1. Fresh content attracts more attention from search engines.  Search engines love fresh content and there is no easier way to create relevant regular content than a blog.
2. Search engines crawl websites with fresh content more regularly.  Although search engines will come past your site frequently, daily or even weekly visits are limited to sites that are more popular and more importantly, those with regularly changing content.
3. In the case of hostels a large amount of the content on a website does not change very often - room types and location don’t change - and getting search engine traffic can become difficult.  A blog can offer a means of introducing fresh content on a regular basis.
4. Fresh informative blog content can help a site be seen as a greater authority on a topic
5. The nature of readers commenting and linking to blog posts creates a web community of interlinking sites generating new traffic to your site.  Links are perhaps the biggest factor used in modern search algorithms; the more links the better the site ranks in organic searches.
6. A blog containing original ideas and opinions will be an invaluable way to attract links from other blogs and websites in your market, improving the overall footprint of your website and business across the Internet, while raising your profile within your relevant community/industry.
7. Blogs can be an ideal way for companies to reach out to their customers in a less formal communication.  Although usually more relaxed than other websites hostel sites are still conveying pretty standard information - where the hostel is, the rooms types, the features and rates.  A blog can create a more customer friendly face giving opinion, news and a human side to the business - something that is the backbone of a successful hostel.
8. Blogs can be fun; a way of staff rallying around the website and communicating with past and future customers and the industry at large

With the launch of the Base and Calypso/NJoy blogs expect to see more of the same in coming months.

A key element in a website with social functionality is stickiness.  To evaluate the stickiness of your social site answer these two questions: Why will a user stay on your website? and; Why will a user return to your site?  In other words what is in it for your user?

One of the first things to think about is that there are a lot of websites in the world and for yours to not just grab users attention but to actually hold their attention needs something pretty special.  You need a hook to keep your users returning again and again - and please don’t say keeping touch with friends - that’s what they are doing on Facebook and Bebo!

The answer I don’t hear enough of is “quality”.  Whether that be the quality of the content, the travel planning software or even the ads being served.  The quality of your sites functionality is a very important factor in retaining your visitors.

Let’s assume you do have a site that is easy to use and offers functionality that your users want, how do you grow it?  By it’s nature social Web 2.0 functionality necessitates more than one person - it means people communicating with one another.  It is the process of connecting your users to more users.  For me achieving connectivity entails answering exactly the same questions as stickiness: why will one user tell others about your site? or; what is in it for your user?

In achieving both stickiness and connectivity I believe there is one solution - social currency!  That is, the value a user perceives themselves to be for using or sharing your site.  The more value a user feels they are earning by using your site the more they will return and the more value they feel they have the more likely they are to share your site with others.  Moreover, if a user feels they are going to earn esteem, points, a true thank-you from others for sharing your site then the more likely they are to share your site.  No one will risk recommending something that is not good - which comes back to the importance of quality of functionality.

Therefore in thinking about your new web project with that all important Web 2.0 social loop ask yourself “what is in it for your user?”  Why will they use and why will they share?  Make sure the first reason is because of the quality of the site; and finally devise some sort of rewards system as part of the user feedback loop of your site.

I first saw about The Gap Year programme at a Backpacking Queensland committee meeting earlier this year.  The Gap Year is an online reality series in which 6 travellers from Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Britain, Canada and the US travel the world for 6 months filming and uploading regular 5 minute clips for the social networking site Bebo.  The Gap Year is being produced by Endemol - the name behind the Big Brother TV series.

This is not unlike the site OE.TV which combines professionally produced travel videos with user generated stories.  But the very limited activity on OE.TV (no comments on the home page community since late May) pales in comparison to the 44 million Bebo users.  In fact, it is predicted that The Gap Year will generate 100 million video views.

And these sorts of predictions are generating some amazing sponsorship partners.  It is understood that the likes of Tourism Australia, JetStar and Proctor and Gamble have invested over AUD$1 million between them in sponsorship of The Gap Year.  The is some big advertising money!

Will it fly?  I think it is quite likely to.  The viral loop nature of social networks is that friends will see other friends watching the series.  Sure you can do this on You Tube - but it does not have the same stickiness.  The potential for advertising and new mediums is pretty exciting.

The advertising potential within social networks is enormous but there is a fine line between what is deemed acceptable and what is intrusive.  One site that does it very well is Facebook.  Some people I talk to say they have never even noticed the small ad appearing on the left hand side of their profile.  Others have said how pertinent the ads are and in fact some have said they even clicked on the ads; Michael Gall from Wakeless even recited the last three ads he saw to me - all music to the advertisers ears.

Obviously Facebook has massive user numbers and page views and therefore can still be making great money from less advertising, but how much advertising is too much?  Bebo once tested Google ads within profiles and was met with outcrys of NO!  What would be the reaction if Facebook started showing two ads or more on your wall - would it be considered intrusive?

Flow is an “intense emotional involvement” and timelessness that comes from complete sensory engagement of immersion in any particular activity, created by the here and now. Marketing specialists like Vanderbilt University’s Donna Hoffman and Thomas Novak, propose that in website design flow is “a central construct when considering consumer navigation on commercial websites.

So what does this mean for a user?  A website that achieves flow would draw a user in for the sake of the website activity alone.  The users time would fly; they would move effortlessly from action to action without disrupting their thought pattern.  Creating a website like this entails creating a story or path that the user will follow.  Most websites on the other hand give the users the choice to pick and choose their own paths.  The problem here is that they may never find their flow and therefore leave the site prematurely.  Most sites assume the user knows what to choose.

The Oz Experience website we launched last month has flow.  Early on in our analysis we realised that the customers did not know what bus passes to choose, they did not know exactly where they wanted to go in Australia.  Instead we broke up the passes, mapped them onto Google maps and created a path that the user can travel along, following the route of the products, selecting destinations, hostels, and activities along the way to create their own product - but never falling out of flow.  We are enticing the user into the website and leading them somewhere (to making a travel plan and purchasing a pass) through the labyrinth of choices.

Oz Experience works - we are getting over 10 new travel passes created a day - some of them very detailed.  The average time on the site is up around 10 minutes; and of course sales are going up as less users are abandoning the site without a least the commitment of making a travel plan.  Notably, many users are returning and purchasing their bus passes after making their plans.  Oz Experience is definitely a website with flow!

From a business perspective, and the success of the Oz Experience website, the creation of flow is only as good as the milestones along the way that transform the random path into a traverse of the website into a goal. We have built a hierarchy of milestones, with little goals (such as creating and saving you travel plan, scheduling your data and so on) that build toward the most meaningful milestone of making a purchase of a buss pass through the website.

Finally we actually reward the user for getting themselves into the flow and in fact add stickiness to the whole story.  As the user builds up their basket of destinations, hostels and activities we “recommend” the bus passes that best fits their consumption bundle - we are rewarding them for making choices and similarily continuing to guide them further along the traverse to purchase.  The Oz Experience website is not naturally easy to immediately navigate, in fact, it slightly challenges the user - but that is part of the seductiveness - it draws the customer in and then once within it’s walls it overloads their sensors moving them easily from action to action.  In this case the flow is the glue that is turning lookers to bookers for Oz Experience!

Well, for the last two days four of us have been holed up in the Hermitage Hotel coding and planning the Travel Generation website.  We thought that a boot camp style retreat would allow us to focus our efforts away from the everyday harassment of the office - and wow have we done alot!!

Next week we will launch the private alpha version of Travel Generation.  This first release code-named “Athens”, after the first city of the modern era will allow invited users to bookmark a whole raft of data from across the Internet (pages, URL’s, images) to a travel planning platform where they will be able to schedule their travel, show it on a map and create a profile.  This release will be followed up quickly by the “Bejing” release (in honour of the Olympic Games) in which we will introduce user profiling and the ability to share your travel plans with friends and family, Facebook, and blogs.  The user interfaces have been designed by Mat Weir and myself and we think they are going to pretty cool - even at Athens release stage.

In writing this announcement however I really go thinking about why have we achieved so much more in the past two days than we would normally in our office environment?  Quite simply is comes down to what Csikszentmihalyi would call “flow”.

The answer is in the psychological principal of understanding the influence of the “here and now” in our ability to focus on whatever task we set our mind to.  The need to focus and concentrate is obvious but it is something we rarely achieve.  Achieving true creativity is difficult when you attention and energies are continually drawn elsewhere.  By coming to Mount Cook, away from the Internet with the continual falling of snow outside has concentrated our energies onto building the Travel Generation website; we are all definitely in the flow.

I think I will take three very important points away from this week:

1. Importance of focusing on present timeframes, but also future possibilities to ignite the sensors - but to keep  the focus clear on what can be achieved here and now over letting yourself dream
2. That focusing on the process of getting it done over the outcome works; and
3. The influence of sensory details (the nice hotel, the snow, the good company) in achieving focus

The concept of being in the flow is something that can be taken further away from just the psychology of work or everyday life to how we interact say with a business or website.  In fact, I believe that by getting ourselves in a unique sensory overload the site that we have finally pulled together for Travel Generation reflects that very principal and users will find that the become drawn into it - drawn into the flow - and therefore will find it easy to use and return to it again and again.

If you would like to help us out and become al Alpha tester please feel free to contact us for a login; and I think we are all looking forward to the next TG Camp hopefully in Franz Josef later this year.

The old bar system used by Google to show search volumes made it very difficult to pick up these gems.  For example, the phrase “business speakers” generates an average of 2,900 searches over 12 months, but also has very high competitor numbers targeting that keyword in adwords campaigns (which we assume they are also doing with their onsite optimisation for organic results).  In contrast, the term “business keynote speaker” generates 880 search on average over the last 12 months and has significantly relative lower volume.  Targeting the latter term will be both cheaper in adwords campaigns and easier in organic optimisation and potentially lead you to more traffic than joining the melee for the larger search term.  In fact, we can even make some meaningful forecasts around this data - such as, if we get 3% of the search volume for our spend we would potentially pick up 27 searches, and not just 27 random searches, but 27 very qualified searches - fill your calendar with these 27 engagements and you will be very busy!   Ascertaining this would have been almost impossible using the previous bar system with Google because in fact the largest search term in this area is actually “motivational speaker” which has on average 60,500 searches.  In this scale the difference between 2,900 searches and 880 searches is insignificant and hence indiscernible under the old Google bar system - we probably would have overlooked a excellent opportunity.

Certainly it is not a perfect tool to use, but it becomes much more useful when you become adept at the art of discernment when considering all the different factors and the new Google reporting of actual search volume has gone a massive way to making this easier.

The Google website gives a few other key considerations for this change - all of which make sense:

• Knowing approximate physical searches allows you to plan your budget more accurately around your selected terms
• Keywords can be selected that are most likely to return quality leads within your budget
• You can better create ad groups around keywords you find relevant and more closely target your ads and landing pages

Finally a few other points to consider when using this tool:

1. The location and language targeting of your adwords account will influence the search volume.  If you are using the keyowrd tool from within your Google adwords campaign be aware that your country campaign and language settings will determine the results.  On the other hand if your are using the external keyword tool you will need to set the appropriate language and country settings - ignore these at your peril, you will end up optimising your site for vacation when you are targeting the UK “holiday” market.
2. The match type of your keyword has a big influence on the search volume that Google calculates.  You need to learn the difference between match, broad and phrase keywords as these influences the variations of your keywords that will display your ads or rank you in organic results.
3. The approximate search volume as reported by this tool shows the search volume statistics for the last calendar month whereas the approximate average search volume column shows the average monthly search volume over a “recent” 12 month period.

The content is one of the most important parts of the website and often its ignored, given to the intern to write, or cobbled together at the last minute.  Or even despite all the strategy, planning and conceptualising there is always a mad rush at the end when a few pages were left out and content is produced ad hoc and jammed into a page that does not fit it.  Unfortunately, this only serves to leave a sour taste for your website visitors and worse risks turning them away.

There are three simple rules that you can follow to make your content more appealing to your visitors:

1.  Use of headings
User don’t read websites, they scan them.  Use good clear headings to help your readers quickly identify with your content and product.  A major word of advice, drop the “Welcome to our website” heading - it is so 1990’s.  Instead state what your company does, or better still use a ‘big fat claim’, such as lose weight in 21 days or top rating hostel in Bundaberg, to draw your customer into the page.

2.  Me, I and We
It’s great to tell your web visitor what your company does, but at the end of the day they really want to know what’s in it for them and how do they get it.  Rather than focussing on your business focus on the benefits to the user.  The idea is achieve “written visualisation” with your content, that is, content which helps your visitors see why they should product to get the maximum benefit - “buy x services and your marriage will last forever” or “use bleach for a whiter brighter smile”.  Have a look at a post we wrote last year about the we-we test when writing content.

3.  Keep it Simple Stupid
It’s cool that you have new 24 seat Mitsi Fusos - but no one really cares.  Joking aside, ignore the technical specs of your products and focus on the benefits.  In fact, I remember from Kiwi Experience days that it always said in the brochure - our buses have big windows to look out and big stereos to cruise to (or words to that effect).  That sort of stuff really works!

Once you determine which keywords you are going target the next step is writing your web content so that it makes the most of these keywords. At Xebidy we have been using a Yahoo API in which we can insert the content to be analysed and it returns the keywords that the Yahoo search algorithm would theoretically pick up.

The guys at SEO Book had actually developed this tool on their site for anyone to use and I thought this a great idea so we have adapted it here using our own Yahoo API key for you guys. Feel free to give it a try - you will find that small changes make a real big difference.

Our own internal tool is very similar to this and along with others we try and work out the best structure for title tags, descriptions, headings, content etc. Unfortunately, no such tool exists for Google that I know of.

One last very important point is to remember about your users. DON’T stuff your content full of keywords to the point where it is completely unreadable by your customers. Search engines don’t buy your product! Check out some of our previous posts on the Art of Writing Web Content.

Many are promoting this as “the biggest change to the way people find each other on the internet since its inception” (Paul Twomey from domain contolling authority ICann). “Apart from the .com, .net or .org, 1.3 billion web users will be able from early 2009 to acquire generic addresses by lodging common words such as .love, .hate or .city, or proper names,” he said.

In my opinion it will have little effect.  At the end of the day .com will always be the first and foremost important domain.  In the most part if the domain is not available in the standard channels then creating a “similar” domain with a different suffix is not going to help you capture market share.  Let’s say someone decides that they are going to setup .search and register google.search - users are not going to be fooled and likewise I would not think it would take very long for the holder of that URL to get a wee knock on the door from the Google lawyer.  I think it is pretty much in everyones normal method that if they are trying to guess a domain the first place they start is with the .com and then if that is not correct then with the country code of company they are searching - I would expect this to remain the case for a long time.

I certainly don’t think it will be the case that we are going to see a rush of new domains infringing on others business names.  If the domain is gone in the .com or for a New Zealand company the .co.nz then I think people are far to weary these days to try and register the businesses competing name with a  different URL.
The only interesting thing will be if the big boys start registering domains for fun, for example Flickr might become flickr.photos - and because they would own the right to issue the suffix no one else have access to this.  This might create an interesting competitive advantage.  There might be a few new domains that are launched, maybe .xxx for the porno sites or alternatively we might get some real inventive domains such as was the case with the guys that came up with using their sub domains to create del.icio.us and script.alicio.us but overall I don’t think there will be much of the shift that everyone in the general public seems to be talking about.