You’ve likely heard it already.

You already know that 2/3 of travelers
ONLY use the Internet to plan their vacations.

From mapping the driving route or booking the airline tickets, booking transportation, accommodations and event tickets, to browsing pictures and menus to find local restaurants before they start their vacation – today’s travelers are captivated by a relationship that BEGINS and grows online.

Today, it’s easier to market online.

It’s true.

And tourism marketing stands to gain the most.

New Social Media sites like Facebook have made it easy and compeling for millions of people to register and connect with dozens, sometimes hundreds of family and friends.

Match this up with the fact that, on a personal level, most Tourism Operators have also used Social Media sites to connect with their family and friends online – and it’s like peanut butter and chocolate!

Now, more than ever, travel and tourism business owners can target and build a relationship with their ideal client, while both people are at home, without the cost of traveling to Sport Shows

Remember – your ideal client now logs into Facebook or eMail daily…
but, they attend Sport Shows annually…

Douglas Lampi takes the guess-work out of Tourism Marketing,
by teaching the small business owner Social Media
strategies that build lasting, measureable results.

Save time, go directly to the most effective strategies. Learn to protect your personal privacy while boosting your business connectedness. Doug can show you how to spend just one hour each evening online through this winter to build online relationships with new prospects – and especially with people who have booked a vacation with you, now, or in the past.

With Social Media Marketing prepared in advance for next season, then you can REALLY maximize the power of word-of-mouth adversiting from your current guests with real-time, online exposure before your client’s entire friend networks.

If you can see how fast and big this can be, then you know your business has to be a part of it.

Visit www.douglampi.com, join the Newsletter, and see how Doug makes it simple for your business to Go Social!

In the never-ending search to bring my web visitors the latest and the best, I’ve been joining and learning about the various forms of Social Media Sites.

After joining groups and communities, learning what they do to build their memberships, I started creating groups and communities within the Social Media sites too.

Though my journey of registering at

• the sites listed with Profilactic.com,
• all the video sites fed through Tubemogul.com,
• all the blogging sites supported by flickr.com and YouTube.com,
• all the micro-blogging sites that Ping.fm distributes to and
• all the additional social media sites compiled by SecondBrain.com and lifestream.fm -

I’ve come to understand that I’m not in Kansas anymore.

Even as a full time web-nerd, I’m shocked at how different things have become.

Now for The Search
Given #1: I can install software and build websites on Linux and Windows servers.
Given #2: Open Source software exists for running a social media website.

I’ll start my search on Sourceforge.net – a great place for any Open Source software you may need, and I’ll work my way through testing out the demo software that I find.

Here are three systems I’m reviewing:

Truthfully social networking platforms, A SOA system for lover and friends.provide a reliable, fast, social networking package.Easy to install,use,manage,and have web service api raise your business to the next level.

IB Social Network System – Complete social networking system for school clubs, small in-school programs, and even entire schools.

Elgg – Elgg is an open source social networking platform developed for LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) which encompasses weblogging, file storage, RSS aggregation, personal profiles, FOAF functionality and more.

Another great place I search is HotScripts.com

With a quick search in the php area, I found a nice list of Social Networking software, but I don’t think these are Open Source, and they are not likely free. However, you do get to save a lot of headaches by surfing through some example sites that are already running on the software.

Many of these systems offer similar features to Myspace and Facebook, but, as I’m reading through, I don’t see one that also includes feed aggregation from other social media sources…

Many include features like social bookmarking, tag clouds, profiles, image voting, classifieds, events and calendar, clubs, e-cards, forum, polls, bulletins, flash chat and instant messenger.

Some of the better scripts also included audio and video blogging, voice and video messaging, audio and video comments, video chat, music and videos, FLV and MP3 players!

My favorite features -

• address book import (supports Yahoo!, GMail, AOL, Hotmail, MSN, MySpace)
• PayPal IPN support

Missing Features -

• Feed Aggregation from other sources
• Widget tool for users to share their content
• Clear mention of RSS Feeds created

I’ll let you know more as I experiment with different software and scripts -

but, if you have your own social networking website, and you are happy with how the site is working for you, please recommend the software here through your affiliate link.

Today’s web gives you the power to create a detailed array of relevant links to your website thru the use of Blogging sites, Social Bookmarking sites, Social Networking sites, Photo Sharing sites, File Sharing Sites, Video Sharing Sites… and the list goes on.

In fact, the list is so huge, a host of new services have evolved to help coordinate and centralize the information flow from all of your various profiles.

These new Web 2.0 Sites are called Feed Aggregators.
They aggregate your RSS Feeds into one stream of updates.

Since I’m always seeking to better use the web for marketing, I set up a few Aggregators for a number of my feeds.  After a short time, I noticed that I was getting indexed in Google within minutes of when I posted to my blog, and, to my surprise, the aggregator websites were also ranking within the top 20 search results! And so, following the principal “If it works, do more of it”…

Today I am reviewing a List of RSS Feed Aggregator services
as I go through the process of registering for all of them. 

Because I market to a number of different niches, I figure it would be best for me to create an individual account at each Aggregator for each of the unique niche’s I focus on.  Tedious?  Rather!  But I only have to do it once, and the Aggregator does its Search Engine magic for a long, long time without further maintenance.

GETTING PREPARED
Start by visiting all your blogs and profiles and collect up the URL’s for all your RSS Feeds.  Save them all in a unique file that is easy to find and update when you add your business information to a new service.

• www.Filtrbox.com – looks like a powerful service.  It has two different paid levels – so I’m figuring it must have some great PageRank juice because of high trust in Google… but it’s not intuitive to set up, has how-to videos – and I’m on dail up at the lake right now.  So I’ve added this one to my list so you can review it, but I’ll set it up further when I’m on highspeed.
• www.Feedkiller.com – no registration required.  Name your stream, add your RSS Feeds and click Build It.  You are given an URL where your feeds are collected into one centralized RSS Feed stream… So I Stubbled the new feed page, and added the RSS Feed to my list that I’ll add to the next aggregators on my list! (note: this new aggregate feed didn’t work in Whereisme.com)
• www.Feedtweeter.com – Feedtweeter says it’s ’A little service that allows you to link Twitter and Plurk to your other activities.’  Feedtweeter can now monitor your Identi.ca posts too: Post something in Identi.ca, and it will appear in Plurk and/or Twitter too. (with a few minutes delay).  This is a cool service, but I’m already set up on www.ping.fm - a more comprehensive version of the same service… 
• www.lifestream.fm looks great.  I’ve applied for an invitation code and Tweeted to my twitter followers to see if anyone has an invitation code they could send me. 
• www.whereisme.com  - a web identity aggregator. It takes all the places you do things on the web and centralizes them for you to show off. This is a *great* place to collect the RSS Feeds from all of your blogs and a wide selection of the biggest Social Media sites, like Blogger, del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm and several other top names.  Get a cup of coffee – this one’s worth your time.
• www.daylife.com – a new way to explore the world, they say – which is pretty vague to me… it’s a collection on online news sources where you can “star” things of interest.  I looked for a way to add my feeds, there was a link at the bottome right of the footer in the page where I suggested my feeds… If you are looking for an aggregator for your own feeds, skip this site.
• http://linkbun.ch/ - lets you put multiple links into one small link which you can share over IM, Twitter, email or even a mobile phone SMS. So, I put all my fishing blogs into a bunch, and this service created an individual page, listing my bunch of links!  Another easy way to create one-way links to your website. 

Ok – I’ve gone over-time in writing this post.  Here are a few more RSS Feed Aggregator Services that I’ll be registering with – I haven’t tried them yet, let me know which are best!

•  
  • www.dailyme.com
  • www.streamy.com
  • www.turtilla.com
  • www.Afrigator.com
  • www.blastfeed.com
  • www.feedfeeds.com
  • www.feeds2.com

Yesterday I worked with my sister to work on promoting her ebook using the online marketing strategies that are getting a lot of buzz these days – the social networks.
Preparation – information you will need

Your profile name
profile email address
small profile picture
150 word intro paragraph
set of best 5 keyword phrases
website address you are marketing

Purpose – why are you doing all this?

Ultimately, all the social attention should gain you new visitors to your main website, new email subscribers and new customers.

You achieve this by establishing a relationship with people who are already in your niche – and by building a means to communicate with them in the future.

Day One

Step One – Register Everywhere

Now you can find WoWGrrl on your favorite social networking sites! And add her as a friend! We started our social networking journey at www.profilactic.com.  It was easier to tackle the project when two of us split the list of sites that are supported, and started registering a new profile on every social bookmarking, file sharing, video sharing, Web 2.0 sites we could find.

As we went through this list of almost 200 Web 2.0 style sites, there were a few that stood out – these were ear-marked for another visit and more development.

These exceptional information sharing sites also included a way to build a friends list and create groups on your topic.

Step Two – Aggregate the Feeds

Another social networking service I found were a few rss feed aggregation sites.  After creating almost 200 new profiles across the full range of social networking sites, it seems impossible to monitor and manage everything.

List all of the sites you have registered with with services like profilactic.com, blogcatalog.com, superglu.com and pownce.com – the beta toluu.com my also be of interest.

Day Two

Step Three – Get Connected
within each community site, join groups, search on your topic to build your friends lists.

Update your profiles – before you start adding friends, be sure to upload a profile image, copy and paste a description the includes a link to your site or offer…etc.

Step Four -
Create a unique ‘Group’ on a theme relating to your topic, update the Group Profile page to include links to your offers then invite your new friends to join your group.

One Week Later

Community Building

A simple and effective way to bring people to your group – a fun contest on pictures and videos.  These simple contests give reasons for members to invite their friends to the group.

One Month Later

Community Partnerships

After your friends list and group membership has grown to a few hundred people, you can start making promotional swaps with other group owners. i.e. I’ll send out a notice about your group to my members if you’ll send out a notice about my group to your members…

Now your groups can start growing to be in the thousands!

Facebook Fans will love this Facebook Friend Graph – and Business Owners should take this Free Facebook Marketing Course and learn how your business can benefit from a business page on Facebook.

Here’s a great way to view your network of friends on Facebook.

TouchGraph Photos


This is the first screenshot I’ve taken while using the Touchgraph Facebook Photo Viewer.  I like how you can easily view the photos of your friends if you are on a highspeed connection, but the images are not cached, and if you return to view the same friends images later, they must be re-loaded.  This app is NOT for dial-up users.  Sorry.

The photo viewing aspect is cool, but it’s more interesting to see who knows who among your friends!

Cheers.

Quetico Internet Marketing is your Online Traffic Specialist

Douglas Lampi provides Internet Marketing insight into more that just top Search Engine Rankings. Today, visitors should be coming to your site through many differnet sources – and your business is at risk if your main source of traffic is from Google.

An Online Traffic Specialist must have broad knowledge and actual experience publishing in all the various media formats in order to benefit from visitor sources like

video sharing sites,
podcast sharing sites,
photo sharing sites
news feeds,
blogging sites,
social bookmarking,
social networking and
special interest groups,
from joint venture partnerships,
from purchased advertising sources like PPC and interstitials,
from Blog commenting,
from article writting – as well as
from link trades and
gaining consistent top search engine rankings.

In the new world of Web 2.0 – your ideal traffic footprint should include dozens of referral sources.  Including bringing Offline sources to view your online messages.

Your Online Traffic Specialist can help you
Achieve Internet Marketing Diversification!

The anticipated Social Dashboard will strengthen the BlogCatalog community - the soon-to-be-released BlogCatalog Dashboard will help you keep up on the activities of your friends. It’s almost like having the ultimate social network feed reader made up of your friends.

In the next couple of days, BlogCatalog is launching Social Dashboard beta, a new feature that displays your latest activities across many social networks — Digg, Flickr, Last.fm, Twitter, YouTube, and many others. That means automatic cross-networking and promotion right from your personal profile page. It also means that the your post updates, Twitter comments, Digg submissions, and other activities will appear on the Social Dashboard of all your BlogCatalog friends, and maybe their friends too.

This is the kind of networking that can make posts go viral. 

And that’s just for starters.

http://blogcatalog.com

The Tourism Keys Seminar in Thunder Bay last week resulted in an explosion of research, here at Quetico Internet Marketing.

The comprehensive view of utilizing all the various forms of media opened a full set of doors, all at once. Producing your content in the form of Video, photos, audio, pdf and text can provide your visitors with your information in the form they prefer. This strategy is literally Super-Powered by using RSS feeds in both directions!

But other forms of media exist where data and information are pooled and accessed by millions.

The Marketing Keys Tourism Marketing Seminar also explained the astonishing leverage that the connectivity in social networks can provide to help get your message out. For example, if your business has a Business Page Listing in Facebook, people can join as a ‘Fan’ of your business. If they comment on your Wall, all of their friends are notified about this comment – and your word can spread far and wide, very quickly.

(profilactic.com provides a central service collecting over 120 social networking websites.)

After some research, I found a WordPress plugin that will update your Facebook account via RSS feed whenever you post to your blog… excellent… that saves me one step of updating my content in to many places. After I set this up, I’ll test and see if my Facebook Notification RSS Feed includes these updates – so I can pull the Facebook RSS feed and link to myself three levels deep, automatically.

%%awsomnews%%

Then Marketing Keys introduced yet another bombshell. A form of media that takes the entire world into scope, in every detail. Maps. Particularly Google Maps.

Todd Lucier, the creator and presenter of the Tourism Keys Seminars, introduced us to the simple, but detailed, process of adding your business data to the Google Maps database. But further, Todd demonstrated how travel providers can utilize these maps to create detailed trip guides, such as canoe routes. Travel routes can be mapped and points of interest can be flagged. Each map entry can be tagged with descriptions, images, audio, video, podcasts, links to further resources… you name it!

Todd showed us an amazing virtual canoe trip in Algonquin Park using Google Maps RIGHT ON HIS OWN WEBSITE! Using a simple embed code, Todd demonstrated how you can add your own custom Google Map to your blog or website – in a few simple steps.

Follow-up Research into Google Maps resulted in some completely unexpected discoveries.

By following the Google Maps embed code backwards, searching for RSS related information, I uncovered a deeper layer to the internet. I have found myself another step closer to accessing the ROOT of the largest databases in the world. I feel like I’ve exposed a part of “the machine” where only Heavy Mechanics work – it’s called GOOGLE DEVELOPERS API’s.

If an RSS feed lets me pull the last 20 posts from a news source, the Developers API’s will let me write a query that lets me pull every post that was ever made… If my picasa RSS feed pulls the last 20 images, the API feed query can pull ALL the images, all the YouTube Videos and on and on.

I figure that, if I’m just learning about it, someone else already knows AND they already have applications built around it… and yes, after some searching I’ve found some powerful examples of how people have pulled API’s from several sources to create very useful Niche services!

Next – I’ll share the list of WordPress Plugins that I have collected to pull images from picasa, videos from youtube, niche-specific social bookmarking activity, news from Google, weather from environment Canada, events from Google Calendar, podcasts from iTunes, and Social Feeds from multiple sources – all this content comes to your site automatically!

Everything you need to provide amazing content FROM everything Web 2.0 and become interconnected INTO everything Web 2.0 – and at the same time, utilizing every one of the various sources of Media and connection between people.

Thank you Fednor, for bringing Todd to us.

Todd Lucier is a dynamic speaker who is teaching cutting edge internet marketing strategies to Tourism Outfitters and other forward-thinking Businesses from Thunder Bay, North of Superior and Atikokan.

Tourism Marketing Seminar

My brief notes on the Tourism Keys Seminar cannot share the passion that Todd feels about the potential for creating meaningful business contacts through a full range of online spaces that can instantly provide exposure to established audiences who share a common interest.  I hope this wee video clip gives you an idea of the information we received on the first day… this clip is only 30 seconds long – and Todd kept the information flowing that fast for hours!!  I can’t wait for day two! 

In this video clip, Todd Lucier is explaining how you can be found in the search engines through various forms of media.  Take your content and re-produce it in all the various media forms.  Include RSS feeds and email notification options for you visitors.  Todd points out a nice mix of Web 2.0 sites that make it easy to promote yourself.

Todd quotes – 2/3 of people ONLY use the internet to shop for travel.  He suggests that 2/3 of your marketing budget be spent doing online marketing.

Take a Tourism Marketing Workshop From Home

Join Tourismmarketingvideos.com for access to over THIRTY HOURS of Tutorials, Seminars and Workshops that cover all aspects of Tourism Marketing – Including: Blogging as an Effective Marketing Tool, by Brad Greaves of Ignace Outposts!