Market your travel agency on the Internet
Lots of people hunt for your travel agency on the World wide web daily. Are these people finding you? If not, then this introductory post is a perfect place to start the World wide web Marketing campaign for your travel agency.
If making your own website sounds like a lot of hard work (and it can be), then don’t worry, there are other ways to get the task done: If you have the money, you can choose somebody to do the work for you. Either look at websites you love and find out who built them - or ask some businesses in your area for a recommendation. You could even outsource the job on a site like Elance - you’ll receive quotes from right across the world - and much of the work done in Eastern Europe or India is first-rate quality and very inexpensive. If you choose to build the site yourself - there are many services out there that can make it simple. Try Wordpress.com or Yola for example - they will not take very long to learn, and you’ll have the advantage of always being able to modify the site in future without spending more money.
Lots of people make the error of not having any tracking or analytics put in place for their web site. This is crazy, because without having analytics you’ll have no way to know how much traffic your site is receiving, where they’re coming from, and what they’re looking for on your website. It’s just like having a blindfold on. There are lots of web stats programs to choose from - they’re often free, and simple to set up.
One of the main ways to advertise your site is to secure links from other web pages. General directories , like Yahoo and Dmoz are a great place to get inbound links. Some are free (like Dmoz), others (for example Yahoo) you have to fork out for. Yahoo is a bit on the expensive side at $299 per year, but there are many other paid directories like JoeAnt that offer much better value.
Sites that specialise in travel agency are few and far between - which is a shame, as that sort of vertical market site is generally a highly valuable place to showcase your website. There is however one website that concentrates on travel agency and will even allow you to publish your information free of charge - and that’s http://www.ClickTravelAgents.co.uk/ - definitely worth looking into.
If you have some resources to bring prospects to your website, then look into Pay Per Click advertising. The most popular system is Google Adwords, which can show your advertisements next to the Google search engine results - but there are several other systems to choose from. You create your advert, select which search results you’d like to show up next to, and how much you’re ready to pay for every visitor to your website. Your advertisement can be online within seconds and prospects will frequently start arriving immediately.
If you would like to have the ability to remind folks to come back to your site - or to tell them when you have special offers on offer, then you will need to get their email address when they are visiting your site. Services like Aweber make this straightforward. You can utilize the service to send out just one newsletter now and then - or develop a sequence to be mailed on auto-pilot at standard intervals. This is a very efficient way of keeping in contact with your prospective customers - and once it’s developed - it all works automatically - you don’t have to do anything.
Clearly there is much more to promoting your travel agency on the net than I’ve been able to include in this brief article - but I trust it’s been a useful introduction to the field. The next move is the most vital one : Get Started!
