Marketing your Tourism Service on the Internet

Sidebar: Join SafariNow.com. This is an already working online booking agency. You just need to enter your details and your first web presence. is finished. There is a setup cost of R550 thereafter SafariNow.com gets 15% commission from all sales. This is a fairly effective deal and SafariNow.com gets me a few clients every month. (Average 4-5 enquiries a month). It is by no means the solution on its own but it does help a little  You could also join accommodation-sa.co.za, doorway.co.za, places.co.za, wheretostay.co.za and there are many others like that too. It wont do any harm but don't expect too much from these sites and my advice is not to pay for listings but rather to work on a basis if commission. I do get a few enquiries from these other sites but nothing that's been consistent.

This is my success story of how to successfully market your tourism service on the internet yourself affordably. I don't often hear positive stories about tourism marketing on the internet and I know why. There is so much disinformation out there and it all sounds so complicated. And really it is just easy peasy. Follow these easy steps and you too will be able to sit back and watch you bookings increase. Please note that I don't describe a get rich quick scheme here rather a method that requires quite a bit of work on your part but with very little technical skill. If you can surf you can do it.

Build your own website.
This is your online brochure. I feel you need to learn how to do it yourself for a number of reasons. 

• It is really easy and anybody can do it if you follow the rules below
• For the website to be effective you need to understand how these things work.
• Very few so called professionals actually know how to build it right so don't get caught and please don't let you daughter do it. Big mistake unless of course she follows the rules below
• Its less expensive to do it your self and you can change it as often as you like whenever you like.
• You get to learn that the internet is easy and fun and a great way of getting your tourism business to work. for you

You need to understand that a website consists of 2 main components. The first is your online brochure and is what sells your tourism service. That most seem to understand. The next is that you would like the website to direct new clients to your service. It can only do this if it succeeds in ranking well in the search engines for the relevant keywords. Now this is where most sites fall down. In the search engine www.google.com the keyword "drakensberg" finds about 66 000 pages of information containing Drakensberg.  Now if your site does not appear in the first maybe 20 or 30 search entries well then it need not be there at all. So how do you go about getting your site to be in the first 20 or 30 entries. That is what I am going to try explain in the next few paragraphs.

Fist you will need the following: (You can choose any internet service provider BUT they must offer the following in the provider package. And if the provider does not have every single item skip it and find another. You will need all of these facilities. If its got more that fine but I haven't found more to be necessary yet)

• A provider for your site.
• An own domain name not a subdirectory on a the providers domain name.
• A tool to build your web pages. Something similar to how SafariNow.com built your page so that you don't need to learn about yet another program.
• Statistics about your visitors. How many unique persons have visited not hits on the site. You need to know how the people got there and which keywords were used. Without this info you cannot measure if your site is working.
• Method of optimizing pages of your site for the search engines
• An automatic method of submitting you site to the top search engines
• Statistics to see your website position for a particular keyword on the search engines.
• A nice touch is a facility to collect email addresses and send newsletters to your site visitors. (Ok maybe this is more than you need to start but in a year you will start to ask about it)

I use the product site-build-it It delivers all of the above and quite a bit more which I have found to be stuff I have not got round to using yet. It works like this. 

• You buy it. (about R2800,00). (about 5 mins)
• then you download it and read the action guide. (Or skim through it you do not need to learn everything in one go and there is more info in the book than you really need to know.)
• Then you register your domain name. (10 mins) It takes about 24 hours for the site to be visible on the Internet.
• Then you decide on the look and feel of your site (10 mins and 15 clicks)
• Then you start to build the content of your site. This is firstly your online brochure and will probably be about 5 to 10 pages describing your services etc. You will find that this is easy as you probably have already done all the thinking when you designed your last brochure. All you do is click on the button add a page, fill out the text boxes and the page is finished. If you have the text already it takes about 10 minutes a page. You can also fit in pictures. Its really is as easy as surfing.

Ok so now you have a site. Unfortunately this is not enough. Site-build-it submits the pages to the search machines but as you have not optimized pages for the search machines so it is only as good as any other site.

You now need to go and identify which keywords are important to you. Maybe "accommodation Weenen", "horse riding", "horse trails", "battlefields" etc. For each of these words you build a single page. You write content about the specific keyword and use the specific keyword often throughout the text. Add the page to your site like you did with the other pages and then press the button analyze this. site-build-it tells you in simple terms what's ok and not ok. Like you have not used your keyword in the first sentence or you have not put your keyword in the heading. Then you correct these simple to fix things and save it. The rest is done automatically. The more keyword pages you build the more people will find your site. And if you have an event near by then its easy to just add another page or if your prices change it takes 5 minutes to change it and you are done

site-build-it lets you do really fancy things but don't worry about fancy till you have mastered the standard features. This site has been built using site-build-it It took me just 3 weeks and had paid for itself after 7 weeks and continues to grow month by month. That's by far the best return I have had from any marketing that I have done so far.

Step 3: Monitor what's happening. Go to your statistics every month. Think about new keywords and add new pages to increase your traffic to your site. Think about adding the newsletter feature to your pages. You will start to learn about the other features that came with your package like how to research more keywords and which ones are really useful to you.

More resources about building an internet marketing strategy for tourism services using the internet

• Marketing your Tourism Service on the Internet

If you have any questions about any of this then drop me a mail or give me a ring 036/3523143 and I will see if I can help you. I am not an internet expert or an internet provider rather a tiny guest house owner in the foothills of the Drakensberg. All I can give you is a wealth of information on how to go about promoting your tourism service by building a website yourself affordably.