A new blog is like a sailboat in the open waters – if you want to get anywhere, you have to unfurl the sails.

As a sail catches the wind, your web strategies aim to catch visitors, or traffic.

And, just as the angle, or presentation of the sail to the wind gives speed to the boat, it is the presentation of your Brand that will direct your visitors to take action – and give momentum to your internet marketing results.

It’s all about Traffic and Conversions – but how do you get there?

If you set sail from Newfoundland, you already know that you must pass Nova Scotia and New York, and a lot of other places, before you can get to Jacksonville, Florida.

But the path from here to there in the ‘Internet Marketing World’ may be unclear – and the path may appear very different, depending on which expert you speak with.

However, all the marketing strategies you may hear, seem to have three common themes;

The First Common Theme – Search Engines

Search Engine Optimization is built-in with WordPress; and completed as you post to your blog.

If you set up with the correct WordPress Plugins, you can forget about SEO – just write for your readers, not the search engines. Your WordPress setup takes care of the technical SEO details.

In other words, SEO is pretty much automatic. Pick just one or two phrases from your list of ideal keyword phrases and then write your content for your readers.

Simply tag your posts – and you’ve completed your work for the search engines.

The Second Common Theme – Social Media

A boomerang only comes back if you throw it.

The Social Bookmarking and Social Networking Sites CAN have a tremendous impact on your business.

Get familiar with Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg – they each take a little practice – start with a small list of friends – be selective. Make mistakes on a small scale.

Remember: There is no need to provide any more information about yourself than what is already available on the Contact Us page of your website. You can adjust your privacy levels to suit your comfort. Start today.

The MAIN Common Marketing Theme

Building Subscribers.  It’s about providing great content on a specific topic – and getting the word out that you provide it. 

If you are technical, or a business owner, you may be interested in reviewing my simple strategy of Syndicating your RSS Feed to create the Echo Effect of Social Bookmarking.

Six of the first six most essential WordPress SEO tactics introduced here
were new to me… make that seven out of seven. And they are so easy!

I ran across this video on WordPress SEO within the dashboard of one of my wordpress blogs. I was going to run the video in the background while working – but soon I stopped everything I was doing, and I was taking notes on the video.

No WONDER I love my job! Every morning, it’s different – newer, faster and better!

More than just WordPress Plugins, there are details about using social media and how to bring traffic to your blog by writing guest posts for A List bloggers.

Competing is more important than winning.

Use Google website optimizer to test your subscribe button conversion rate – provide rss and email option. Under each post, remind people to subscribe.

A one-time visitor is great, but a repeat visitor is what you really want.

So many great little tips in every sentence – I’ll have to watch this a few several times!

Why Use WordPress

WordPress has a bigger community at the moment which forces it to improve at a lot faster rate.

If you look at what wordpress has been doing since 2.3, 2.5, 2.6… if you see all the improvements in those releases – if you compare that to corporate CMS’s… nobody can keep up with all the stuff they’re doing.
-Joost de Valk

Pre-Announcing: www.TourismMarketingVideos.com

A Glaring Need

Tourism Marketing Videos came to being in phases, as all good ideas do:

First, I saw a glaring need: Lodge Owners need help learning how to manage their websites.

Recently I’ve upgraded many of my clients’ websites to WordPress 2.7

Although their website is ten years old, many Lodge owners are just starting to Blog and update their own websites for the very first time.

I Can Help!

Second, I saw a way to offer much more help than I could provide on my own.

As I began researching what educational videos were available, I was – mostly – delighted with the results. I was delighted, because I started learning so much new information, I naturally started to bookmark and organize it.

Then a very curious thing started to happen;
My own personal marketing results began to change.

Without planning it, and without giving much thought to it, I had started to return to various bits of my video collection on a regular basis, and after a short while, I began realize this stuff was pretty cool!

I was making more sales but -
I still hadn’t realized the tremendous value
of the specialized collection of videos I was putting together.

Action Items and Examples

My marketing results were changing because I had taken action. I took the new knowledge and immediately put it to use.

This is so vital – but most people overlook it’s importance.

If you take action right away, take the new knowledge you’ve just learned and immediately put to use, you are 80% more likely to retain and use the new information in the future!

They don’t have to be big actions. Often, it takes less than 30 minutes to take one of these great ideas and increase your value!

Just 30 minutes to make VITAL changes to the presentation, layout, images or sales copy – and reap the ongoing rewards!

I can help you can do the same. www.TourismMarketingVideos.com

Relax, It’s Easier

Say you are a Fishing Lodge Owner, a Bed and Breakfast or the event organizer for the Annual Fishing Tournament; Relax, it’s easier to update your site than ever before.

Learn by Video

Stop reading manuals written by nerds. Sit back and watch a How To Video!

Back it With Action

Great marketing ideas are… great – but how can I put it into action if I’m not sure what my options are?

Good News! Tourism Marketing Videos offers new members an Introductory Tour that guides you through a sequence of educational clips to provide an Executive Overview of the range of the most important Internet Marketing strategies available today.

You may pause the Video Tour and start into the Action Items right away, follow through the entire sequence for an overview or jump off the Guided Tour at any time to investigate related videos.

Interested in Updates?

Opening Soon! Be the first to get updates on our Grand Opening Date.
Rolling Out Small

Limited Grand Opening

Only the first 100 get a spot.

This isn’t just a collection of easy-to-learn-from Educational Videos and Video Marketing Lessons for Camp Owners and Tourism Operators… and it’s more than real-world Actions you can take right now to make a difference in all aspects of your marketing…

Tourism Marketing Videos is a community of people. People who are your peers and colleges. They run a Tourism Business too. They do the “Song and Dance” at Sport Shows through the winter – and they have also been thrown into blogging, social media and running their own website.

Why Limit the Grand Opening?

Because I want to know and help each of you. I want to visit your website and learn what you offer, I want to invite you into our new Private, Members Only Community, and I want to help you start building your business assets by using the free and powerful Social Media tools.

www.TourismMarketingVideos.com

See you there!

Listen to Barry Siskind’s 60-minute Double Your Trade Show Results Guaranteed mini workshop.

http://www.siskindtraining.com/product_free.php

Double Your Trade Show Results Guaranteed Part I

Double Your Trade Show Results Guaranteed Part II

Does everybody know what a blog is?

I will get into a definition of what it is, like I said, I’m not going to get technical on you, but I want to keep it as simple as possible about what a blog is. It is a huge topic. You could probably spend three days just doing a talk on blogs. There’s a lot of technical data involved, search engines and RSS feeds and Keywords and Social Networking and Web 2.0… All these things are associated with blogs. If you want to know any of that stuff, talk to this fella right here. Doug (Lampi), he’s a technical guru – that’s his field, he know’s all about how to make your blog.

I’m also not going to get into any debate with anybody about which is better, wordpress or blogger, and I know there’s another couple other ones out there. I use blogger. I’m familiar with it and it works fine for what I want it to do.

Ok. I’m going to try to make my little conversation so that your blog will become effective, as apposed to just sayin’ “put this widget over here, put that picture over there”… just how to promote some of your stuff

The Internet Is Changing

The Internet Is Changing and most of us have web pages. The web pages started out as a static brochure. They didn’t change very often. So what happened is somebody would go on your website, then they go on your website a month later – it’s the same thing, a month later it’s the same thing, a month later… a year later… it’s the same thing, it’s the same pictures – nothing was changing. It’s like you had the guy your brochure and he just keeps pulling it out of the cupboard and keeps looking at it.

— Like what you’ve read? Get the whole series! –

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!

Social Media is about connections between people.

Travel & Tourism is also about connections between people.

Social Media and Tourism can work together like hand in glove, but only a few of the early adopters are really starting to seriously consider the exciting future impact of Social Media on Tourism Marketing.

Enter Douglas Lampi – Presenting next week at the Northwestern Ontario Tourism Association (NWOTA) Annual General meeting for the second time in as many years.

Douglas will give a brief lecture on how Social Media can help Tourism Businesses build their connections, brand recognition and word-of-mouth recommendations.

Watch here for more details.

Forecast says:
More Social Spam is on it’s way.

Social networking is about building your lists, building your groups and your lists of followers, so I started doing some research this evening while passively watching my Twitter stream updates through TwitterFox, a handy little Firefox addon.

The first thing I came across was an article on DoshDosh.com How To Get More Twitter Followers – which is an informative, lengthy, and indepth article.

I’m a reformed spammer, and, like a ex-smoker, I chant the virtues of not spamming all the time. (watch for the upcoming podcast “How I made 30k as a spammer, and why I stopped”) So, I was curious to learn about tools from DoshDosh, like the Twitter Blacklist and Twerpscan, that have been developed to help Twitter users weed out people who try to follow many users in order to build an large audience.

DoshDosh quoted statistics on “Following Others As A Strategy To Gain Followers”:

Take for instance, Osen Komura. A fake profile set up by another Twitter user in February 2008 as a social experiment. The Osen account followed 41,798 Twitter users in one month and 7,847 users added him as a friend, a 17%+ follow-back rate…

DoshDosh goes on to say

Apart from the risk of being labeled a Twitter spammer and increasing the noise on your Twitter stream, this method still works.

Note: The strategy is completed when the spam account stops following almost everyone on it’s list, changes the profile name to seem like a real person, and starts to recommend product reviews that go through affiliate links, etc.,

Another source, Problogger, makes some good, standard social ettiquette suggestions to help correctly befriend people, such as joining in on the conversation, replying to people, and to leverage other people’s larger profiles by commenting on their tweets – but his most important comment to me, in his 5 Tips to Grow Your Twitter Presence, was to tweet during peek times when other people are actively watching.  This may seem logical and obvious, but important to consider when scheduling.

While both articles were great reads, I took more time to read the replies to the posts that I did to read the original posts!

The most common thread to the conversation that followed, echoed the closing advice that most of the top bloggers recommended:

• be real, be yourself, and get involved with your niche in an active, positive, helpful way.
• Comment on other people’s thoughts more often than you talk about yourself – and keep on theme.
• Utilize other website profiles and blogs to send people to your Twitter feed.
• Be patient, and build your follower list by offering value to their twitter experience.

READER WARNING:

In the future, the Social Media sites will become better at filtering spammers, HOWEVER, the appeal of a 17% response rate in building a permission based list is fantastic – and this will ensure that, in the short term, we can all expect to see a lot more Social Spam coming our way.

Follow me on Twitter! http://www.twitter.com/douglaslampi

Cheers