Daniel Hackett is a fly fishing guide. He spends his days fishing in some of the world’s most beautiful wilderness regions. He is the co-author of In Season Tasmania: A Year of Fly Fishing Highlights. Daniel was the Australia-wide winner of the OM4Tourism Hidden Jewel Award, and markets his business online.

Glenn: Hi Daniel, how important is the web to your business and why?

Daniel: The web is vital to my business. Web and Email based marketing generates more than half of all my new business. Through these tools I can ’sell’ my product with little actual time or effort involved on my behalf. Secondly, by using these tools I am able to keep clients up to date with my products, which increases repeat business levels and brand recognition.

Glenn: How do you approach marketing your business on the web? What has worked best for you?

Daniel: Websites are great, but I believe that they need to have the added value of being a resource that potential clients can use, in this case for keeping up to date on fly fishing in Tasmania. Many of these users will eventually become clients in one form or another. Linked to the website an Email database is paramount to keep clients up to date with new products, offers, and prompting business.

Glenn: How do people find your website? What strategies do you want to employ to increase the number of visitors?

Daniel: I advertise in the leading Australasian fly fishing magazine, FlyLife, and sponsor their internet forum. This is as far as my very meagre marketing budget can stretch. With that said, I authored my first book in 2007, In Season Tasmania - A Year of Fly Fishing Highlights, and have been published or have featured in articles within Australian Traveller Magazine, Outer Edge Magazine, FlyLife Magazine, Tasmanian Fishing and Boating News and Tasmanian Sportsfisher Magazine. Just having my name out there increases brand recognition, and as a consequence, visits to my website.

Glenn: In your experience, what are the most important factors that help in converting an interested visitor into a client?

Daniel: Consistent contact by getting them onto an Email database mailing list. This should be made available as a service through your website.

Glenn: What do you rate as the most important factors to take into account for a business website?

Daniel: Clean appearance, no typos, great photos, clear message.

Glenn: Any other recommendations or comments for a business owner wanting to market effectively online?

Daniel: Get a website that you can maintain and update yourself. Publish professional quality photos, and get help with the text if this isn’t your forte!

We upgraded and redesigned Daniel’s Riverfly website as part of his Hidden Jewel award, including search engine optimization. Also check out Daniel’s book In Season Tasmania: A Year of Fly Fishing Highlights.

Our OM4 Tourism clients often have some computer experience. However, most are new to the technology used in self managed websites.

I certainly remember at the beginning all the new terminology was a bit daunting for me too. To help you through this we’ve tried to make our client resource information easy to understand.

The user forum is also a chance to ask questions and read posts by other people in the industry. Most of our clients find that their questions are answered in these two places.

Having said that we are always keen to find ways to make setting up your website as smooth as possible.

Recently I interviewed Wendy Payne from the Seahorse Sanctuary in Kalbarri to find out how she found the process of managing her new OM4 website.

Jane: What were your first impressions of the OM4Tourism website setup service?

Wendy: Very professional approach. I felt that I was in good hands and talking to people who really knew about website design.

Jane: Were there any issues that remained unclear to you in the planning stages?

Wendy: To be honest, there was a lot of computer language that I was fairly unfamiliar with, but all of the basics that I needed to understand were explained and this was done in a manner that was easy to understand.

Jane: How did you find the design phase? Were you happy with the result?

Wendy: Very easy - just answering a few questions and giving as much detail on the overall structure that I needed. Already having the structure of the overall website in our old website helped a lot at this stage, so that the new website was familiar in content, but sooooooo very different in presentation to our old website. The planning of the website design was so well done, that once the website was put together there was very little that I wanted to change.

Jane: When you began learning to upload content and images, did you find the task daunting, exciting, liberating? Did you have enough up-front support and encouragement to take the first steps?

Wendy: I like to be able to do things for myself, so tried doing the initial stuff by just following the information on how to upload content etc. It was daunting at first, but only because it was a new system that I haven’t used before. By the time I had my second session, things were beginning become clearer. The next thing I did was contact you so that you could run through it all with me. Having already played with the website design first, this session was more valuable as it made more sense already having a feel for the system.

Jane: What areas were the most challenging for you?

Wendy: Oh well, I’m not really very computer literate, so everything really. The instructions provided are clear and precise though, so once you beat your fear of computers into submission, the rest is easy. If you’re not continually working on your website, it’s easy to forget how to do individual modifications, so if I haven’t added anything on for a week or two, I’ve sometimes forgotten how I did that modification last time. No problem - the instructions are clear and easy to follow.

Jane: What aspects of a website are most important for a business owner interested in marketing online?

Wendy: Definitely the overall professional image of the website design, but more importantly, the keyword search. If you don’t have this - you don’t have a website. It’s a bit embarrassing really, as we’ve had a website for 5 years, but it was really mostly being found by people that were looking for us specifically by name. The new website is helping so very much to gain business from people who’ve never heard of us. That’s very powerful!

Jane: Any other comments you would like to make?

Wendy: Just thankyou!!

A quick update to Jane’s post about getting onto page 1 in Google Search through Google Local search results.

If local leads are important to your business, then listings in Google Local Search can help you appear above the #1 ranked organic search results in the Google OneBox.

I’ve written a new article on the topic of Improving Your Rankings for Google Local Search.

Get listed. Get reviewed. Get cited.

I often hear from frustrated tourism operators who experience difficulties with their email service: messages disappearing, download problems, inadequate technical support, a mountain of spam, and complications when changing to a new ISP (internet service provider).

We now recommend that our clients move to using Google Apps, and before you groan at the thought of changing your email addresses yet again - you don’t have to.

Your existing email addresses can be used and simply redirected into your Gmail account. So you still receive and send from your existing addresses - via the Gmail interface.

You can still use Outlook or AppleMail if you prefer it to the Gmail browser, and I’ve never seen a more effective spam filtering system.

There are other important benefits to using Google Apps, as Glenn’s article, Simplify Your Email Life, explains.

To demonstrate that every small tourism operator can make the switch without pain, Glenn interviewed Deryck Brockhurst of Boshack.

Deryck rates his technical skills as a 2 on a scale of 1 to 10.

Have a read of the interview, and if you can still think of a reason not to switch to Google Apps, let me know by commenting here or going to the Forum discussion.

Going live this month is Captains by the Bay in Broome WA, who achieved a page 1 ranking in Google search results almost immediately. How did they do it?

After optimising and indexing their website with Google, they registered with Google’s Local Business Centre. This means when someone searches Google Australia for “Broome accommodation”, Captains appears on page 1 under Local Business Results.

As a destination-focused business, you can’t afford not to be registered with Google’s Local Business Centre - it costs nothing and also gives you a listing in Google Maps.

This is useful for your own site - once you have a Google Maps listing, you can capture a link that enables you to place the interactive Google map in your own site at no cost. It also makes it easier for people searching Google Maps for your accommodation or tour outlet.

Go to Glenn’s article on Google Local Search to find out how to register.

For tourism businesses, website development and design is like a coastline full of hidden rocks.

The choices you make right at the start can make the difference between a boat wrecked on the rocks and a yacht on the open ocean with wind in its sails.

I’ve written an article about the 4 most common myths we have come across when working with small businesses - particularly tourism operators. The myths are listed below, and you can read the complete article here: Website Development and Design - 4 Common Myths.

Myth 1. The best person to create my website is a graphic designer

If you were building a hotel, would you get the interior designer to choose the location, draw up the plans, construct the building, put in the wiring and plumbing, install the telephone and Internet system? Of course you wouldn’t!

Myth 2. When someone comes to my website, I need to grab their attention

Your website isn’t a billboard attempting to attract attention by distracting viewers from other things. It doesn’t need to shout, flash or entertain with moving images. It needs to inform - easily and quickly.

Myth 3. To create an effective website, all I have to do is put my brochure online

Transferring a brochure online to make a website is often the first step in online marketing, but a website is a bit like a sailing boat. It won’t go anywhere unless you remember to give it sails.

Myth 4. The more people who visit my website, the better

If 20 people enter Arcadia Bookstore and 1 person buys a book, then another 10 people enter Zenith Books and 9 people buy books - who wins? Arcadia got more visitors, but Zenith sold more books.

Tell us about myths that you’ve come across either by commenting here or by posting on our Tourism Marketing Forum.

A colleague told me today that although she is doing everything she can to optimise her website, and is getting lots of site visitors, very few of them are interacting with her via her website.

This set me thinking about what takes people that extra step from reading your stories to responding to your stories by commenting or making contact with you.

My colleague felt that trust might be an issue. As soon as someone clicks, responds, signs up, asks a question, they reckon you’re going to zoom in on them with the hard sell.

Another colleague recently mentioned the issue of confidentiality - many in his profession don’t want to lay themselves open to others and are reluctant to ‘trust’ the web medium, such as blog comments and forum posts.

We already know that building trust is an essential objective for all small businesses, and that this can be done by blogging your story to the world, by being authentically you and conveying your experience, expertise, track record and authority.

Then I came across this Smart Company blog post: Sell Like a Woman. If you’re male, don’t let the post title put you off! There’s an interesting point made here.

You can tell your story in two essentially different ways, and getting your head around this is important if you are going to market your tourism business effectively.

When you tell me a story, it can be all about you … or all about me. Yes, of course all your posts are going to be about you in some way - but the point is to look at what you are essentially conveying.

Are you saying to your readers “We do this” or “We offer that” or “We are great because”, or are you looking at your business from their point of view and enabling them to engage with you from their starting point? Are you essentially saying “You can do this” or “You can have this experience” or even “Look at these guys - they did it and so can you”?

For example, have a look at this blog post: Planning Your Great Ocean Road Drive Holiday.

Yvonne Hunter is a great blogger who understands how to give people what they want in order to build trust. The effect is to get you thinking, this looks interesting, I’d like to do that, I CAN do that. The post is about the reader, not about Yvonne, although it is based on her experience and she includes a link to the most relevant page on the website.

You will rarely, if ever, find a blog post by Yvonne that talks about her accommodation and how great it is. And yet, as her partner, Tim Kottek, told me recently:

“The site is now getting about 1000 visitors per month. The blog as well as the authority pages have helped the home page to a Google Ranking of 4 out of 10, with internal pages ranking at 2 and 3 out of 10. Three of the 10 most viewed pages are from the blog. And it is those popular blog pages that have lead to e-mail requests.”

So it is possible to build trust through your site content, which leads to enquiries, especially by blogging.

For some businesses, this takes longer than for others - and I suspect this is the case with my colleague - but persistence invariably pays off. In tourism, our experience is that it doesn’t take long at all to see a significant improvement in traffic and enquiries - but only if you are blogging effectively, keeping site content up to date, and giving people plenty of opportunities to click and contact you.

We launched our new OM4 Forums today, and immediately got an excellent question. I’ll pararaphrase it as follows:

What options are there for generic booking services? What do they cost, and do they tie an operator down?

In a moment I’ll answer that question partially and refer to three solutions that are worth looking at - RoamFree, ChannelManager and FrontDesk/V3.

But first a bit of background (free free to skip ahead if you just want to see the solution information).

Jane and I have been actively discussing the issues assocated with inventory management and bookings. It has arisen on multiple occasions as we help tourism operators migrate to our web platform, or establish a new web presence.

No worries, I originally thought, a bit of research and we can write up a useful article explaining the options.

As if.

Jane and I have spoken to more than a few solution providers. Even with their assistance, it is difficult even to understand the options. Let alone explain the vast number of permutations in a way a small to medium tourism operator will find useful. Too much information is not helpful. Neither is too little.

There are many choices on offer, and I sympathise with tourism operators, as it is easy to be confused. In general, the information you need to know is not available on websites. And in some cases (like which distribution outlets are included with online distribution solutions), we just haven’t been able to get the information are after. The websites of the solution providers are not up to date. Speak to the right person, and you will get answers. But it pays to know what questions to ask.

Add in to the mix that the story is very different depending on whether you are looking at bookings for accommodation, tours, events or restaurants. Or if you are associated with a destination.

Why so much complexity? The main reason is because things are changing so fast. New technology is changing the tourism industry in a big way. Technologies that emerged some years ago are now available in commercial form. And the industry is consolidating, with larger providers buying up smaller ones and integrating their solutions.

What does this mean for small to medium tourism operators?

Two concepts that are very important to understand are Online Distribution and Liquid Inventory, as they are driving major changes in the industry.

Online Distribution. For accommodation providers, Distribution used to mean rooms being booked by customers through travel/booking agents, tour operators, travel wholesalers and visitor centres. Online distributors emerged as the web matured and they have grown rapidly, to the point where online distribution is a major part of the tourism industry.

Liquid Inventory. I haven’t found a generally accepted name for this yet, so I tend to use the term Liquid Inventory. Liquid Inventory (rooms) can be offered through multiple distribution outlets (such as major travel websites like wotif.com and xpedia.com), and bookings made through any one outlet reduce the available inventory for all outlets.

When many distribution outlets use and dynamically update the same available inventory, the inventory level is liquid. Industry wide inventory liquidity is definitely not with us yet. But the networks are growing at a breakneck pace, and existing liquid inventory networks are already a force to be reckoned with.

With online distribution widsespread but liquid inventory not readily available, many tourism operators had to get used to allocating their inventory across several channels. If inventory sold out in one channel the operator would have to de-allocate the others to avoid over booking. Or just deal with over booking situations if and when they arise (just look at the airlines).

When a small number of outlets were involved, this wasn’t such a problem for the tourist operator. But when you have thousands of online booking outlets accessible, ranging from very large to very small, the problem of over booking is a lot harder to deal with.

With Liquid Inventory, a single available inventory level for an operator is dynamically updated no matter where a booking comes from. This means an operator can use a far wider range of distribution options, without having to manually manage allocations/de-allocations or worry about over booking. With such a wide range of options available, it is possible to test new outlets and optimise for profitability, instead of relying on a few distributors to deliver the goods year in year out.

With online distribution going from strength to strength and liquid inventory options becoming accessible, big industry changes are afoot. There are many choices available right now, and there are going to be winners and losers.

Jane will be posting some more detailed information in the future. In the meantime, here is a model that may help you assess your options.

Breaking Down the Problem

The first stage is to break down the problem into manageable chunks. We are first of all focussing on small to medium accommodation providers. While Jane and I were interviewing Shane Crocket of V3 Leisure, he proposed a generic model for tourism operators that struck us as very useful. While Shane’s company is one of the solution providers we are looking at, we found the approach was indeed generic and useful for assessing the options, so we have stuck with it (and even extended it a bit).

Question 1: Size/Type of Business

How big are you and what kind of tourism operation do you run? Options are quite different depending on your size and type of business. Our focus is initially on small accommodation providers, from 1 room to 50 rooms.

Question 2: Inventory Management and Direct Bookings

How are you going to manage your inventory (how many rooms you have available to be booked) and process direct bookings (counter, phone, fax, email)? Decisions you make here may have a big impact on how efficiently you can run your business. Small operators might manage inventory and direct bookings with pen and paper or a spreadsheet.

There are also entry level inventory management solutions available from a number of providers that let you record inventory electronically, with total rooms, direct bookings and availability all accessible to you. The three that we have been focussing so far are:

• ChannelManager
• FrontDesk/V3
• RoamFree

Front Desk, RoamFree and ChannelManager are three entry level solutions worth looking at in this area, with RMS and Hireum relevant once room numbers go over 20, or strata title management is involved. There are other solution providers as well, this is not a complete list of options.

Question 3: Own Website Bookings

How will you take bookings from your own website? For small to medium operators, own site bookings can be very important.

Your options here start with simply providing a phone number or email contact form to take enquiries. Or you can accept payments using a number of online payment providers. In both situations, you have to update your inventory manually.

Front Desk, RoamFree and ChannelManager all provide you with a facility to put a link on your website that enables visitors to book and pay online. Costs vary, and there may be setup costs, payment gateway / merchant account costs as well as booking service commissions involved (sometimes these are reduced or even waived if bookings are taken on your own site). Some providers give you a link to put on your site, which takes visitors to a third party site.

Some collect a planned visit date and number of nights and then take you to the third party site to show availability. Some providers offer options that may reduce your costs in return for a longer term tie in (up to 24 months), while others support more casual options.

Some of the solution providers mentioned offer solutions for tours and events, as well as accommodation. It is worth assessing tour and event bookings carefully. In our experience, usability issues are yet to be fully resolved in this.

Check with providers for full details. You may find it useful to go through your own scenario, write down your understanding of what happens and how much it costs. Then get the solution provider to verify your written understanding is correct.

Question 4: Online Distribution

Once you have sorted out inventory, direct bookings and own-site bookings, consider your options for online distribution. That means, how can your inventory be offered for sale through other online distribution outlets. These might include websites like Wotif.com, Xpedia.com, Stayz.com or LastMinute.com, through visitor centres, automotive clubs or any number of third party websites.

Online distribution options are many and varied, and changing rapidly. Basically, once you have your inventory recorded in one of the online inventory managers, you can choose to make that inventory available through other distribution outlets.

Whether or not your inventory is allocated or liquid (dynamically updated) across outlets depends on the solution provider. There are different technical means of achieving liquid inventory, and you may need to decide what is practical and effective for your business.

The fees you pay for various distribution channels can range from around 2-3 percent to over 30%. The effectiveness of the channels can also vary widely - just because a site gets a lot of traffic does not mean it will deliver bookings for you.

Some channels are very popular with operators, some less so. The three main solutions I have mentioned in this article - FrontDesk/V3, RoamFree, and ChannelManager - are quite different in terms of what distibution outlets they offer access to, and how much this access costs.

This is probably the most confusing and complex aspect of online bookings and inventory management. Good luck, and please share your experiences with us in the OM4 Forums if you think it will help other operators make an informed choice.

Question 5: Affiliate Commissions

So far questions have been focussed on an operator getting bookings for their own inventory. But there are now many options for tourism operators (tours, attractions, destinations, accommodation, restaurant or otherwise) to convert website visitors into bookings in return for an affiliate commission.

Here is how that might work. You run a website that has information on attractions in your area. A website visitor clicks on a Check Availability link from your website, and then decides to book one of the accommodation options they find. As the source of the lead, you are paid a percentage of the booking amount.

Affiliate commissions are not important for every tourism operator. But if they are potentially relevant for your, then it may be worth assessing what affiliate commission options are available and they whether it is relevant for your business.

Of the three main solution providers mentioned in this article, only RoamFree has an affiilate programme. You do not have to have inventory with RoamFree to partipate in their affiliate programme (altough no doubt RoamFree will try to make this attractive if you do have your own inventory). There are also other affiliate programmes (the subject of other articles). If this area is important to you, do your research.

OM4Tourism Involvement.

OM4 and/or OM4Tourism do not have a financial relationship with any of the solutions or booking providers referred to in this article. We don’t take commissions on bookings, or participate in affiliate programmes with the booking providers referred to. Our objective is to help OM4Tourism clients integrate with the booking solution of their choice.

We have researched solutions with a number of service providers. We are happy to talk to more. We won’t accept any money for looking at booking solutions or for writing about them. Solution providers don’t get to edit what we write, although we may ask them to check our material for factual accuracy and point out if they think we have anything wrong.

We do want to help tourism operators understand what their options are in this important area, and to make an informed choice. But we are not offering advice or recommendations. If you want specific advice, we do know of tourism consultants who will review your business requirements and come up with advice for you. Let me know if you want contact details.

Summary

So much for a quick and easy article. We have started this process, and will continue to write about it for some time I imagine. I expect we will see more consolidation, and better solutions and offers appear.

We live in interesting times. Stay tuned for some additional posts from Jane about specific solutions.

Once you are up and blogging, you’ll notice that you have the option to create categories for your blog posts.

It’s a bit like having a table of contents - it enables you to focus on the themes that are central to your site content.

So, for instance, if one of your themes is native wildlife, then it makes sense to have a category with that name.

If you are creating categories, they need to be visible on your site, so that readers can click a category and see all the relevant blog posts.

This means, for OM4Tourism clients, you’ll need to add the Categories widget into your sidebar so that they appear on your site. Our article on Changing the Contents of Your Sidebar explains how to do this.

You also have the option of adding tags to your blog post, and we highly recommend doing this.

Think of tags as your index. When someone clicks on a tag they see the ‘tag cloud’ - which is the equivalent of your blog index. They can then click to see more posts with the same tag - so it’s like looking in an index and seeing all the pages that include content that is relevant to that word or phrase.

This and many other online marketing tips appear in our support site OM4.com.au. For questions not answered there, go to our Forums.

We have recently launched a new website for VA Clare Valley, primarily a boutique wine business producing international quality wine, as well as olives, olive oil, red wine vinegar and honey.

Wineries are in a class of their own when it comes to marketing. They’re an attraction and a store, and often a restaurant and accommodation provider too.

VA Clare Valley’s focus is on selling produce, and the site has two objectives:

1. to attract potential visitors to South Australia’s Clare Valley wine region and encourage them to visit the cellar door, and
2. to enable produce to be sold online.

Our keyword analysis told us the words and phrases potential visitors and customers are keying in, and this guided us in structuring the site content.

Searchers are likely to find the site through destination searches on Clare Valley, and product-related searches. Google Analytics will enable VA Clare Valley to monitor this and adapt their content accordingly.

Many of the destination visitors are likely to be self-drivers, so the Getting Here section, with clear maps, is vital for conversion.

The Cellar Door & Shop enables VA Clare Valley to take orders online using PayPal, which takes a commission on sales of between 3.5 and 4%.

This article explains the benefits of using PayPal to sell online, and how to set this up yourself.

Above all, the site has engaging content likely to appeal to its prospective audience and convert them into paying customers - whether online or face-to-face.