KDCA AGM 2011

I am very excited by the invitation from the Kenora District Camp Owners Association (KDCA), to make a short presentation on Social Media Marketing for Tourism and Travel, during their spring Annual General Meeting!

KDCA AGM at the Waldhof Hall

With about 70 Camps and Lodge Members, and about 70 Allied Members, the KDCA is a large and influential lobby organization who work closely with Ontario Sunset Country Travel Association and the Northwestern Ontario Tourism Association (NWOTA) to promote the well being of tourism and travel in Northwestern Ontario.

KDCA AGM, May 6 2011

Free Webinar Tuesday February 1 2011 – 8 – 9 PM Central Time

http://www.facebook.com/tourisminternetmarketing

This webinar answers our ‘most asked question’ form Lodge and Resort owners who are just starting to engage their customers on Facebook: How do I keep my personal information separate from my Business Page?

Tips to help tourism business owners make the most of their business page on Facebook while keeping your personal information separate.

When this webinar is complete, you will understand how to use your Business Page to build your brand on Facebook and connect with a 100′s or 1000′s of fans, while keeping your personal profile details separate.

Free Webinar Tuesday February 1 2011 – 8 – 9 PM Central Time

How To Separate Your Personal Profile From Your Business Page On Facebook

http://www.facebook.com/tourisminternetmarketing

Web Design For Fishing Lodges

Fishing Lodge Web Design

We are a Canadian Company focused on providing Internet Marketing for Tourism and Travel Businesses in Canada, specifically – web design for Fishing Lodges. We cater to the annual cycle of small, seasonal lodges who service between 500 and 1000 guest per year.

Web Design and Business Development

We regard each piece of online real estate we build for you, as an asset established for your business. But, like a car without a driver, web properties are not much use without web marketing strategies.

Successful Website or Successful Business?

In my town, tourism businesses were the first to establish websites. In the early days of Web Design for Fishing Lodges, a tourism business site was considered successful if they ranked well in the search engines. These days, the tourism business themselves are successful if they are well represented in the Social Media arena.

Social Media Traffic vs Search Traffic

It’s important to understand the significant difference between traffic from the search engines and traffic from Social Media sources. Once you do, it will transform the focus of your marketing.

Search traffic comes to your website with interest, perhaps, but generally without any prior relationship to your business. Of course I’m not talking about people who search for your business name – those people know you, or have been exposed to you by word of mouth, print etc. By search traffic, I draw attention to the audience of new people who find you through the search engines – and I want to compare them to the audience of new people who may find you through Social Media Channels.

People who find you through organic search, or worse, through paid Google Ads, are starting a relationship with you from a cold start.

On the other hand, if people find you through Social Media, it is because one of their friends or family mentioned you online. When traffic lands on your site from a social media source, odds are much better that this person was referred to you through online word-of-mouth.

Referral From A Trusted Source

Word-of-Mouth marketing has always been recognized as The King for building sales. For this reason, all of our web design projects for Tourism Businesses like Fishing Lodges, Resorts, Camps and Outfitters – now include a strong component of Social Media Marketing.

Web Design for Fishing Lodges

Websites are getting easier to run – and we shorten your learning curve.

If you are a Camp Owner or Manager with a traditional static website that your webmaster must update, it’s time to invest in an upgrade.

If you are a Camp Owner with plans to sell your business in the next few years to a decade, it’s time to invest in establishing online real estate that will increase the resale value of your business.

Web Design for Fishing Lodges and Hunting Camps

What is this course about?

This is a technical course – with a personal guide.

Together we create a blog and the entire marketing system that makes it work.

Who is this course for?

I’ve designed this course for Tourism Business operators, but this same marketing strategy will work for any different subject or product.

Are you a web designer?

This course itself can become a step-by-step guide that adds a new product line to your business.

Customize Your Options

www.tourismmarketingvideos.com

I’d like your participation in this tourism blogging survey for three reasons:

First, I want to know what you think.

Second, after you have completed the survey, you will see the poll results – and you will get to know what other tourism business think.

And the third reason I want your participation, is because one of those answers *is* the #1 Reason More Tourism Businesses Are Blogging Than Ever Before.

So, what were the results of the poll? Do you wonder if you choose the same answer as most everyone else?

Of course, as I’m making this, I don’t know what the results of the poll are going to be… But I imagine that each of those reasons will get a vote by somebody. Because the truth is, any one of those reasons is powerful enough on it’s own – to get you out there and start blogging.

Before I reveal the answer – before I reveal the answer I’ve come to know after nine years of professional web design, I want to take a moment to review each of the reasons for blogging in our survey, to highlight the benefits that a tourism business can experience… benefits that might not be directly obvious just by looking at a blog.

First Reason: To Reach A Different Audience

The best clientele for fishing lodges have been coming to Canada for years. The trouble is, the best clientele are now baby-boomers, and they’re just not taking as many fishing trips anymore. So Reaching a different audience has become more important.

A blog can help you reach an audience of younger people, younger professionals… Professionals who are accessing the internet more of the time through their mobile phones.

The Second Survey Opinion: To build a relationship of trust with your readers.

It takes time to establish trust. Studies show that it takes 5 to 7 contacts with a potential customer before they will make a major buying decision. Your blog helps build trust in two important ways: Your blog gives you the power to proactively reach out and make contact with trip planners while they are in the trip-planning phase. They can get to know you in a way that is much more personal than any static website.

Second of all, your blog can allow people to leave comments below your posts. These comments, and your replies to them, act like “Word of Mouse” Advertising for your business. There is nothing more trust building than a third-party recommendation. And remember, the comments on your blog are always fully moderated, so only the good stuff goes up!

The third reason in our survey, that more tourism businesses are blogging – is so they can easily update their own website and pictures.

If you can format an email and send an image as an attachment, you have all the skills you need to update your own website.

Aren’t you sick of sending things to your webmaster, waiting weeks for the work to get finished, and you still have to make corrections when it’s done?

The forth reason people are blogging: To automate their marketing so they can spend more time on their business.

There are two critical ways that your blog can save you time.

First, you can pre-schedule your posts to publish themselves on specific dates and times. You can do you blogging in advance, and it will publish the scheduled entries while you are servicing your customers.

Second, blogs contain a key piece of technology that may revolutionize your marketing. This technology is known as the RSS Feed. (Really Simple Syndication). Your RSS Feed can be used to automate your marketing in some groundbreaking ways:

Your RSS Feed gives you the power to publish your content to news sources and several popular websites – all at the same time. And, your RSS Feed sends an automatic notice to your website subscribers – who are often reading these notices on their mobile phones.

Your RSS Feed lets you get your information out across the internet – and – delivers a personal note to each subscriber – all from a single blog post.

And the fifth answer in our survey: To get web marketing results that are more measurable.

Before the internet, measuring the results of your marketing dollars was a game at best. And while the internet was young – many tourism businesses treated their website like a brochure, and novice web designers reported useless statistics like: the number of unique visitors and the number of top search engine rankings you have.

Today, the knowledge from other profitable online business plans can be applied to Tourism Marketing. With your blog, you can quantify a relationship development process that has been proven to lead to sales.

If your planning to sell your business in the next 5 to 10 years, TAKE NOTE! These numbers add measurable equity to the value of your business!

I want to thank you for stopping by, and for reading all the way through! I hope I’ve helped to reveal a number of tourism marketing benefits that might not be apparent when you look at a blog.

Now, if you want to participate in the survey and get the answer to the Question – What is the #1 Reason More Tourism Businesses Are Blogging? – sign up here!

http://www.tourismmarketingvideos.com

I hope you’ve found this post helpful – just on it’s own. But if it has just peeked your interest and you’d like to learn more – I have a special offer for you. Please sign up at Tourism Marketing Videos and follow the three simple steps!

Recent Updates

Recent changes to the CanadianFishingBook.com project have really made an impact!

Overall, the network of five themed fishing blogs and the Fishing Lodge Directory have seen a 47% increase in traffic!  Individual Lodge Owners may login and view detailed stats on the performance of your listing:

New Strategies

Social Media is evolving every day, and CanadianFishingBook.com is keeping pace!

Our New Twitter Strategies are gaining over 60 new followers each day!  Working in concert, our five themed Twitter accounts are providing a new and fast-growing source of traffic – directly to the member listings!

Better Conversions

 The following three changes have boosted our eBook Download Rate by over 200%!

• Traffic from Web 2.0 Tourism Marketing strategies converts better
• Recent updates to the blog layouts improve response rates
• Recent updates to the eBook Squeeze page and sign up sequence provide more perceived value and clearer directions.

May Long

I went and enjoyed the May long weekend at a remote cabin on the lake shore. You can picture the rustic Canadian wilderness – no running water, a woodstove to keep the chill off, a path to the biffy out the front door – and no internet access. It was great!

Back to my computer – Twitter First

After nearly 96 hours offline, the first thing I check is my number of Twitter followers. I reply to direct messages, then I return any @replies. While I’m working with twitter, I take another ten minutes to follow the daily routines to continue building my Twitter Follower List.

Downloads and Subscribers

Next I checked my email subscriber lists to make sure the numbers are still growing. Presently, I’m not running an email-subscriber-boost campaign, but when I’m managing such a promotion, I include a close review of sign-up conversion rates and also review the geographic location of the new subscribers. Watch for a video of email subscriber analysis, or take a test drive of Aweber.

Visitor Stats Detailed Review

Third, I complete my daily review of my website visitor stats. Each project has it’s set of keywords that it targets for search engine traffic, and an ideal target footprint of referral traffic that it is trying to attain. I use Google Analytics and recommend it to you – even if you have additional visitor tracking on your site.

Reply To EMail

Now that I have a handle on the marketing results for the weekend, I turn my attention to email replies and important newsletters.

Create a Blog Post

After chatting to my Twitter friends, reviewing stats and replying to email, it’s easy to come up with ideas for a new blog post. A new blog post that will be helpful to my intended audience, while at the same time, bringing better focus toward my ideal keywords.

Follow My Own Advice

In an earlier post, I set up a social marketing campaign I was to follow as a means of building the Fishing-Trip-Related search engine rankings and traffic I was aiming for.

My Aim?

To demonstrate that YOU can gain immediate and lasting exposure for your fishing or hunting travel-related business – by blogging.

These results are very significant:

Your Website Is A Business Asset

An original blog is an asset that increases the value of your business – it is not just another marketing cost.

Find out more about how I can help you leverage your daily activities to increase the traffic to your website, to increase your bookings – and to increase the re-sale value of your business – with live, real-time Blog Coaching.

Introducing…

A new Twitter Marketing Experiment designed to promote Canadian Fishing Lodges.

Twitter has been getting a great deal of attention within the Marketing Circles so I’ve been researching the Twitter methodology of the most successful Twitter accounts online, and using their strategies for Tourism Marketing, specifically, for fishing and hunting trips.

Growth of Twitter

The exponential growth in the uptake of Twitter is partly because Twitter works so well with texting to and from a mobile phone.

Mobile phones now outnumber land-line subscriptions four to one – and represents a fundamental change in the way people are accessing the Internet.

WHO

WHAT

If fishing in Canada interests you, then so would these Twitter accounts! Because all that these Twitter accounts talk about is fishing! Fishing News, Fishing stuff on eBay and real Fishing Reports from actual, real, Fishing Lodges in Canada!

I’d love to hear your feedback — good or bad!

Twitter has become one of my top referring traffic sources, and I’m excited to send new, targeted traffic – directly to your websites and blogs!!

Join The Experiment

Contact Me for all the details!