Cruise Geek

Here's an interesting new way to give your business a boost in Local Search. Google Boost allows you to set up affordable local search campaigns online.  Google Boost gives your listing premium position and more visibility.  To learn more click here.  

This is a really interesting presentation on internet trends and where marketing will be in 2011 and beyond. 

This week’s focus is on Twitter. Twitter is a pretty compelling way to deliver travel offers or cruise news stories. But the way to really get the word and grow your business via Twitter  is to get the word out beyond those who are already follow your posts by adding tags containing hash marked keywords. Using the hash mark symbol (called ad pound symbol by some), you can add tags to your post to have it found by others searching that keyword. There’s some real power in adding keywords – as an example I recently posted a news story to our CruiseOne corporate twitter account leading people to a news story on our CruiseOne corporate website – and just 1 minute following the post, I had 20 people visit the news article from my twitter post. So if you haven’t tried tweeting using #cruise or #travel, you haven’t really experienced the full power of Twitter.

This is a must read for anyone who's looking to build the number of people who are fans of their Fan Page.   Although Facebook has now changed the "Become A Fan" button to the "Like" button, I think the same strategy applies.  Check out this article :

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/21-creative-ways-to-increase-your-facebook-fanbase/

A Search Engine Watch article talks about some current social media research:
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/100303-014140

The article states that a recent study by Neilson shows that the biggest users of social media on the go are Women age 35-54. Coincidentally this is the same age group that is the primary demographic target of those selling to first time cruisers. This means that social media is a great way to engage with cruise prospects and to keep in touch with them over time.

Are you marketing via social media? If not you should strongly consider it. Start by creating a Facebook Fan Page, and a Linked In profile and start searching for current clients to add as either Connections or Friends.

Keep in mind that soft sell works in social media, share news items and link to your site, share ship photos and link to your site, and occasionally share links to sale pages. Keeping the proper balance between entertaining content, informative content and sales content is the key to not being ignored in social media. Watch this balance and see your resulting sales increase.

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If your website were a store, would it be located on a dead end street or in a major mall?  The way you promote your site has everything to do with how many people visit your site each month.  This week's topic is building traffic to your individual website. 
Each month we post traffic reports to the BC telling you how many unique visitors have come to your site and how many pages they have viewed. A separate report outlines the website traffic generated from CruiseClick. If you haven't seen these reports lately, it's time to revisit the stats and get a handle on how many people know you exist online. Find these BC reports by searching on the term Website Traffic on the BC.

Now when looking at these reports, think about how many people are visiting your site month and then divide by 4 to break that down by weekly or divide by 30 to get a daily number. When analyzing the number of visitors each day, you’re probably feeling like you should do more to drive more business to your site. Here are 4 simple things that will help you increase your traffic to your site :

1. Collect email addresses from everyone you speak to over the phone or in person. Even most seniors have email addresses – and collecting emails and asking to add them to your weekly esaver list is the top way to build a loyal base of clients who visit your website regularly.

2. Make sure you’re listed on Local search engines. Google Local, Yahoo Local and Bing Local all are leading sources of local business – insure you’re listed using your subdomained CruiseOne or Cruises Inc web address in order to be indexed by these search engines. Please note, this is one place an alternate domain name actually hurts you – so don’t list it here…use your subdomained address in local search submission forms. So for example http://Jdoe.cruiseone.dot com is the way your address should be listed and indexed in local search engines. Submission forms for local search engines and online yellow page sites are on the BC under Marketing > Ecommerce > Advertising > Free Listings.

3. Consumer Reviews of your business help your relevancy in local search – get positive reviews and your position will move up the page and your listing will be displayed in a wider area…have happy customers? Send them to Insider Pages to rate your business and you’ll benefit on multiple search engines…one word of advice – don’t rate your own site – your IP address is recorded and search sites penalize those who submit their own reviews.

4. Want another way to drive relevant traffic to your site? Consider a local search ad campaign on Google Adwords. We have more info on doing this under Marketing > Ecommerce > Advertising.

A quick search for the term travel blog on Google yields 185 million result pages.  That’s a sea of blogs.  The question is how do you get your blog to stand out?

Well there are few tricks that can separate you from the others… and this week we’ll talk about a few very important steps to take in promoting your blog.

Step one….search for your blog by typing your blog’s address into the google search box.  If you’re not seeing anything come up then it’s time to re-submit your blog to Google.  How do you do this?   There’s a link to the submission page on the BC under Marketing > Ecommerce > Blogging > Add Your Blog To Google (Once).

Step two…link to your blog from your social media posts.

Step three….add your blog address to your BC profile – this insures there’s a banner on your site pointing to your blog.

Step four…join a network like BlogBurst.  Blog burst is a network of blogs that publishes your blog’s posts to high traffic websites and leads people to your blog.  Network partners include Time Warner, Fox News, Houston Chronicle, Chicago Sun Times and many many more.  Joining is FREE but requires a real commitment to blog regularly.  For more info on joining blogburst go to BlogBurst.com

Follow these four steps you’ll find you’ll get more traffic to your blog and generate more business as a result.