Thursday, December 22, 2005

Newsletters and Holiday Greetings

Have you been getting e-cards and holiday newsletters? What a great way to keep your tourism business top of mind in a customer-friendly way! Tourism Keys workshop participants know the value and impact of targeted and segmented newsletters - they make the phone ring! Have you sent your holiday greetings??

All the very best to you and yours for a safe and happy Holiday Season.

Jill

posted by Jill @ 1:25 PM   0 comments

Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Keyword Advertising? A Helpful Tool

Google recently posted a short slide show demonstrating how to keep online paid campaigns focused and to deliver the Web traffic you want.

posted by Toddles @ 1:47 PM   0 comments

Sunday, December 18, 2005

Rich Media

I just found a groovie way to make movies for your tourism Web site. It's another free tool available on the Web at Grouper.com.

Take a quick peak at a video I made with stills and an audio post. Using this tool it took 10 minutes to create a movie with audio. If you have video, you can stream video as part of this rich media content too.

Listen to the complete audio track for this short intro to rich media.

posted by Toddles @ 2:03 PM   1 comments

Thursday, December 15, 2005

Search Continues to Grow

5.1 billion searches were done online in October, marking a 15 percent increase from June, according to a Nielsen//NetRatings report released Tuesday. Google maintained its leadership position, garnering 2.4 billion search requests, or almost half of all searches. Yahoo! accounted for 21.8 percent of all searches, followed by Microsoft's MSN, which was responsible for 11.3 percent of search activity. Leaving hundreds of search engines to share the remaining.

This Reinforces the importance of ensuring your tourism business can easily be found when relevant searches are conducted on the big three search engines. If you haven't said hello by submitting your site to these engines, consider visiting the tutorial and follow the links to register your site.

posted by Toddles @ 12:14 AM   0 comments

Friday, December 09, 2005

GMail integrates RSS


Gmail - the online email client owned by google is widely regarded as the most useful e-mail tool around. A recently added RSS feed server is an outstanding addition to what is already a beautiful tool. In the image above, the red * shows how Web log feeds can be fed to subscribers. Essentially what this means is that if you have a Web log, those who subscribe to your feed get your new blog postings automatically when they log into their gmail account.

If you have Ideal Guests who you want to build a great relationship with, this is a very groovy way to do it. Of course, RSS feeds are still in the early adopter stage, but for those who are ready, the future is now.

If you want to use Gmail, you need to be invited. We've set up an account at www.GMail.com
user: tourismkeys
pass: keys2005

If you want gmail, log in and invite yourself!

posted by Toddles @ 11:22 AM   0 comments

Thursday, December 08, 2005

Flocking to Blog

I'm using a new browser for this post called Flock. It's a social networking web browser that integrates a variety of Web based tasks like blogging, posting images to and sharing bookmarks with others.

It is new, but stay tuned. In the next 6 months there will be a lot of people flocking to this browser. Until then, I'll keep encouraging folks to use Firefox.

posted by Toddles @ 12:02 AM   0 comments

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Regional Tourism Development Workshop

Jill and I are in Oshawa today dropping another load of Tourism Keys info on unsuspecting workshop participants at Regional Tourism Development Workshops. Later this week we stop in Mississauga for another round of these Tourism Keys regional development workshops designed for regional tourism organizations and cluster marketing associations.

We're back in northern Ontario in January with Tourism Keys I and II.

Todd.

posted by Toddles @ 12:01 PM   0 comments

Saturday, December 03, 2005

Free Tools to keep your computer humming along

At Tourism Keys II we introduce participants to a wide variety of free and almost free tools to help businesses build their brand across the Web.
One of the things that is most difficult for non-geeks is the maintenance of a virus free computer that doesn't slow down to a crawl.

Thankfully, there are a couple of free tools that can help:

CCleaner is a free registry cleaner and cache cleaner that just plain gets rid of the clutter on your computer.

AVG Antivirus Free version offers free weekly antivirus updates and is much more effective at recognizing unfriendlies than Norton Antivirus (which requires an annual paid subscription to get the updates!)

Subscribe to our feed using an RSS reader or check back occassionally to learn about new tools to enhance your Web Experience.

BTW, We just finished our Western Ontario Swing and had a great time. Thanks to the full house of workshop participants in Dryden and Thunder Bay for joining us!

posted by Toddles @ 12:41 PM   0 comments