Why Use Facebook?
Beyond the simple and staggering number of people who use Facebook, there’s a certain mindset to the community website, it’s about sharing positive experiences and linking to content worth sharing with friends. Since Facebook is about social community, linking to favourite pubs and eating establishments is just one more way for people to tell their friends who they really are.

How much does it cost to market with Facebook?
It’s free. Seriously, building a Facebook page costs nothing except an hour of your time to assemble some text, a few photographs and  a little bit of technical know how. Once you have the basic content together, setting up a Facebook profile is completely free for your company.

How to setup a Facebook profile for your restaurant
Setting up a Facebook page is actually very simple, first you need to visit Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/pages/ and click the  Create Page link.  The next step will ask you to select your business type, just follow the picture here and select your local business as a restaurant.

Next, let’s add the title of your page. This should be the name of your restaurant or something very similar, often if you have a commonly named restaurant (There are over 700 Crown Pub’s in England for example) you may need to add a descriptive phrase such as the town or area to the title.

Finally, you need to verify that you are in fact a human being by typing a series of letters and then you can create your restaurant’s Facebook page. If you don’t already have a personal profile, Facebook will ask you to create one but don’t worry, it’s also free and easy.

Marketing with Facebook
Once your restaurant has a page of Facebook, you can easily upload some photographs and a brief description. It’s also possible for you to add your restaurant’s hours of operation, specials etc to help people know more about your business.

Since Facebook works through social networking, you’ll want to tell your local ‘real world’ customers about the new addition, you can run a small promotion in store and give away a free lunch once a month to somebody on your new fan list. Once your fan list starts building, each friend of your new addition will see that they’ve joined your page! That’s the best “word of mouth” advertising you could ask you.

What are keywords?

Simply put, keywords are the phrases that people would type into popular search engines such as Google with the hopes of finding hotels in your area, they’re the phrases you want to promote on your website to help people find you.

For example, if you’re a restaurant in Fredericton you want to have phrases such as:

• fredericton restaurants
• restaurant fredericton
• where to eat fredericton
• fredericton dining
• great food fredericton

These phrases are popular patterns for finding where to eat, they’re what your visitors type into search engines if they’re looking for food so rule #1 … keywords is really less about writing keywords and more about thinking about the keywords your visitors put into Google when they’re looking for your hotel.

How to use Keywords

There are a few places on a website that you’ll need to place your keywords to be effective:

1. <title></title> – this is the title of your web document
2. <meta keywords /> – describes the document to Google
3. <h1></h1> – the headings of your document
4. filename.html – the name of your physical document
5. <img alt /> for image alt attributes
6. the body of your content

These six areas represent the six key areas that a search engine optimization expert will attempt to streamline your content to highlight keywords but an important note is that no matter how important SEO content may be, quality content that people want to read is even more important!

The Secret Seventh Step

The seventh area that is critical for marketing your hotel online is a process called inbound links, these links are critical for building traffic and online reputation for specific keywords and is accomplished by ensuring that your keywords are linked from other websites back to your hotel. Did you notice earlier in the article I wrote “… if you’re a restaurant in Fredericton you want …” and I hyperlinked the phrase “restaurant in Fredericton” to http://www.isaacsway.ca/? That’s because I designed the restaurant website for Isaacs Way and I want Google to know that the website is all about the keywords “restaurant in Fredericton“. This simple process, repeated dozens of times across websites will help Google understand the main business of the website and improve the ranking of the restaurant.

A similar process should be used for your hotel.

To use this theme all you need to do is download the free WordPress theme from my website and install it on your own WordPress website. If you don’t know much about WordPress, don’t worry I can help get a website for free by offering you $75 back in online promotions with Google and Yahoo plus free installation of this great theme and WordPress on a free domain name when you host with BlueHost, the same company that hosts my websites.

The tool quickly added a new menu to the side of your WordPress administration panel in which you can easily add or remove up to 10 special links. You’re welcome to download the plugin for free, to help make your website work even better.

Understand that before people give you their contact details, you need to peek their interest and build their trust. Nobody wants to receive unsolicited emails, junk mail or spam so you need to effectively communicate what the mailing list will be used for and that’s where peeking interest comes in, use your list to promote contests, special offers and seasonal events which appeals to your clientel. They’re far more likely to sign up for your lists if they know what they’re going to get out of it.

If you are promoting a restaurant you must always make sure that your restaurant is providing people with something that they want rather than need. Remember, building a list is about building a marketing base and more than any other business, restaurants and a luxury not a necessity.

Once you have people subscribing to your list, use a simple tool like Google Docs to manage your information. There’s no reason to invest in expensive mailing package to start just a simple spreadsheet will do it for you. Scared of spread sheets? Don’t be, for the purpose of list building they’re just rules columns and rows on paper. Add a column (along the top) for each aspect you want to track such as First Name, Last Name, Email, Address etc. and for each (along the side) add a new list member.

Remember to send each list member a personalized welcome message and greeting, if you’re lucky enough to have access to some information about your customer such as a business card keep it handy and next year send out a special email to them reminding them that your restaurant is a great place for holiday parties, or just to say happy holidays. Building lists is about building and maintaining communications so make sure you don’t forget the main purpose of your list is people and you’ll do great!

Link Building is a generic Internet term used to describe the building of links from other websites to your own, it’s the single most important part of establishing an online reputation and often ignored by business owners. Let’s take a look at several methods for building links to hotels and how you can make the most of free online marketing solutions.

Ask Other Hotels for Links

Many people would never consider asking other similar hotels or bed & breakfasts for a link but why not? One of the best ways to generate links in your industry is to trade links with other similar establishments across the country. Add a page to your website and list 20 hotels across the country that you’ve stayed at or enjoyed, then ask each of them to do the same. Each link acts as a vote for each other, so remember to only link to businesses you want to promote!

Tourism Operator Trades

If your hotel has nearby tourism operators such as whale watching or fishing, place a list of nearby ‘things to do’ on your website linking to each of them and ask each local tourism operator to do the same back to you. Often websites forget to swap links to compliment each other but adding local restaurants and hotels to a tour operator website is a wonderful way to increase business and traffic for both sites.

Associations and regional authority links

Does your town run a local tourism website? Make sure that you’re listed on it with a link back to your own website! Also look around at the associations and business groups you’re a member of to make sure that you have a profile on their website and that your business is linked back to your own website. These free listings are vital to building your authority through links but they’re also often well placed and promoted themselves, so driving business to your website from them is a bonus!

Operate localized and specialized tourism blogs

An often over looked resource for high quality links is to become a directory service yourself! Take the time to register a domain name using specific keywords in your area, for example I run a website about the best interior design schools called http://best-interior-design-schools.com/ where I promote the best design schools. You can easily run a similar website for your local travel and tourism professionals, giving you easy access to a high quality link!

Add your website to directories and list websites

Add your website to services such as dmoz.org and yahoo.com, these services offer high quality links as well as a constant stream of web surfers looking for specific information.

Wikipedia and other Wiki Websites

Online encyclopedia giant wikipedia.org is a fantastic place to link your business from, as long as you remember to follow their guidelines. Wiki’s are user controlled so be aware that anything you post there may be altered by other users and also keep in mind that your business should have some relevance to the service you’re posting details on. Wikipedia for example is first and foremost an encyclopedia, so make sure your business deserves a listing before posting one on the service or it will be deleted.

Article Syndication

Post articles on services such as EzineArticles, GoArticles, iSnare to reach more of an audience, article marketing is an easy way to quickly post your articles to thousands of web sites, best of all they all love to post back to you!

Isaac’s Way Restaurant

Located in the heart of Fredericton, Isaac’s Way Restaurant is a popular destination for business travelers, local diners and of course tourists who love eating on the patio or enjoying the jazz atmosphere the restaurant promotes. The business owners use Twitter regularly to notify clients of upcoming specials, contests, patio hours and other big events – @isaacsway

Fredericton Weather Reporting

Knowing what to expect from the weather is one of the big concerns travelers experience, but using the @wxFREDERICTON weather channel visitors can receive updates live to their cell phones to help keep track of what the weather is like in the provincial capital.

The Harvest Jazz and Blues Festival

One of Fredericton’s biggest events and certainly the coolest, the Harvest Jazz and Blues Fest uses Twitter to announce new lineups, event dates and keep the community informed outside the primary festival season.

The Fredericton NB Tweet

Put together by Bill Wren, the @fredericton_nb tweet stream is a summary of all things happening in the city and promotes a ton of local Fredericton events, many of which wouldn’t be large enough to make traditional media.

CBC New Brunswick

The CBC New Brunwick (cbcnb) (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) is a mainstream radio news station here in the city as well as an online news source. Their profile regularly updates on local news, weather and community actives of interest to travelers.

Do you know of any other Fredericton tourism twitter users? Please let me know, I would love to share them with the world!

Description

The Simple Social Media Thought Bubble Icons are a free collection of popular social media icons, designed to be used on your website or web application. This collection of 15 common social networking websites is intended to be a series of simple, easy to integrate icons.

Download the file for free.

Installation

To install these icons onto your website, upload the complete installation folder to your website image hosting directory. You may then include any image or size for your website needs.

For example, place the following code on your web page:

<img src=’http://[YourWebsiteAddress]/images/social-media-icons-thought-bubbles/blogger-32.png’ />

License

This artwork is free artwork; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. Please leave this readme file unmodified, as recognition to the original artist.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this artwork; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA

To see what major search engines see, take a look at our free SEO checker found at seocheck.getawaygraphics.com. This tool was original designed as an internal tool for our development team to ensure quality marketing and online promotion for our clients so it’s not the prettiest tool but it gives you a great idea of what major search engines can see.

Why does it matter?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) isn’t really about making it possible for companies like Google or MSN to find you, it’s about making it possible for people who have never heard of you to find you. If you think of major search engines as a blind person, then you begin to understand that the single most important aspect of your web site is the text you display and that by extension the better the text you display, the more people can find you.

We call it organic traffic, it’s designed to save you countless marketing dollars.