In it’s early days, WordPress was almost exclusively used for Blogging. Over years of continual development, WordPress is released as a publishing platform, not as a blogging platform. More and more small businesses like fishing lodges, outfitters and hunting camp owners are benefiting from the unmatched SEO and Social Media integration provided by WordPress For Tourism Marketing.

Wikipedia reports that, in 2009, WordPress won the best Open Source CMS Award, and in 2010, WordPress has won the Hall of Fame CMS category.

Web Technology Surveys reports that WordPress is used by 14.0% of all the websites they surveyed, that is a content management system (CMS) market share of 54.6%.

Social Media and WordPress For Tourism Marketing

Social Media works seamlessly with WordPress For Tourism Marketing. Why is this important? Because Social Media has created a changed consumer-scape for all business sectors, not just travel and tourism.

National Tourism Week Social Media Seminar

“Visit Bucks County has been embracing the revolutionary changes that have impacted the tourism and hospitality industry by speaking directly and interacting with the people that fuel our economy,” said Jerry Lepping, executive director of Visit Bucks County. “Hosting this seminar during National Travel & Tourism Week was the perfect time to encourage the importance of this transition as well as the impact travel has on our economy.”

Watch This Slide Show – Interesting Social Media Data For Business

Rural Tourism Marketing Recommends

The Wharton Internet Marketing Blog sums up the benefits of WordPress for Tourism Marketing: At a recent workshop, Joanne Steele from Rural Tourism Marketing recommended that business owners make sure their websites are built using WordPress.

Using WordPress As A Content Management System (CMS)

Evoke Design writes “As WordPress has developed into version 3, it is slowly becoming a top choice for CMS solutions for designers and developers. It provides great flexibility and it’s easy to work with. This means that WordPress has moved on a long way from being heavily biased on a personal blogging system.”

9 Great Reasons to Use WordPress as a CMS

Today, WordPress is released as a publishing platform, not as blogging software – which means it’s even better to use as a CMS. In this article WordPress Ninja explains why WordPress is such a good choice to use as a CMS.

Taking Advantage of Seven Recent Facebook Changes

Who Is This For?

Ninty Percent of my clients are small seasonal Tourism Businesses in Canada. My focus in on Tourism Marketing, however, these strategies work for any category of business or industry.

Introduction: 5 min

Part One: 15 min

For Tourism Marketing: Overview of the benefits of a Business Page on Facebook

Recent changes and what opportunities they create for business owners to create better connections with their guests and prospects.

Part Two: 15 min

Reviewing Mari Smith’s 7 Step Formula for making your Facebook Fan Page a Success.

Question Period: 15 min

The most important part of the Webinar, and the section I look forward to the most – Question Period!

Without traffic, your website is useless.

With the wrong traffic, your website is a costly marketing drain.

With the right traffic, your website is a growing asset that generates a steady stream of leads every day of the week.

Is Your Traffic Valuable, Or Costly?

Let’s compare the relative value of the major different traffic sources available today.

Pay per click Traffic

A timeless non-technical review of blogging for tourism marketing – Presented at the NOTO Conference in 2008

logging As An Effective Marketing Tool – Pt 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgD5rH6Unc4

00:52 The Number One Secret Marketing Tool
01:39 What To Blog? A Few False Starts
02:50 Does everyone know what a Blog is?
03:23 Talk to Doug
04:08 The Internet Is Changng
06:06 Blogging, blog, blogger
06:37 Why would you want to blog?
06:54 What is your Brand?
07:37 Tourism Keys Workshops by Todd Lucier
08:35 Why do people read blogs?
11:27 Ten Tips To Effective Blogging
12:03 Post Regularly – Plan Ahead
14:13 Is this important to you?
14:42 The WORST thing to put on your blog!
15:06 Polish the piece before you publish
17:00 How To Come Up With The Ideas
19:31 I prefer to be in an airplane

Blogging As An Effective Marketing Tool – Pt 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW8ouVtLT5M

00:00 Part Two – Continued – Write down your ideas
01:04 People Get The Nobel Prize For Research!
01:58 Quick List of Blogging Ideas
04:41 Who is the most important person in your camp?
06:57 Fall Fishing is good in September!
07:20 Father and Son Fishing Trips
07:49 The Untethered Vacation
10:43 Use Short Sentences
11:11 Use Lots of Pictures
11:44 Format your pictures!
13:10 Sorry – Did want to wake you up
13:30 48 Inch Northern Pike Story

Blogging As An Effective Marketing Tool – Pt 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5O5el16bkM

00:02 Want your picture on my Blog?
00:18 Time to get the camera out!
01:10 Why you should use photoshop – clone tool
02:03 Videos are very easy – use movie maker
02:50 Keep your videos short
05:10 Do It Your Way
06:15 Questions
06:20 How do you get people to your blog?
07:40 What about comments on your blog?
08:54 How do you schedule your posts?
10:42 What about Traffic Stats – Google Analytics?
11:57 Do you find it harder to blog in the off-season?
17:42 Meet other bloggers

http://www.ignaceoutposts.com – Brad Greaves of Ignace Outposts presents Blogging As An Effective Marketing Tool at the 2008 NOTO Conference.

A social media marketing Business Plan with numbers you can measure.

My report is written in the form of a business plan that reflects a Seasonal Tourism business as they examine and re-define their Marketing strategies to make better use of people’s existing friendship networks on the huge Social Media sites like Facebook.

Whether you’re already on Facebook with a Business Page, or wondering whether it’s worth it, this report will give you hard numbers to inform your business mind.

I must admit, the numbers are pretty compelling, the marketing potential is amazing!

I’m happy to share this report with you:

http://www.marketingtourismwithsocialmedia.com

Marketing Tourism With Social Media

P.S. Special Pre-Release Webinars !

Learn More About Twitter By Studying Your Klout

Amplification – Odds that your content will be acted upon.

Network – Influence level of your engaged audience.

True Reach – Size of your engaged audience.

Klout Score – Measurement of your overall online influence.

quetico is an Explorer
You actively engage in the social web, constantly trying out new ways to interact and network. You’re exploring the ecosystem and making it work for you. Your level of activity and engagement shows that you “get it”, we predict you’ll be moving up.

Improving Your Klout

You may ask me – now that you know your Klout Score – how do you plan to improve your Klout?

My personal plan on how to improve the Klout Score of my Twitter account is simple. I only plan to add one new activity to the strategies that are currently set up with my YouTube Channel, Blog notifications tweeted by Feedburner and my business page on Facebook: Each morning, after I wake up, and before I get out of bed, I browse my twitter feed on my ipod and I retweet interesting bits of information.

That’s it.

Oh …and I will also include Klout Screenshots when we do the annual benchmarking of the online visibility for our new and existing web design and seo and social media clients.

How Do You Improve The Klout Score of Your Twitter Account?

Comment below and let us know –
What are some different ways to improve your Klout?

This webinar answers our ‘most asked question’ form Lodge and Resort owners who are just starting to engage their customers on Facebook: How do I keep my personal information separate from my Business Page?

Tips to help tourism business owners make the most of their business page on Facebook while keeping your personal information separate.

When this webinar is complete, you will understand how to use your Business Page to build your brand on Facebook and connect with a 100′s or 1000′s of fans, while keeping your personal profile details separate.

Free Webinar Tuesday February 1 2011 – 8 – 9 PM Central Time

How To Separate Your Personal Profile From Your Business Page On Facebook

Fishing Lodge Web Design

We are a Canadian Company focused on providing Internet Marketing for Tourism and Travel Businesses in Canada, specifically – web design for Fishing Lodges. We cater to the annual cycle of small, seasonal lodges who service between 500 and 1000 guest per year.

Web Design and Business Development

We regard each piece of online real estate we build for you, as an asset established for your business. But, like a car without a driver, web properties are not much use without web marketing strategies.

Successful Website or Successful Business?

In my town, tourism businesses were the first to establish websites. In the early days of Web Design for Fishing Lodges, a tourism business site was considered successful if they ranked well in the search engines. These days, the tourism business themselves are successful if they are well represented in the Social Media arena.

Social Media Traffic vs Search Traffic

It’s important to understand the significant difference between traffic from the search engines and traffic from Social Media sources. Once you do, it will transform the focus of your marketing.

Search traffic comes to your website with interest, perhaps, but generally without any prior relationship to your business. Of course I’m not talking about people who search for your business name – those people know you, or have been exposed to you by word of mouth, print etc. By search traffic, I draw attention to the audience of new people who find you through the search engines – and I want to compare them to the audience of new people who may find you through Social Media Channels.

People who find you through organic search, or worse, through paid Google Ads, are starting a relationship with you from a cold start.

On the other hand, if people find you through Social Media, it is because one of their friends or family mentioned you online. When traffic lands on your site from a social media source, odds are much better that this person was referred to you through online word-of-mouth.

Referral From A Trusted Source

Word-of-Mouth marketing has always been recognized as The King for building sales. For this reason, all of our web design projects for Tourism Businesses like Fishing Lodges, Resorts, Camps and Outfitters – now include a strong component of Social Media Marketing.

Web Design for Fishing Lodges

Websites are getting easier to run – and we shorten your learning curve.

If you are a Camp Owner or Manager with a traditional static website that your webmaster must update, it’s time to invest in an upgrade.

If you are a Camp Owner with plans to sell your business in the next few years to a decade, it’s time to invest in establishing online real estate that will increase the resale value of your business.

As a Fishing Lodge owner, for example, you need to establish credibility and position yourself as an expert with a new guest before they will book a vacation.

The free training video was so good that I re-started it, and started frantically typing these notes on how to position yourself as an expert as the presentation went along.  You can scan a few highlights from the pages of notes I took, or go and sign up and watch the report for yourself here:  http://www.expertsacademy.com

Role One To Position Yourself As An Expert

You must be a researcher – a consumer of reports – go to every seminar, learn everything that the marketplace is saying about your topic.  Come up with a summary: what are the 5-7 strategies that the entire marketplace is talking about? These are the best practices that work, and in order to position yourself as an expert, talk about the research you have done.

Role Two To Position Yourself As An Expert

Be a results maker – show that you have made results doing the same thing. In other words, show the results you have attained by putting the best practices into practical use.

When you have these two skill sets, complete research and practical results, then you can position yourself as an expert because you have perspective on what is going on… you know what everyone else is doing – and you have also done it successfully and produced results. You have what it takes to position yourself as an expert and provide information and strategies that are invaluable to people who want to overcome the same challenges you have and create similar results.

12 positioning tools to position yourself as an expert. These 12 examples help you build credibility and help convince other people that you are and expert within your field.

1. Perspective. say you have perspective of the industry. challenge or problem, by showing that you have done the research and created results.

2. Philosophy.  You can show that you are an expert by your philosophy, if you look at the world in a different way, people will pay attention if your perspective will help them solve a problem or avoid a loss.

3. your personal path is your greatest credibility – you don’t have to show your wealth – they want to know about your struggles – and how you can save them time.  by figuring out what you accomplished… you have solutions.

4. Your position – your job title. People are often impressed by titles more than wealth. Share the various rolls and positions you have fulfilled. You are the creator of this, you are the author of that, a founder of this, a director, a ceo, – you must reference this in you bio in your video, in your speeches…

5. Popularity – we have the best selling, the most downloaded, the most views… Many beginning experts do not yet have these examples of social proof, but once you have these hooks you can stack on these to add credibility to your other accomplishments.

6. Partnerships – if you have ever partnered with another credible expert in your field, co-author, an non-profit – talk about them. You get borrowed credibility.

7. Progress – if you have taken a project from here to there, from bad to good, – tell those stories – they have come a long way – they got results…

8. Praise – testimonials,  how you are a good person, how your products and how they help people etc.

9. Press – performances – if you  have ever been in the media, share those stories of who you shared the stage with.

10. Paying clients – who has paid you as a client?  Experts who pay you, big or small

11. Promotions – when you are told about somebody by a third party, you gain credibility. Endeavor to enlist other experts to endorse and promote you.

12.  Product – to complete the journey of becoming an expert, you actually need to have something to sell. It can be ebooks, speeches, presentations – anything that you can package – now people can pay you for your help.

Guru Position Trifacta

You as a role model –

Service – the reason for all of this, is to help other people.  focus on doing things with purpose, with service, with care for your customers.

Where to get the goods:

Watch the report for yourself here:  http://www.expertsacademy.com

P.S. I’m not affiliated with the author and I do not get any compensation for recommending these videos.

This morning I found a treasure.

This morning I watched a seminar about Google Places and how
local search is changing because of the smartphone!

This webinar was soo good, that I watched it over from the beginning – and started taking notes!

Offline Hero’s Method Webinar Replay

Brief: This webinar is two things:

First, it outlines a detailed online marketing service that local business owners can benefit from. The author presents a complete package of identifiable services where local businesses can increase their exposure in organic and mobile search queries to Google.

Second, this webinar explains how an online local marketing expert works, and what you can expect if you might wish become an Online Marketing Consultant and provide these services to business owners. The course is aimed at individuals with an intermediate knowledge of web publishing and search engine optimization; someone who has completed all or most of Ed Dale’s Challenge.co

After introductions and background details were shared, the Offline Hero’s Method Webinar Replay got down to business by taking a look at some actual search results using Google Places.

Why is Google Places Important for YOUR Local Business?

I was really impressed by the statistics on the number of cell phones out there, the growth of the smartphone market – and I had not considered the implication that top search rankings could have in the mobile environment.

Cleared Up My Thinking

I admit it, I only went mobile just recently, and now that I’ve had first hand experience with using my ipod touch locally, the message in the Offline Hero’s Method Webinar Replay really cleared up my thinking about the real economic meaning to local business.

Local Is Where It’s At

Stats roughly show that 1 in 5 Google searches is a local search. Local is where things are going – Google is going local because the traffic is going that way. Five time more people have a cell phone than a computer,  smartphone growth is accelerating and is also the fastest growing segment of search – some anticipate hand-held will be the standard way to access the internet.

And yet, only 1% of websites are mobile-ready!

Be The First Option At Their Fingertips

Local business owners who recognize this opportunity stand to gain new business and customers – right now.

Taking steps can result in easy-to-attain first page listings on mobile search results, combined with the growth of smartphone internet access – and you have a push-button way to give local smartphone users an easy way to call you – right when they have a phone in their hands, and these days, smartphones can include a GPS guided map to your shop!

Top website rankings in for desktop searches in Google are great for people who are browsing at home – but top rankings in mobile searches can lead directly to bringing customers into your store.

This is hurting local business owners who have a website that is not Mobile friendly.

Is This Important For Your Business?

Are you a retail store? A restaurant? A service business? Do your customers come from several outlying communities?

Can you be found when someone searches Google on their mobile phone?

Your Mobile-Ready Business Assessment

Let’s follow the process in the Offline Hero’s Method Webinar Replay and go through a brief Business Assessment of your web presence.

First, lets compare searches in Google Mobile and Google Desktop and try to find your business. Search for keywords that match your service, and append your location when you perform the searches. If you are not on the first page, you could be.

Compare search results on Google for a mobile device vs a desktop device:

http://compare.offermobi.com/

If you already have a website, and you are already doing extra things to bring traffic to your website – then you should pay close attention to the massive growing trend of smartphone internet usage. If you have been considering the technology leap to upgrade your website to include a wordpress blog, but hesitating with making the change – keep a close eye on the mobile phone trends in the news – and check back here for Case Studies.

Lets take a look at what your website looks like when viewed by today’s smartphones:

See for yourself: Visit this site and enter your business website address. Do you have to scroll around? Or is there a simple, easy way to call or find your location?

What does your website look like on a cellphone?

Is your website Mobile Ready? Take the test!

Mobiready provides an amazingly detailed review of a full range of technical issues a website may have when viewed by a mobile device.  Fortunately, if your website is created with WordPress, there is a way to conform to all the protocols and provide a top-notch mobile experience that results in

Get Your Website Ready For Change

Updgrade your website to wordpress, customize the website-theme to match business marketing, include the Mobile Pack Plugin, and customize the mobile-theme to match business marketing.  Now you have a modular website that can be upgraded, change and customized with any of the latest developments in technology and communication.

How to get top placement in Google Placement Listings.

The author of  Offline Hero’s Method Webinar shared a process for gaining top listings in Google Places  with details on specific authority directories for her geographic location.  Here are my notes as I paraphrase her strategy:

Stage One – Authority Links

First, create a business listing in InsiderPages.com – use the same information in the Google Places listing – be sure to use the same business name, place and phone number etc, so you don’t trigger a manual listing review from Google. Use your Google Places Listing as your website when filling out your profile information – this link will add authority to your listing in Google Places, and will help you rank higher.

Next, created a business Listing in CitySearch.com – repeat the process above.

Finally, create the Google Places Listing

Stage Two – Social Proof

Get ten different reviews written for your listing in InsiderPages.com, and get ten reviews written for your listing in CitySearch.com – it’s very important to get genuine review from clients. Come up with creative ways to engage your audience and your clients to write a few words about your business.

Putting It Into Action

I’ve put together a short video showing some details as I review the present mobile readiness of one of my client websites.

Putting The Offline Hero’s Method It Into Action In Canada.

More reports to follow as we put together the Case Studies that will be the basis of our Google Local and Google Places Coaching and Consulting Services.

Offline Hero’s Method Webinar Replay