Internet Marketing for Tourism

Listing your tourism business with a variety of portals or cluster Web sites can be a boon to your Web traffic on your Web site. Consider paying for membership in portals that represents not only your region but also the type of accommodation, activities, travel themes that you offer.
400Eleven.com is an Ontario travel portal north of Toronto that provides Web traffic in a variety of these areas for fees ranging from $100-$400/yr.

The Ontario Tourism Marketing Partnership also provides opportunities for Tourism businesses seeking exposure of their travel experiences by providing similar themed content niches at little or no cost to Ontario Tourism businesses.

The reason to join these types of clusters includes generating Web traffic and sales, but well-designed portals will also give a boost to the position of your Web site in the search engines. Check the html code of the portals and ensure they are using effective Search Engine Optimization strategies for keywords you want your site to appear for and watch your site rise in search results, particularly with Google.

When choosing a travel portal be prepared to track the number of click throughs you are paying for. Remember, traditional pay per click Web traffic from search engines can generate significant amount of Web visits at pennies per click and up.

The benchmark I currently use is $0.12-$0.20/click. So for a $400 investment, I would hope to generate at least three thousand relevent click throughs to my Web site, and a number of tracked purchases (at least $3000 worth or the equivalent of 10% of sales). I'll also hope to build my email list with at least 300 new Email list members. The latter requires a meaningful "Small Yes" offer on the landing page coming from the portal site.

Be sure to inquire about what pages provide the bulk of Web site visits for any and all travel portals you are a member of and consider the number of products listed on those theme pages. Sometimes, a lot of traffic is not as beneficial as a few really relevent Web visits. Place your tourism packages where they produce the most return.

When considering rebooking next year, ask the portal to report how many times your packages were viewed and clicked on. At your end, do a good job of tracking the number of inquiries and sales that are generated by the portal. Then when the time comes to renew, you'll have some real statistical information on which to make a good decision.

Portals may also offer opportunities for e-newsletter advertising. It is a good idea to place content in these newsletters - even for an additional fee. Be sure to direct traffic to Web pages which have your own opt-in request to get recipients to sign up for your newsletter. Make any offers exclusive to the newsletter recipients and be sure to track inquiries and sales that these offers generate.

Remember, the Internet is not free. Services which produce meaningful sales will have costs associated with them.