Marketing: How To Promote Your Hotel Website Effectively

How To Promote Your Hotel Website Effectively - And For Free!

Written by David Carruthers

The old adage - "build it and they will come" has been disproved as a fallacy time and time again. As a hotel or guesthouse owner it is crucial that you understand that you need to do more than just build your site. But how do you go about promoting it to potential guests?

You have probably heard repparttar buzzwords - optimisation, search engine submission, rankings, tracking, reciprocal linking, analytics etc. Unfortunately these buzzwords describe repparttar 119610 activities you need to be doing to make your website visible to repparttar 119611 world and potential guests.

Of course as a busy hotelier it is difficult for you to find repparttar 119612 time to learn all of these techniques and apply them to your website.

Can I suggest a free solution? Yes, completely free! Try Web Ceo.

Web Ceo can be downloaded free of charge (there are paid versions but repparttar 119613 free version will be more than adequate for most independent hotels) from www.webceo.com. But what does it do?

Web Ceo takes you through repparttar 119614 process in distinct stages and includes great information about why each stage is necessary and how to to carry out each technique automatically (using repparttar 119615 free software).

Keyword Research This involves identifying repparttar 119616 keywords that web surfers use to search for your hotel (see Who's Looking For Your Hotel?). Web Ceo helps you identify these as well as recognising alternatives which are being searched for. The programme also provides you with repparttar 119617 number of competitors who are seeking to be listed for similar keywords. By applying an index number you are then able to identify searches that may not be so competitive (eg 'London Hotels' has almost 8 million competitors whilst 'discounted London hotel' has only 800). You may then choose to target searches where you can achieve higher listings when optimising your web site.

Site Optimisation After identifying your keywords, Web Ceo then provides you with optimisation advice. Humans and search engines treat a web page differently! The key issue for search engines is information and Web Ceo helps you ensure your site is sufficiently optimised with your keywords, but not over-optimised (stuffed with keywords which could get your site banned from repparttar 119618 search engines). Site optimisation involves adjusting title tags, meta tags, content, positioning, alt tags etc. It does this before submitting your site to repparttar 119619 search engines.

Google Adwords vs. Direct Mail

Written by http://www.earthquakestudios.com

We recently ran a test to see whether Google Adwords could outpower traditional direct mail advertising. Here is how we did it. We created a new Adwords campaign choosing a few of our favorite targeted keywords, mainly keywords such as “small business web design”, “custom web design” and “promotional print services”. We set a budget of $500 for repparttar

whole campaign with a ceiling of $20 per day per keyword. Also, we set repparttar 119609

campaign to target two regions, California and Florida in this instance. At repparttar 119610

end of

week we ran out of money and only had 1 valid customer contact. That’s right, 1! We assume that repparttar 119612

rest of

clicks were either trigger-happy Web surfers, potential clients that moved on elsewhere or perhaps our competition clicking on our ads to help us kill our budget faster. That’s right, we said it! Anyone that has worked with repparttar 119614

Google Adwords program knows about repparttar 119615

obvious problems with competitors clicking on your ads. It has become a part of repparttar 119616

“waste” formula for many companies. For our company however, we try to minimize as much budget waste as possible, especially when many keywords cost over $5.00 a click for a top sponsored position in Google.

We turned to our now favorite method of reaching our target audience, good old-fashioned DIRECT MAIL! In our opinion, there is simply no better targeted way to spend your marketing budget and have results to prove your efforts. We set up a new postcard campaign with our logo, marketing message and a call to action. Then we sent it out to our target list of 1,000 companies. Total cost was $500 for postcard production & postage, and a day or two of building repparttar 119617 list. Guess what? We had over 75 calls that we could track based on repparttar 119618 postcard message. Out of those 75 calls, we have already begun work on 4 projects. Not bad if you compare those numbers with what Google Adwords did for us. Just give it a try and let us know how it works out for your company. It may just sway you towards cutting back on your Adwords budget and allocating those dollars towards more productive marketing means.

Here are 5 rules to follow if you want to create a successful direct mail campaign:

1. Make sure that you build repparttar 119619 right list. Instead of going out and spending thousands of dollars on a bulk list from a mailing list company, we suggest that you take repparttar 119620 time to build your own hand-picked winners. Take a couple of hours a day and visit repparttar 119621 Chamber of Commerce websites that are in your target region. Most of these sites will have all of their business members listed by category with company name, address and phone number. That’s right… FREE LEADS. A little time & sweat on your part could save you a bundle.

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