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.

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.

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.

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!

Cost-effectiveness is a top priority for small operators when it comes to marketing.

If the experience of Elizabeth Fleetwood is anything to go by, online marketing seems to offer the best solution.

Elizabeth runs Hobart Historic Tours, and is relatively new to online marketing. The path that led her there is probably familiar to many small tourism businesses.

“I had made some efforts to join in Tourism Tasmania’s international marketing efforts,” she told me. “But I find it too expensive and cumbersome for my operation. For example, it would simply not be worth my while to go to ATE [the Australian Tourism Exchange], as the minimum cost would be about $10,000.”

Another avenue to reach international visitors is through the magazines that go into hotels that attract overseas visitors. But again, advertising in these publications is prohibitively expensive for a small operation like Elizabeth’s.

“I think the future is more likely to be on the web,” she concluded. “And I am more likely to look at marketing opportunities in that medium.”

So far, Elizabeth has concentrated on links, including Discover Tasmania, which brings most of her online enquiries, and the Tasmanian Travel & Information Centre, with brochures in the Centre’s physical office in Hobart, which still brings the majority of her bookings, thanks to a great staff who know her product well.

She has recently signed up with BookTasmania, an interface that places her product on travel distribution sites at her discretion on a commission-only basis, while allowing a booking system directly linked to her own site.

Linking out to other relevant sites to encourage back links is a good strategy for achieving higher search ranking, and you can read more about how Elizabeth is doing this in my blog post.

With the percentage of international visitors booking her tours now at 40%, Elizabeth’s attention is focusing on the quality of her product and marketing online. Getting these two things right will take her a long way towards building her business cost-effectively.

Here’s a tourism business that’s poised for success with an international market.

A River Bed is a self-contained retreat at Airey’s Inlet on the Great Ocean Road.

Already doing well domestically, Wendy Deighton is looking at ways to get the message out to potential visitors from overseas.

Given that the Great Ocean Road is a highly popular destination, we believe Wendy’s best bet is to have a presence on dynamic destination-focused sites, and this reflects her own plans to forge strong online links.

She is already listed on OzStayz, GreatOceanRoadHolidays.com.au and we have just put her in touch with Tim Kottek and Yvonne Hunter at GreatOceanRoad-Torquay.com.au.

These sites will certainly help to bring her attention from an overseas audience.

She is also keenly aware of the need for thorough keyword research to attract more visitors, and recognises something that we have also recently discovered - ‘kangaroo’ is one of the most highly searched wildlife terms!

Kangaroos have been seen on the front lawn and often on the other side of the river which guests can view from the studio - something that will definitely help her to get the attention of overseas visitors wanting a truly Australian experience.

Wendy also points to the difficulty some small operators face when clients want them to arrange every aspect of their trip for them.

Tourism operators aren’t travel agents, and you don’t want to spend time organising a complete holiday when you only benefit from one small part of the package.

Creative packaging with other tour operators in the same region can give overseas visitors exactly what they’re looking for though. Then all they have to do is book transport - very easy to do online.

In addition, each operator involved in the package promotes the whole deal, which brings more attention to you.

Beyond this, linking into the best destination sites and relevant online travel agencies means even if you get a direct enquiry from a high-maintenance client who wants more than you are able to offer, you can refer them to your affiliate site.

By funnelling destination searches into an effective site with recommended tours and accommodation neatly packaged - we believe operators such as Tim, Yvonne and Wendy could be onto a winner.

Targeting your market is a much more precise process online, because you can find out exactly what people are searching for, what search terms bring them to your site, and which ones keep them there the longest.

Interestingly, as this article explains, online searchers are looking for more and more specialised information. And this is where niche businesses like yours can benefit enormously.

But how do you capture the searchers who are looking for the services, products or experiences you offer?

The answer is through intelligent keyword research - I say ‘intelligent’, because it isn’t just a matter of looking at the most popular search terms. You need to find terms that are more precisely associated with your business, with fewer actual searchers.

For example, a business that offers dolphin encounters will be competing for attention on the search term ‘dolphins’, which attracts over 7,000 searches a day. But ’swim with dolphins’ and ’swimming with dolphins’ are each keyed in 96 times a day.

Here’s an opportunity not only to publish content that attracts a niche, but to attract a more precise search audience. You know from the search term exactly what they’re looking for.

It’s important to note here that ‘dolphin swimming’ gets 22 searches and ‘dolphin encounters’ just 4 a day. Knowing this is vital to your success. You could guess which phrases are being keyed in, but if you know, then you have a much better chance of matching your content to those phrases.

Remember too that the number of people visiting your site is less significant than the number of site visitors who find what they’re looking for on your site. Even more important is the number who book. So attracting people who are clearly looking for precisely what you offer is more important than attracting thousands looking for all sorts of other experiences and information.

How do you find out what searchers are looking for? I used Wordtracker’s free service for the figures given above. You can also take out a Wordtracker subscription to get access to more detailed keyword analysis.

Once you have keywords that are significant but not huge, you have a real opportunity to use them in your content, remembering to apply good search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques to attract people searching on those terms.

Glenn explains keyword analysis further in this article.

For small operators in particular, knowing your market is at the root of business success. It means that not only can you offer exactly what they’re looking for, but you can reach them and communicate with them effectively.

The Rainbow Connection is a useful example of a business that has a clearly defined market, and uses that knowledge to build business.

As the first and only gay and lesbian designated accommodation in Central Australia, the business is ideally positioned to corner a growing and lucrative market segment. Around 80 per cent of guests come from overseas.

“Our guests are looking for stylish, soft adventure experiences and iconic visitation,” said The Rainbow Connection’s Phil Walcott.

“They are aged from early 20s to late 70s, gay or lesbian (including transgender, intersex etc.), cyberspace savvy, professional, with a medium-high level of disposable income.”

Knowing the market well means understanding that a significant proportion of guests will find the accommodation through online search, coming directly to the site or via the major gay and lesbian online associations: GALTA (Gay & Lesbian Tourism Australia) and IGLTA (the International Gay & Lesbian Travel Association).

Phil is Regional Director of GALTA for the Northern Territory and finds that ‘bundling’ of product through GALTA is a highly successful strategy. GALTA works hard to support similar businesses around Australia and has a presence at significant events across the country.

Linking to organisations and agencies that target your market is essential, and needs to go beyond listings to proactive packaging and participation in collaborative marketing initiatives.

“We have benefited from forging strong links with mainstream operators locally, domestically and internationally, and with RTAs [regional tourism associations], STOs [state tourism organisations], ITOs [inbound tour operators] and Tourism Australia.”

Phil also seeks out links and listings on other relevant sites and ensures that The Rainbow Connection is marketed through the international gay and lesbian Spartacus Guide.

Getting the word out is only part of the picture though. Once travellers find the site, effort goes into personalised email contact, and The Rainbow Connection keeps in touch with past guests through email, encouraging word of mouth marketing.

This is a market that values personal service and attention to detail, so this kind of follow-through is vital.

Significantly, the marketing strategies that The Rainbow Connection has found most effective don’t involve expensive advertising campaigns. Online marketing is bringing and retaining virtually all their guests, along with a presence at carefully targeted events, and one important international guide listing.

Success comes from a clear knowledge of where their prospects are, how they research travel, and what they are looking for.

Having your website pages indexed by search engines such as Google is a vital part of your SEO.

So when you upgrade your site, or make any changes that result in new URLs for your pages, don’t neglect the index.

This means ensuring that every page gets indexed, not just your home page, and that redirects are planned and implemented.

Having every page indexed gives searchers more opportunities to find you because more specific content is crawled by the spiders.

For example, Undara Experience has a page on the Savannah Guides in their site. When you key ‘Savannah Guides’ into the Google search bar, a link to this page appears on page 1 of the search results.

Our recent upgrade of the Undara Experience website has made a big difference to the amount of content Google has indexed.

Their old site had some excellent content - but the Javascript menus made for a great spider trap, so only 23 of their pages were indexed.

Less than a week after going live, almost twice the number of pages were indexed, and now they have 66 pages in the Google index.

We also set up redirects from all their old pages to the relevant content on their upgraded site - a vital part of any website revamp or upgrade.

Just like setting up postal address redirects if you move office, you need redirects set up for every one of your indexed pages. Otherwise when the index brings up one of your old pages during a search, clicking on the link will give the searcher a ‘Page Not Found’ result, and the link might be removed.

The same goes for sites linking through to your site. As soon as they realise the page is no longer there, they may simply remove the link, and lost inbound links are going to be detrimental to your business.

There are a few ways redirects can be established. The best way is to use an Apache 301 redirect that tells search engines the page has been permanently moved.

When a site upgrade is involved that will change the URL of any indexed page:

1. Get a list of every page indexed by the search engines (you can do this by entering site:youraddress.com in the search box of Google and Yahoo).
2. For each page indexed, record the old URL and the new URL.
3. When you upgrade your site, make sure a redirect from the old page to the new page is set up.
4. When your site changes over, test each of the old page URLs to test the redirects are working.

Implementing 301 redirects is quite technical, so make sure your web developer knows what to do.