You may know that there are thousands of people searching for your travel agency on the Internet - the challenge is how to get them to find you! This article can only provide a brief overview - but with any luck it will be a useful place to start.
You don’t need to have the most innovative all-singing all-dancing corporate website for your travel agency - actually a straightforward but interesting site typically works better. You can very easily employ a local website design company to produce a site (ask around for referrals). Many firms prefer to produce their own site, to make it easy to alter the content in future. It can be time-consuming, but it doesn’t have to be difficult - there are loads of wonderful solutions like Homestead and Google Sites that can help you to develop an attractive site quickly and easily.
Once you have built your website - make certain you have a decent Analytics system set up. This will tell you how many visitors your website’s getting, and precisely how they’re finding you. Without this data you’re working in the dark. Google Analytics is a good choice - it’s free of charge, and works perfectly.
The starting point for many people is to send their web site to the appropriate category on the Yahoo Directory. Regrettably this now costs $299 per annum, and since it sends very little traffic nowadays (try finding the Yahoo directory on their site) it may not be good value for many businesses. Fortunately there are also free general directories out there, and it’s normally worth submitting to those. DMOZ is the most popular, but because it’s operated by volunteers it can take forever to get in. Ensure that you submit your web site to the correct category for the greatest chance of success.
Together with general directories, it’s always good practice to post your website to any specialist directories (ie those that deal specifically with your market) that you can unearth. They usually get much better results than general directories. Sadly, the majority of these charge for listings, but it’s occasionally possible to find zero cost ones. For instance http://www.ClickTravelAgents.co.uk/ is a brilliant site to post details of your travel agency to, and it’s free of charge as well. They do want in depth details and photographs, but that all helps get more traffic to your website, so it’s really worth doing. See if you can find other free websites like that, and apply to those as well - it will all help!
A terrific method of getting targeted visitors to a brand new site is Pay Per Click Advertising (often referred to as PPC). Pay per click means that you can create an advertisement, and get it shown on other websites - yet you only have to pay when someone clicks it to visit your site. Google Adwords is the best known PPC system . It’s very important to know all about PPC before starting out - but it’s worth learning more about since it has the potential to provide a lot of targetted visitors to your travel agency web site.
One of the most important tasks to do next, is to build an email mailing list, by persuading your visitors to enter their email address and permission to email them. Use a service like GetResponse - which for a small monthly fee will let you store email addresses of thousands of potential customers and email them whenever you fancy.
There’s lots of effort involved in advertising your travel agency online - but the most important thing is to get cracking, and chip away at it, one task at a time. Quicker than you’d expect, you’ll have a successful internet site and plenty of new clients. All the info you need is out there on the internet - so get out there and start advertising and marketing on the Net - it’ll be one of the most beneficial decisions you ever made.
