If you read the companion article to this one, the Top Ten Mistakes in Dive Store Website Design, you know that there are a lot of ways in which otherwise good dive store websites can go wrong. And, while it is easy to criticize, what’s more important is to show how to do things right. That’s why we have this article.

Truly effective dive store websites share a number of features in common. If you can learn what these features are, then incorporate them into your store’s website, chances are you’ll increase sales and profits.

How This Article Works

In the pages that follow, we describe a number of features effective dive store websites share. Each of these pages will contain one or more links to a dive store website where you can see actual examples of what we describe. (These links open in a separate window, which you can close when done.)

There are a number of good dive store websites we could have used to illustrate each of the points in this article. The catch is, because these are good websites, they are constantly being changed and updated. That put us at risk of linking you to pages which might no longer contain what it was we wanted you to see.

To solve this problem, we created a complete — but entirely fictional — website for a dive store that doesn’t exist. We call this store Spring Country Dive Adventures, and located it in the town of Gainesville, Florida. The website is real; only the store is phony.

To make our website seem as real as possible, we pretended our phony dive store certifies through PADI and is a dealer for AquaLung, SeaQuest, Suunto, Dive Rite, Atomic and Henderson. The principles we cover, however, will work for almost any dive store, regardless of training agency affiliation or product line.

You may want to spend some time poking around the Spring Country Dive Adventures website, just as though it belonged to a real store. You may find a number of ideas worth taking advantage of — ideas that go beyond just website design.

Read whole article here...

Show off your favorite blogs with a Blog List

Blogger: Dashboard

June 5, 2008 — permalink

Today we’re releasing a new page element for Layouts blogs: Blog List. The Blog List improves on our Link List page element by using blogs’ RSS and Atom feeds to show update times, post titles, and snippets.

Use a Blog List to put a blogroll in your sidebar, or make a few to categorize the blogs you read. The Blog List works well for any page that has an RSS or Atom feed, so you can get creative: link to news sites, podcasts, Twitter streams, search results, or anything else with a feed.

Here’s a quick summary of the features that a Blog List gives you:

• Link to blogs, web pages, and feeds from your blog’s sidebar, with an optional favicon
  
• For pages with RSS and Atom feeds, Blog List can show last updated time, post title, and a snippet of the latest post
  
• Sort links alphabetically or by last update time
• Show all links, or hide some behind a “show all” link
  
• Import subscriptions from Google Reader
  
• Blog List links are visible to search engine crawlers, so your blog’s PageRank and reputation flow to those you link to
  

Blogger: Dashboard

Channel Managers, the future....

With all the internet booking going on nowadays, you'd be silly not to be considering site like Expedia and Travelocity as a way to sell your tourism product. In fact there are now literally hundreds of booking engines online, and if you, like me have tried to manage all these sites, you'll realise that it is damn near impossible to do by hand. You end up spending hours of each day just trying to upload the booking sheets to keep every engine up to date.

Well if you haven't yet found it yet, there is a solution custom made for this problem called a Channel Manager. These systems are basically a central engine that you keep up to date and in turn it send the update to all the others automatically. Thereby saving you a LOAD of time.

Here are a couple of the ones on offer:

HBSi's Demand Gateway^TM channel management platform connects hotel companies and distribution partners, enabling them to transmit room availability, rates, and bookings data instantaneously. This eliminates time-consuming, error-prone manual processes that disrupt the flow of commerce. As a result, both sides enhance their revenue potential.

ChannelRUSH is a web-based application that helps hoteliers manage Internet revenue channels such as OneTravel.com™, BookIt.com™, Booking.com™, Caesar-Data.com™ and many more.

ChannelDirect is a robust channel management solution that enables you to update rates, inventory and restrictions across multiple third party sites from a single, web-based platform

With ChannelDirect you can increase the number of sites you manage without increasing resources. You can manage ten sites with the same effort required to manage two!

Channelmanager the online hotel front office accommodation bookings and reservation system in Tasmania Australia. Accommodation booking system provides quick book hotel, motel payment portal, automatic hotel reservations, last minute hotel booking and hotel invoices management services

Personal Branding Tips for LinkedIn

Personal Branding Tips for LinkedIn

What is LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is a social network of more than 20 million professionals from around the world, representing 150 industries.

When you join, you create a profile that summarizes your professional accomplishments, pretty much like an online resume, but with important social networking elements baked into it.

Here are some personal branding and marketing tips to get the most out of your LinkedIn profile:

Add a picture

You can add your picture and display it at the top of your profile. A picture helps create a personal connection and conveys the message that you take networking seriously.

You can use the same picture you use in other social networking sites, so that those who frequent them may identify you more easily (brand recognition).

Create a personalized URL

When you join LinkedIn, your profile will be assigned a random URL such as:

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/2/496/aa7

Not very marketable.

You have the option, however, to create a personalized URL such as:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/yourname/

If you want an even better URL, you can always register yourname.com for less than $10/year and forward it to your LinkedIn profile page for the ultimate in URL branding.

Promote your profile with LinkedIn buttons

Like other social networking sites, LinkedIn offers a wide array of icons and buttons that you can use to promote your LinkedIn profile on your site or blog.

You can chose among many different styles, and link them to your profile.

Create a LinkedIn email signature file

A LinkedIn email signature file displays your contact information including a link to your LinkedIn profile, in a variety of layout styles. The only caveat is that LinkedIn signatures are designed using HTML, and therefore will work with Outlook but not with Gmail or Hotmail.

If you don’t like any of the default styles, you can always use an HTML editor and create your own signature file, or create one directly in Outlook (you can use one of the LinkedIn buttons discussed before to make the link to your profile stand out).

If you use Gmail or other email provider that doesn’t accept HTML, you can always create a text-based signature file, and include a link to your LinkedIn profile by writing your URL preceded by http://.

Always include a Summary

LinkedIn lets you write a few paragraphs about yourself as part of your profile. You must take advantage of this since the Summary almost always gets read. This is your chance to include your elevator pitch or any other carefully crafted statement where you put your best foot forward.

Make your summary objective, but not boring. Avoid sounding self serving and corporate: if the summary of your qualifications sounds like it came out of an automatic mission statement generator delete everything and start again.

I suggest that you read the profile summaries of several members first, to help you decide how you would like your profile to read.

Participate in Questions & Answers

LinkedIn has a Q&A section where you can pose questions and answer other people’s inquiries. By actively using this feature you can share your expertise with other members and enhance your reputation in your field.

When answering questions, pretend you’re commenting on a blog or an online forum. The idea is to help others and add something meaningful to the conversation, not to openly advertise your products and services. If you are too aggressive you will turn people off. If you honestly try to help, people will naturally come to you.

Fill up the Specialties section carefully

Some LinkedIn users search for people by keyword. For example, if somebody does a LinkedIn search for “Online PR” and the term Online PR is listed among your specialties, your profile has a better chance to pop up for that query. Make sure to include all your areas of expertise in the Specialties field.

Marketing for Independent Professionals and Small Business | Shoestring Branding

How to Compare & Measure Different Brands Using Search Volume

HubSpot was founded in 2006, so we're a relatively small startup company. One issue I have been pondering recently is the HubSpot brand, and how much (or little) we had grown the brand in the past year or so.

One piece of brand-related data that I track is the number of people each month that find us by searching on "HubSpot" in search engines. This number has increased dramatically each month, so clearly more and more people are going to search engines to find information about HubSpot.

But that brand statistic does not tell me how I am doing building the HubSpot brand as compared to other marketing software companies. The question I wanted to answer is "How does HubSpot stack up to other companies that also sell Marketing software?" Most of these companies are not really competitors to HubSpot (they generally sell much more complicated and expensive products aimed at large enterprises) but they are a good proxy for HubSpot's position in the broad market for "marketing software". Here is how I tried to answer this question - I decided to get some search volume data for different companies.

How to Compare Different Brands Using Search Volume

1. Launch a Google AdWords campaign. Take the list of company or product names from the market in which you are interested, and use those as the keywords for your AdWords campaign. Need more info about how to launch a Google AdWords campaign? Read this article about How to Launch a Google AdWords Campaign for more info.
2. Make sure to have a high bid per click. You want to have your ad displayed in the top couple results so you are shown as close as possible to 100% of the time. If your ad is not shown all the time, your data will not be accurate.
3. Set a large daily budget. You don't want Google to decide how often to run your ads based on your budget, you want your ads to be shown as close to 100% of the time as possible. Use the Traffic Estimator in Google AdWords to make sure that your budget is not limiting the number of impressions you are receiving.
4. Let the campaign run for 3-5 business days. You want to get a few days worth of data so that any daily noise in searches is minimized. Also, try to run the campaign when there are no major announcements or news from any one company happening in your market.
5. Stop the campaign, check the impressions data. Go into the details of your campaign, and look at the keyword detail, then look at the number of impressions by keyword. You don't care about click through rate (CTR) or the number or cost of clicks. As long as your ads are shown the vast majority of the time for each keyword, you now have an inventory of the number of searches for each company brand over the life of your campaign. You can now rank and compare all the companies or brands in your market. Here's the table I created of marketing software companies.

Company	Searches/Day
Unica	581
Manticore	189
Eloqua	171
Aprimo	112
HubSpot	87
Marketo	34
Market Brite	33
Market to Lead	29
Vtrenz	23
Market2Lead	23
Par Dot	21
LoopFuse	12
ParDot	10
Vtrends	3

After seeing this, I felt pretty good. The companies ahead of us are much larger and older companies, and the sell to very big enterprises and can spend a lot more on marketing. Most of the companies below us are smaller startups, but even a lot of them have been around alot longer than HubSpot.

I was also thinking that as a potential customer of one of these companies, especially the smaller ones, I might want to get a sense of the market traction for each company as a way of telling if they would be around in a year or more from now. In addition to picking software, you are also picking a long term partner, since you want your marketing software vendor to be growing, allowing them to have more and more revenue to increase their spending on R&D so they can continue to invest heavily in the product you are using. As a potential customer, this would make me feel good about HubSpot, since the data indicates HubSpot is one of the top growing marketing software companies.

The whole campaign cost me under $100. A small price to pay for some pretty interesting data. In your market, you might have to pay more, but for most small comanies, especially B2B companies, it will probably not be that expensive.

Have you done this type of analysis for your market? What did you learn?

Expert Marketing Tip - How to Compare & Measure Different Brands Using Search Volume

Top Ten Mistakes in Dive Store Website Design

Dive store websites can suffer from the same design mistakes common to all websites. “Splash” screens, “Mystery Meat” navigation and hard-to-read text are just a few of the blunders many dive store websites share with websites in general.

There are ten goofs, however, that are especially bad when dive stores do them. In this article, we will look at each of these and how you can avoid them. Then, once you have learned what not to do, we will show you several things you will definitely want to do in our companion article, Secrets of Effective Dive Store Websites.

Here is what we cover in this article:

10. Too Much Text, Too Little Info
9. Hiding From Google
8. No Corresponding eNewsletter
7. “Mailto” Links
6. Do-It-Yourself Websites
5. Sites That Make Users Hunt for Answers
4. No Clear Path to Certification
3. Stale, Outdated Information
2. Websites That Never Change
1. No Website at All

Read whole article here....

Link Building 101

Great article by Jason on Link Building, which keeps the language simple and the truth obvious. i.e. Link Building takes a lot of time and there is no AUTO program to do it for you!

Stuart

==========================================
by Jason Storm

Two of the three big search engines (Google and Yahoo) place a large importance on one way links to determine rankings. Each link to your site is like a vote and the more votes you have, the higher you will rank.

In this article I will be sharing with you some important info on link building and some strategies to help your one way link building.

Before we get started, it's important to understand the fundamentals...

Beginning with the very basics, a link is a way of navigating from one webpage to another. To have a link within the same website is called an 'internal link'. An 'external link' takes you from a webpage in one website to a webpage in another website. The meaning of 'backlink' is that your site is being linked to from another website.

What Are the 4 Types of Links?

There are 4 different types of links:

* URL Link - This is simply a website url that is a link.

* Text Links (aka static links) - This is the most common type of link (when you click on a word or phrase and it is a link)

* Image Links - An image link is simply an image that you click on to navigate to another webpage.

* Dynamic Links - These types of links are in another programming language called Javascript and while they also take you from one webpage to another, they have 'extra codes' to perform special functions.

(these types of links can appear in many different forms)