Thanks to everyone for all the feedback on the monthly articles. It is really motivating to have so many people responding positively. As you have all recognised there is a tremendous amount of work that goes into producing these and I am looking forward to the future of them. If there is some particular topics that people are interested in, please advise.

If you know someone who these might be of interest to they can email me at stuff@xebidy.com to be put on the mailing list.

I have been doing a lot of work on justifying the cost of large scale web development and have read a number of interesting articles in the last few weeks. In fact I will be making this the subject of April’s article (click here to see previous Xebidy articles).

The reason for this post is a great idea that was put to me by Darrin Bird, who is a consultant Project Manager to base and Backpackers World. Darrin proposed that a tourism website project be considered in the context of a retail travel outlet. To set up a travel shop will cost in excess of $100k and require the work of consultants and marketers. Usually in a shop there is one person even commissioned with the role of marketing a shop. Yet, often tourism businesses view their website as a marketing product without the commensurate expenditure on the development - let alone the ongoing resource commitment. It will be great day for the quality of tourism websites when it is the norm to spend in excess of $100k on development in the first place and then resource the sites with the necessary marketing and content staff.

Simply thinking of the website as an online retailer that you control would also provide a simple measure of performance. The website should stack up on it’s own right financially. I don’t know what a retailer would be expected to return in terms of margin from their commission earnings - maybe 1 - 2%; but I would bet anything that a well developed, well resourced eCommerce website could deliver a much greater return on investment.

Although it is only the second month, I have already realised what a monumental undertaking I have embarked on to bring these articles out monthly. I am already counting down to number 12 and a bit of a party!

Well, here is our March article. This month’s article is perhaps a little more intense introducing a few more elements of Web 2.0 and how you might apply some principles to creating a better relationship with your customer. Of most interest should be some of the practical ways to re-market to your customers and some important points on getting involved in the social Internet.

Creating a Relationship with your Customers

Enjoy!

For something a little bit different this week. I was in a meeting last week in Hamilton when the music website Pandora was raised. This is a very cool website which streams live music based on a theme or style of music you select. You start by selecting an artist and then Pandora plays more music that is classified as similar to that artist. You can add more artists to your selection at anytime. For me I have found some cool new music that I like based on the stuff I already listen to.

But, my new cool site that I like is Fine Tune. This site allows you to build up your own playlist from all the artists you like - you can only select 3 or 4 songs per artist and must have at least 45 songs to make your playlist active. You start by selecting one artist or song and then Fine Tune suggests other similar artists and you can build up you selection from there. It is interesting seeing how Artists are viewed as similar through only a few degrees of seperation. Check out my playlist - it took only a few interim bands to get from Eminem to Ben Harper to Avril Lavigne!

This is seriously cool!

I was working in the Oz Experience office with Bruce Thurlow the Online Manager for Oz Experience and Adventure Tours when we set up this You Tube channel called 100Adventure. It has only just started but the idea is that users can post their videos of their trip on the Adventure Tours Groups including the newly acquired Wayward Bus. The next step is to start promoting the channel and get some suscribers involved. There is already a huge amount of content that we have found on You Tube covering all the ATA companies and Bruce and his team plan to contact these guys over the next few months to get them involved. Keep you eye on this channel it could be the beginning of big things to come.

I also know a cool secret about a wicked competition coming up from the team at ATA and TNT Magazine regarding You Tube, Flickr and a whole host of user generated content and free travel. Watch this space it is set to be one of the best things I have seen in Web 2.0 application to tourism business ever.

This just comes up so much and I thought I would use this post to reinforce it. Don’t waste time optimising your website for generic keywords or keywords that are not directly related to your product!

For example, if you run a bus company in South Australia there is absolutely no value in being in the top ten of Google for a term such as “Hostel Cairns”. A customer that types in this keyword is probably looking for a hostel in Cairns. Much more pertinent is to work out what your customers are typing into search engines to find the best way to transport themselves in your operating area and target these key phrases.

Unfortunately, this is just one example of the sort of poor keyword targeting I see everyday. As I discussed in our February article concentrate on optimising your site for only 5 to 8 keyword phrases; select these based on expected quantity of traffic they will generate; and track their performance - at the end of the day there should be just one axiom that drives your web strategy: “generate more sales!”.

In this regard a strategy that focuses on simply more traffic is a flawed marketing strategy - as I said to someone the other day, the Marketing Manager does get a promotion for achieving a number one Google rating, but they do lose their job if they fail to deliver any sales.