I built this Drakensberg Tourism Portal as a means of marketing our region. It helps everyone here including me. In fact it has helped me so much that this is the only marketing I now participate in. If it had not been for the internet then we would have long ago had to give up our dreams of living in the country and have had to find some other means of income.
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Sidebar: Join SafariNow.com. This is an already working online booking agency. You just need to enter your details and your first web presence. is finished. There is a setup cost of R550 thereafter SafariNow.com gets 15% commission from all sales. This is a fairly effective deal and SafariNow.com gets me a few clients every month. (Average 4-5 enquiries a month). It is by no means the solution on its own but it does help a little You could also join accommodation-sa.co.za, doorway.co.za, places.co.za, wheretostay.co.za and there are many others like that too. It wont do any harm but don't expect too much from these sites and my advice is not to pay for listings but rather to work on a basis if commission. I do get a few enquiries from these other sites but nothing that's been consistent. |
This is my success story of how to successfully market your tourism service on the internet yourself affordably. I don't often hear positive stories about tourism marketing on the internet and I know why. There is so much disinformation out there and it all sounds so complicated. And really it is just easy peasy. Follow these easy steps and you too will be able to sit back and watch you bookings increase. Please note that I don't describe a get rich quick scheme here rather a method that requires quite a bit of work on your part but with very little technical skill. If you can surf you can do it.
Build your own website.
This is your
online brochure. I feel you need to learn how to do it yourself for a number
of reasons.
You need to understand that a website consists of 2 main components. The first is your online brochure and is what sells your tourism service. That most seem to understand. The next is that you would like the website to direct new clients to your service. It can only do this if it succeeds in ranking well in the search engines for the relevant keywords. Now this is where most sites fall down. In the search engine www.google.com the keyword "drakensberg" finds about 66 000 pages of information containing Drakensberg. Now if your site does not appear in the first maybe 20 or 30 search entries well then it need not be there at all. So how do you go about getting your site to be in the first 20 or 30 entries. That is what I am going to try explain in the next few paragraphs.
Fist you will need the following: (You can choose any internet service provider BUT they must offer the following in the provider package. And if the provider does not have every single item skip it and find another. You will need all of these facilities. If its got more that fine but I haven't found more to be necessary yet)
I use the product site-build-it It delivers all of the above and quite a bit more which I have found to be stuff I have not got round to using yet. It works like this.
Ok so now you have a site. Unfortunately this is not enough. Site-build-it submits the pages to the search machines but as you have not optimized pages for the search machines so it is only as good as any other site.
You now need to go and identify which keywords are important to you. Maybe "accommodation Weenen", "horse riding", "horse trails", "battlefields" etc. For each of these words you build a single page. You write content about the specific keyword and use the specific keyword often throughout the text. Add the page to your site like you did with the other pages and then press the button analyze this. site-build-it tells you in simple terms what's ok and not ok. Like you have not used your keyword in the first sentence or you have not put your keyword in the heading. Then you correct these simple to fix things and save it. The rest is done automatically. The more keyword pages you build the more people will find your site. And if you have an event near by then its easy to just add another page or if your prices change it takes 5 minutes to change it and you are done
site-build-it lets you do really fancy things but don't worry about fancy till you have mastered the standard features. This site has been built using site-build-it It took me just 3 weeks and had paid for itself after 7 weeks and continues to grow month by month. That's by far the best return I have had from any marketing that I have done so far.
Step 3: Monitor what's happening. Go to your statistics every month. Think about new keywords and add new pages to increase your traffic to your site. Think about adding the newsletter feature to your pages. You will start to learn about the other features that came with your package like how to research more keywords and which ones are really useful to you.
If you have any questions about any of this then drop me a mail or give me a ring 036/3523143 and I will see if I can help you. I am not an internet expert or an internet provider rather a tiny guest house owner in the foothills of the Drakensberg. All I can give you is a wealth of information on how to go about promoting your tourism service by building a website yourself affordably.