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.

Going live recently is a new OM4Tourism website for Boshack.

Chrissy & Deryck Brockhurst offer Australian outback experiences within an easy drive of Perth, with a choice of lakeside camping, farmstay or hotel accommodation.

Notice that the home, tour and package pages all include a contact form at the foot of the page.

This is a strategy we have adopted and recommend to our clients, because we have found it increases the likelihood of site visitors getting in touch. Chrissy & Deryck are already seeing a significant increase in the number of enquiries they receive, because of the contact forms.

We believe this is simply because people will often have a half-formed question in their mind whenever they read a web page. Putting the form right there on the page makes it easy for them to put that question into words and click to send it to you.

Also notice the use of ‘outback’ in the domain name. This was a result of keyword analysis that told us this is an important keyword for Boshack.

This article explains more about choosing a domain name.

The OM4Tourism Forums have just been launched and are ready to welcome small-medium tourism operators.

The Marketing Discussion Forum creates a space to discuss marketing issues, directing questions to OM4Tourism or to other Forum users, and answering questions posted by others.

We know that tourism operators recognise the value in working together to boost the industry as a whole, and many smaller operators are relatively isolated from the wider tourism community. The Discussion Forum facilitates a sharing of marketing tips and information among those who are at the chalkface of tourism.

The Support Forum is there to support OM4Tourism clients in their online marketing, in particular with questions related to OM4Tourism websites. If this is you, ask away, and we will post answers as questions come in.

To register, simply go to this page, click on the ‘register’ link, and follow the prompts.

If you already have an OM4Tourism website, you can use your existing log-in name and password to get onto the Forum.

We look forward to seeing you there!

After a long, fascinating and challenging process, the OM4Tourism Hidden Jewel Awards judges have chosen the winners for 2008.

The National Winner is RiverFly Tasmania, created by fly-fishing guide Daniel Hackett.

Daniel knows Tasmania’s northern rivers like the back of his hand, and spends most of his working life knee-deep in water.

Sharing the adventure of trekking, camping and fishing one of the World’s heritage-listed areas with holiday-makers is his passion, equalled only by his dedication to conservation.

It’s this passion that lies at the heart of success for small tourism enterprises. Daniel couples this with sound business sense in targeting a lucrative niche market.

He has also created a stunning coffee-table book with professional photographer and fellow angler, Brad Harris. In Season Tasmania is a journey in print that aims to encourage Australians across the Bass Strait for a fly-fishing adventure of their own.

We are very much looking forward to working with Daniel in the coming weeks as he takes his business to the next level with online marketing.

The judges also chose a winner from each state and territory. All winners will receive an OM4Tourism Online Marketing Website, with Graphic Design and that vital Keyword Analysis to help position their businesses effectively online.

I’ve created a Winners Page that tells you about all our winners, and I will post further blogs as each of their online marketing sites goes live.

Winning an award gives small tourism businesses a real boost, but it’s hard for smaller operators to find the time and resources to put together an award submission.

That’s why we created the OM4Tourism Hidden Jewel Awards, and the result has been a long and fascinating list of tourism enterprises that deserve more attention.

We’ve seen a particularly impressive turn-out of entries from Tasmania and Queensland this year, and overall the businesses have been wide-ranging and imaginative - many of them clearly bursting with energy and potential for growth.

We’re right into the judging process for the 2008 Awards now, and as ever, choosing one business over another is proving challenging.

The first stage is to choose the national winner, and then we move on to selecting the state and territory winners.

From an initial shortlist of 40, each judge has chosen their top 3, which has given us a final list from which to sift out the Hidden Jewel for 2008.

Both John Walsh, executive producer of Getaway, and Quentin Long, publisher of Australian Traveller magazine, join us for the first time in judging the Hidden Jewel Awards, and both have been surprised by how difficult it has been to choose just 3 out of a possible 40.

The winner must be a quality enterprise that has something unique or unusual about it. It must be a genuine ‘hidden jewel’ - so those that already welcome thousands of visitors a year, have won a string of awards or enjoyed significant publicity in the past are unfortunately out of the running.

And the judges need to see the potential for the winner to benefit from the additional exposure that will come from the prize - a new online marketing website from OM4Tourism and a publicity campaign from PublicityShip.

Even with these clear criteria, we are struggling to make a choice, which only goes to show how many quality tourism businesses are out there - and how many remain relatively hidden from the mainstream travelling consciousness.

The name of the national winner will be in our hands by the end of today, and then we move onto the state/territory judging.

All winners will be announced on 20 March.

Last night we officially launched OM4Tourism’s unique model for website marketing to a select gathering from the tourism industry.

The enthusiastic support we received in response to Glenn’s captivating presentation was mixed with concern that perhaps we needed to be taken away by men in white coats!

Take a look at our new home page and you’ll see why. We are giving away websites and charging no hosting fees - and there’s no catch.

Instead, our revenue comes from the online marketing services we offer to clients who want us to help them with keyword analysis, writing web pages and blog posts, establishing e-newsletters and booking services, or running search marketing campaigns.

Our sites are designed to be self-managed by businesspeople, not technicians. The editing facilities at the ‘back end’ of the sites are user-friendly, and anyone who is used to word-processing will be able to pick up the basics very quickly.

What this means for tourism operators is you can have a fully self-managed website at absolutely no cost, with free tutorials from us to help you market your business online, using the built-in tools that come with your site.

Or you can hire our web designers and writers to do some or all of your online marketing for you.

For example, Goat Rock Texas is a site that we set up and are now hosting at absolutely no cost to the site owners.

The Croft family are managing the site themselves, happily uploading content and images, publishing blog posts and setting up their own banner artwork.

Periodically they receive an email tutorial from us explaining how to use the tools available to them within the site.

We are delighted to see watch the site develop naturally, infused with the family’s unique energy. It has lots of appeal for its target market and will no doubt draw plenty of attention.

Notice that the url contains ‘om4tourism’ - once the site is ready to cut over, this will disappear and the site owners will have their own domain name.

At the other end of the continuum is K2O, who also received a free site and hosting, but have purchased our online marketing services to carry out keyword analysis, establish the look they want for their site, populate the site with optimised content, and set up links and images.

We will also support K2O in monitoring Google Analytics for their site to measure its performance over time.

Given the excellent results we are seeing with other OM4Tourism sites, we are very confident.

You don’t have to create a whole new website to get better at online marketing.

Live History is an example of a site that we have converted to our platform, giving the business owners, Judith and Chris Cornish, more opportunities to get their story out to their target audience.

The new site has the same look and feel of the old one, and the content has been transferred to the new structure. So why is this one better?

Because it has all the online marketing tools that are vital for positioning the business, bringing in traffic, encouraging conversation, increasing conversion and boosting bookings. For example:

• Keyword analysis told us to put Hobart into the domain name to attract more searchers wanting things to do when they visit the city, helping to put Live History on the Internet highway instead of the backstreets.
• Like all OM4Tourism sites, this one is designed to be highly visible to search engines, bringing more traffic to Judith and Chris’s door.
• A blog with email subscription enables Judith and Chris to post regular news and updates to keep visitors engaged and enrich their site content.
• Clearer testimonials and accreditation are important conversion tools - they tell site visitors that this is a good quality experience.
• Easy access to booking and travel information with a prominent contact form helps visitors to incorporate the tour into their holiday and encourages them to enquire and book online.

In addition, Judith and Chris now have access to Google Analytics to help them track where their site visitors are coming from and what terms they key into Google to get to the site. They can then incorporate these search terms into their content to attract even more attention.

Here’s Judith’s response to the site set-up process:

Thank you so much to both you and Glenn for getting us set up with this new site. I know that it won’t be long before I am blogging with the best of them and our testimonials are flowing in from satisfied clients!

As Live History develops, Judith and Chris will be blogging their news regularly and uploading more images and testimonials. As they develop new performances, they can add new pages to the site very easily - if you can manage Word, you can create a page in an OM4Tourism website. And as the content builds over time, so will the authority and PageRank of the site, turning it into an online magnet for Hobart visitors.

Small tourism operators across the country are invited to register interest in the 2008 OM4Tourism Hidden Jewel Awards.

We launched the Awards in late 2006 because we were coming across so many wonderful tourism businesses struggling to get the word out.

This was a chance for those smaller operators to win recognition, without a prolonged and time-consuming entry procedure.

We decided to invite a panel of judges from the tourism industry. This meant all entrants came to the attention of some influential tourism icons, including Australian Traveller magazine and national tour company, AAT Kings.

State winners won some excellent media coverage - each seeing between two and four editorials in their target travel and lifestyle publications - and the national winner, NingalooBlue.com, are now the proud owners of an OM4 online marketing website.

This year, we have equally influential judges on the panel, and some amazing prizes.

We’re thrilled to be welcoming the Executive Producer of Channel 9’s Getaway travel show, John Walsh, to the panel this year. Respected travel publisher, Quentin Long, will be representing Australian Traveller, and Les Cox, CEO of AAT Kings, is once again bringing his contagious enthusiasm to the judging process.

Each state winner will get an OM4Tourism blog-enabled website with hosting, design package and keyword analysis to kickstart their online marketing.

The national winner will also get a publicity campaign targeting national print and broadcast media, with global internet distribution as well.

The entry procedure is straightforward and quick. Register your interest now and you’ll receive information shortly on how to enter. To register, go to our Hidden Jewel page and scroll down to fill out the form.

We are delighted to have launched our latest OM4Tourism site this week: Undara.com.au

Undara Experience is a fabulous tour company that took out the Queensland Hidden Jewel Award earlier this year, and has many other awards under its belt.

Take a look at the site.

It’s the kind of website that’s good to rummage around, one that draws you into all the fascinating material on the volcanic landscape, the native wildlife, and above all, the experiences to be had in this captivating corner of Australia.

On a practical level, there’s a helpful planning section and lots of support for self-drivers, maps, walk trails, facilities for corporate groups and schools, and links straight into Undara’s iconic events.

Notice that testimonials and awards are displayed prominently, and eco credentials are discussed in a separate ecotourism page - vital for conversion.

The Undara crew are excited about the new site and getting right into blogging straight off the bat. We’ve all very much enjoyed putting this site together and look forward to tracking progress as the site gains momentum.

We’ve just seen our first two sites designed specifically for tourism operators reach a Google PageRank of 4/10. This is an excellent result, and if you’re not sure why, I’ll explain.

An online marketing site is designed to get results.

It’s a dynamic system that attracts the site visitors you want, engages them in your content and converts them to paying customers.

To achieve this, your prospects first have to find your site, and many will do this by keying relevant search terms into a search engine - the top 2 being Google and Yahoo.

What Google “spiders” do when they search the web is decide which site pages are important enough to display in the ‘organic’ listing when someone searches on your keywords. By ‘organic’ listing, we mean the main listing on the left of a Google search results page, as opposed to sponsored links that have been paid for.

Here’s how Google explains PageRank to online searchers:

“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.”

So a PageRank of 4/10 within the first few months of going live is a very good result for NingalooBlue.com and GreatOceanRoad-Torquay.com.au - many sites never make it that high.

However, there are other factors that help their sites to be found by their target readers. Google continues:

“Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.”

This is where Keyword Analysis is essential. Having an authoritative site is important, but using the words and phrases that your prospects are keying in is vital. These are your keywords, and when Google spiders crawl the web looking for content that matches those keywords, you want them to find your site. Where, how and how often you use those keywords will help Google to make the match.

And before any of this can happen, Google has to be able to ’see’ your site in the first place - that means submitting your site to Google for indexing.

So - there are 3 vital steps here:

1. Create authoritative content on your destination or style of travel that attracts back links from equally authoritative sites.
2. Carry out Keyword Research & Analysis and incorporate your top keywords into your site content, headings and tags.
3. Submit your sitemap for Google indexing.