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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.

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 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.

My previous post went on a journey to find out where travellers are likely to end up when they research travel experiences online.

One of my searches - for an interactive dolphin experience in Western Australia - took me to 2 specialist operators: Naturaliste Charters and Rockingham Dolphins.

So why did these operators get my attention?

1. Relevant content, optimised for search

Well, for one thing, they appeared high in Google’s ‘organic’ search list.

These are the links that appear through a process of natural selection on the left-hand side, as opposed to the sponsored links listed on the right and sometimes at the top.

Their position in the organic links tells us that Naturaliste Charters and Rockingham Dolphins carry authority in the eyes of Google. To achieve this, the sites are search-optimised and contain relevant content (i.e. the content matches my search intentions).

2. Inbound links

It’s also likely that both sites are getting some quality inbound links, as this is another way the search engines decide on a site’s overall authority.

The best way to achieve this is to link to other high-ranking sites and encourage them to link to yours. Google checks where the links are coming from and only gives you brownie points for authentic links from relevant sites.

Naturaliste Charters has some excellent links at the foot of its home page, which are a useful resource for site visitors and will serve to encourage back links from those sites.

But while a high ranking will bring you traffic, it won’t necessarily hold the attention of your visitors or convert them to bookings.

There are certain features of a site that help to keep your prospects’ interested enough to have a good rummage around. Both Naturaliste Charters and Rockingham Dolphins held my interest for different reasons, but I’m going to focus on Rockingham Dolphins because they kept me onsite for longer.

3. The travel experience

First, I could immediately read not just about the tours available but about what it’s like to swim with wild dolphins. And the good quality images help to tell the story visually. This all confirms for me that I want to share this amazing experience - I want to “be there, doing that”.

Tourism Australia research tells us that inbound visitors to Australia are “experience-seekers” first and foremost. So the experience needs to be paramount in your online content.

4. Personality and passion

It’s easy to get to know the crew through their profiles, which communicate their personality and humour in just the right measures. There’s also some interesting information on the history of the company that conveys the passion that led Terry to set up the business.

A conversational style with lots of personality is something that Tourism Australia also encourages in marketing material, since research shows that this is what visitors find most engaging.

5. Awards and affiliations

There’s also plenty of credibility in evidence on the Rockingham site, with awards and environmental affiliations. They now have my trust.

So don’t be afraid to blow your own trumpet - this is a vital part of the conversion process.

6. The booking process

In practical terms, if I want more detail I can download a brochure (quickly) and the information on booking and getting there is easy to find and clear.

If site visitors have to work hard to find out what their options are and how to make a booking, you could well lose them.

7. The all-important blog

There’s only one thing missing for me from these sites: a stream of news and stories that I can read and maybe even subscribe to. Naturaliste Charters does have a newsletter that visitors can subscribe to, but having news on the site is more immediately engaging and likely to lead to more subscriptions.

Blogging is vital for tourism operators in today’s online travel environment, and is an easy way to post regular updates and news. Site visitors can subscribe to a blog by email, or via an RSS feed which means they can receive your news stream without giving their email address - some visitors will prefer this.

Blogging also helps your search ranking, attracts online browsers through blog search engines (such as Technorati), engages visitors who are used to a more informal, newsy style of content, gives you more opportunities to link to other sites, builds a more comprehensive portfolio of content on your site, adds personality, and encourages interaction through comments.

I’m delighted to be launching OM4Tourism - a site dedicated to online marketing resources for small to medium tourism businesses.

We decided to launch a site just for tourism operators because:

• you have told us how important the Internet is to your business success, and
• we believe small tourism businesses offering unique experiences have a great deal to gain from online marketing.

At PublicityShip, we have already enabled small businesses to grow through online marketing. To find out exactly how our very first online marketing clients, ocularists Paul & Jenny Geelen, achieved phenomenal success purely through online marketing with us, check out this case study.

We have continued to develop our services since then, and established our first two tourism sites: NingalooBlue.com and GreatOceanRoad-Torquay.com.au

Why Tourism?

Small tourism businesses offering unique experiences have far more to gain from online marketing than large operators, wholesalers or online agencies.

Why? Because with smart online marketing, you can now reach your target customers directly, wherever they are in the world, placing you on a level playing field with bigger businesses. To find out exactly why this is happening now - and why Glenn turned his life upside down to create businesses based on this model - read this article.

We also know that the tourism industry is rapidly responding to the enormous changes occurring due to the widespread availability of broadband. Travellers are researching, booking and writing about their experiences online, and the rate of growth is extraordinary.

The popularity of blogging is growing fast too, which is good news for tourism because blogging represents a fantastic way to help your clients understand the experience you offer them, in a way that can be much more authentic and up close than a website on its own.

Scan some of the 1.7M+ travel postings on Technorati travel blogs for a while, and get a feel for how many travellers are sharing their thoughts and experiences using blogs as the medium.

This is why we have developed online marketing strategies and services to help tourism operators market themselves online.

How We Can Help

Most tourism businesses have websites. But a website is not a marketing tool on its own. Keyword Analysis, Search Marketing, Content Marketing, Email Marketing and Affiliate Marketing offer significant opportunities for tourism operators to reach travellers while they are researching and planning their trips, and to increase bookings and visitor numbers.

We’ve put together a carefully researched and tested set of services, that will enable you to get online marketing at your own pace, spreading the cost and drawing our support as much or as little as you need us.

We can also guarantee dedication. Travel and tourism is close to my heart, having spent six years working as a travel writer and then editor of national travel industry magazine, Traveltalk. This brought me face to face with a wide range of tourism operators and fired up my determination to help this passionate group grow their businesses.

After joining Glenn Nicholas and Julia Sutton as manager of their new business, PublicityShip, in 2006, I established the Hidden Jewel Awards for small tourism operators because we saw how these businesses were struggling to enter the spotlight at established state and national awards schemes.

Thanks to Glenn’s extensive experience in business development and IT, I also quickly learned the ins and outs of online marketing, and recognised the potential for tourism operators to take advantage of the Internet’s level playing field. Since then I have been itching to launch this site.

We Want to Hear from You

We’re dedicated to helping you market your business online, so that you can claim your share of the growing number of travellers planning their holidays online. So do contact me with your feedback, requests and suggestions.

To kick off a few ideas, I’ve just published an article based on interviews with 12 tourism operators from around Australia. It examines some of the most common challenges faced by businesses marketing to overseas visitors, and I’ll be posting on each of those challenges in more detail. You can read the complete article here.