Hotel Blogs

I often type "toruism" when I mean to type "tourism." It's one of my most frequent typos.

I did it again today. And it got me thinking. So I Googled "toruism" and got some interesting results. Surprisingly, the misspelled "toruism" gets 29,400 hits!

I can't claim to have browsed through them all, but the ones I looked at were mostly the result of typos like the kind I'm guilty of. And the fact that Princeton University was among the sites making this mistake made me feel moderately better about my typing skills.

But other results were more intriguing.

Result #3 was for "Toruism Stock Photography" by David Sanger. Clicking through, I found one image tagged "toruism" by Mr. Sanger. But then I searched for "tourism stock photography" on Google and result #4 is also for Mr. Sanger. Click through this link and you will find 112 photos tagged "tourism"! (A search for the correctly spelled single word "tourism" did not turn up Mr. Sanger's site in the first several pages, as you might expect.)

Clearly Mr. Sanger has created a "landing page" (to use a term of art) targeting the incorrect keyword "toruism" to capture traffic he would have missed otherwise.

So what does all this have to do with home-based travel agents? Simply this: more and more travel agents are selling travel on the Internet and the travel niche in cyberspace is huge. So big, in fact, that calling it a niche is something of a misnomer.

At any rate, if you want to compete for traffic, you're going to have to be creative and play all the angles. And clearly there are people out there using purposely misspelled words to draw visitors to their sites through the search engines.

So here's an exercise for those of you who have web sites. What are your most important keywords and what are their most common misspellings and typographical errors?

Here are some I found for South Carolina:

Common misspellings: southcarolina sout souh soth suth outh so carolin carolia carolna carolina carlina caolina crolina arolina caroli carolins carlina carolinas carilina caralina corolina

It may take some noodling to come up with your own list. Noticing what your clients tend to typo in their emails to you might be a good start.

Once you have a list of likely suspects, consider creating some pages on your web site that target the misspelled key word. For example, if you market tours of Washington, DC, you might want some pages targeted to "Wasington" and "Washinton".

Make sure you have enough inlinks to these pages so the search engines can find them. And make sure you have ways of guiding people from those landing pages to the rest of your site so you can monetize any traffic that develops.

Then sit back and monitor your stats. If you are getting significant traffic to these "bad" pages, you might want to do more of them.

Is anyone out there using this tactic? I'd love to hear your experience.

If you are a home-based travel agent selling Sicily, you will no doubt find this interview of interest.

To summarize, the Sicilian travel industry has the following problems: fragmentation of the tourist offer; lack of any consistent marketing strategy to promote the local territory; low knowledge and use of new technologies; no benchmark actions to set prices for the tourist offer to compete within the Mediterranean area; no entrapenaurial [sic] initiative; and little governmental support.

Sounds bad, and yet . . . This tells me that a creative travel agent can fill the void left by the "official" Sicilian tourism infrastructure.

I haven't been to Sicily yet (it's high on my must-see list), but everyone I know who has spent any time there says it's one of the most beautiful spots in the Mediterranean. That's a message that needs to be communicated. And the Internet is the perfect vehicle. Provide the information. Get the booking. It's the new mopdel for selling travel on the Internet.

If you are a home-based travel agent and you don't have your own site yet maybe it's because you think it's just too big a job for you to tackle. You don't know HTML or web design. You're just not a techie at heart. You don't have the time to learn a whole new business. I mean, there are lots of excuses.

But if this is sounding familiar, you might want to check out this site. When you get there, click on the "Travel" link. There you'll find a list of travel-oriented sites that are in the top one percent of all Internet sites when it comes to traffic (as measured by Alexa)!

I can't say I've had to time to look at all of them, but of the ones I've browsed, none seem to be home-based travel agencies. (The villas in Tuscany site comes close, but they seem more a broker than anything else.) Most of them seem to have advertising as their business model, but with traffic like they're getting that could be quite lucrative.

Still, I see no reason why the basic approach illustrated by these sites couldn't be adapted for a home-based agency, as long as there was a mechanism in place to capture opt-in emails and continue the marketing conversation.

There are a few things that I noticed when browsing through these sites.

1. None of them are terribly fancy. Do you see anything that screams "We spent a TON of money on this site"?
2. They are packed with information.
3. They have odd looking and sounding domain names. I mean, what's with all those dashes?
4. And then there are those Alexa rankings. People would kill for readership like that.

What's not immediately apparent is that all these sites were created using a relatively inexpensive all-in-one web-based software solution. Better yet, It's remarkably easy to use -- even for people who have ZERO Internet experience.

All-in-one means it is quite literally soup-to-nuts, starting with helping to choose a domain name. That's why there are all those dashes in the sometimes cumbersome domain names -- because they have been chosen to be search-engine friendly (just one reason for those high Alexa rankings). There are a lot of other services (like SEO) that are built into the package that otherwise would have to be purchased separately. If you were smart enough to know you really needed them, that is! Even web hosting is included.

Web-based means that the software lives in cyberspace, not on your local computer. That way, you can fiddle with your site from your laptop, anywhere there's an Internet connection. In a Paris cafe? On a cruise ship?

The solution is called Site Build It and they have an action guide that walks you through exactly how it works.

I think it's worth looking into as an alternative to the "canned" solutions that offer you cookie cutter sites that aren't optimized for the search engines and have nothing to differentiate themselves. Of course, Site Build It can't provide you with the creativity. That has to come from you. But its tools will help get your creative juices flowing and the point-and-click site building tools will help get you over any web design fears you might have.

In the last issue of my biweekly newsletter, I raved about my experience with Hover Ads. Well, the "official" results are now in: a 158% increase in email opt-ins!

But I'm surprised that so few of my subscribers actually seem to have taken advantage of the marketing power that Hover Ads represents. Why could this be? I wondered. Seems there are several possibilities.

1. You don't have a web site.

2. You do but you are not using a device such as downloadable ebooks or a regular newsletter to collect email addresses.

3. You are collecting email addresses, but you just don't see the importance of making that process more productive.

If you fall into categories 2 or 3, I strongly urge you to take a second (or first!) look at Hover Ads.

If you don't yet have an email collecting mechanism in place for your web site, then you need to learn the basics of Internet marketing. The same goes if you do not yet have a web site.

I have long maintained that the Internet is not a threat to home-based travel agents. In fact, it largely serves to siphon away the kind of customers who will be a thorn in your side -- the tirekickers and price shoppers. This is still true.

But -- and it's an important but -- technology and the ingenuity of Internet marketers don't stand still and every day someone is figuring out a new way to chip away a few more customers from more "traditional" forms of travel sellers.

It is imperative that you keep up and find creative "guerilla" tactics for using the Internet to your advantage.

I am going to assume that most home-based travel agents still don't have web sites. Or that if they do, they are mostly ineffective, cookie-cutter sites with canned content and no individual personality.

Over time, I hope to use this blog to explore the ways, the many ways home-based travel agents can sell travel on the Internet, but for now I'd like to challenge you to do something very simple, yet something that will have powerful implications down the road.

Start collecting email addresses!

Even if you don't have a web site, you have access to the Internet and the email capabilities that go along with it. Email is what I like to call the Other Internet. And if you're in business, you can use it.

So set yourself some goals to ask everyone you come in contact with for their email address. Assure them that you won't use it indiscriminately, but that you would like to have their permission to contact them if you come across something -- a cruise, a tour, a special offer at a resort -- that you think might interest them.

Note: It is crucual that you get people's permission to send them email. If they don't want to do that, then don't press them. Just make a note that they "opted-out."

If you already have a client list, check it to see how many email addresses you already have. Missing some? Get them.

Don't feel you're under any pressure to use these email addresses immediately. You're not. But you should save them. You should also at least begin to create a "database" of this information.

Don't freak out. It doesn't have to be fancy to start with. Ideally, it should be in some electronic form that is scalable, that is it can grow and expand over time. A spreadsheet like Excel will work, or you can use an actual database program like FileMaker. You can even use a word processor like Word; just create tab delimited lists or tables.

But even if you keep your list in pencil and paper format, start to capture some useful info about your contacts. First of all, to my way of thinking, you want to be able to separate the lists in to customers and non-customers. (Hint: Your customers are mnore valuable to you then your non-customers). Another important area is the interests of the people you are adding to your list. For example:

John Jones, email@aol.com, golf, cruises

Simple, but if you have a great cruise to promote, you'll be able to find John quickly.

Now this may all seem screaming obvious and unbelieveably basic to some of you. But the fact that so few are jumping at the chance to add Hover Ads to their marketing arsenal leads me to believe that it's a lesson worth relearning.