Party-destinations.com Special Promotional Offer

Our latest promotion is to build a World Travel Site for the fun party crowd. We call it party-destinations.com. Initially it will feature St. Lawrence Gap and the two hotels that have subscribed to SocialIndexEngine Brand Marketing.


http://youtu.be/ep3amMKmtaU

We are inviting activities, car rentals and restaurants to participate in the program. The cost is $750 US to have an advertorial, a video blast and a blog. We create the video for you and also publish it out to many sites which will help build your social index and get the attention of search engines as well as help in your brand marketing.

We also give you the video for your website. 

So you get:

1. a short advertorial on party-destinations linking to your website directly.
2. a blog with your video embedded in it and linking to your website
3. a promo that will post your video our to social media index network
4. a secondary promo that will post your blog out to the network

Deal!! ... It is probably the best value you will see anywhere if you are interested in target the party-time travelers and fun holiday crowd.

BUT hurry! We are accepting 3 restaurants for this promo only – 1 car rental, 1 dive company, one sailing company, etc.

Check out party-destinations.com and contact us immediately to reserve your spot, get a sales video, a blog and an exclusive promotional opportunity.

Note that we also offer extended promotions such as Press Releases and Facebook integration.

For more information, see our video  http://youtu.be/ep3amMKmtaU

You will notice that is an international site – We are branching out! You will also notice that our focus is on Barbados, and this promotion ranks the Caribbean and Barbados amongst the top part holiday destination in the world.

We cover the St. Lawrence Gap in this campaign, but Holetown and other areas will be featured in a future campaign, so book your spot ASAP. In order to be fair to sponsors, the offer will always be very limited. We will feature a few hotels and restaurants and a single activity of each kind.

We plan a series of videos for each campaign. Each will highlight some aspect of the destination promotion. The videos and blogs will be geared to specific keywords which are being targeted. All will be about fun-filled holidays. But there are many marketing segments and many keywords by which travelers will search, such as party holidays, fun vacation, active holidays, nightlife, clubs, dancing, activities, carnival, street festivals as well as party time places, live music, pubs, bars and restaurants of every culture and cuisine.

Each promo, video and blog will be targeted to orient with the search keywords and to specific age groups and budgets. As we move on to new locations, we will repeat the process. We aim to have the premier website for this market - one that will rank on the first page of all search engines for the relevant search.

This content marketing with videos, blogs and social media is the new form Search Engine Optimization.

Http://party-destinations.com follows on the very successful launch of Travel2ExoticPlaces.com and http://BoliviaHotelSpecials.com.

In the last campaign MBC doubled its bookings and jumped up a level in Google Page Rank. See blog...

 Call us now for full details and to reserve your place!

How to Build Your Business On Line - Book

In December my book “How to Build your Business Online” (http://HowToBuildYourBusinessOnlineBook.com) was published and is for sale on Amazon as a paperback and on Kindle as an e-book. Barnes and Noble is supposed to carry it. We ran into a snag with our foreign bank account. That may change soon.

It’s a simple book that describes in layman’s terms what needs to be done to build your brand and market your business online. It covers Search Engine placement, keyword strategies, Search Engine Optimization, Video, Blogging, Content Marketing, Mobile and Social Media.



I video blog and write about media a lot these days and have more than once said that we are all publishers. With this in mind, it seemed logical to publish a book about building your business online. 

You may have seen samples of my writing on various website and in magazines (Sea Technology, Computers in Education, Hi Society etc). For example, I embarked on a world saga project years ago that got me writing about local cultures starting with the saga of Bathsheba in Barbados, Example Life in a Fishing Village.  I was asked to write an account of Barbados for the BBC TV program “By Any Means”, a Project of Great Big Earth, with Charley Boorman (reprinted on Barbados.org).  But this is my very first book and publishing it was quiet an experience. 

There are many self-publishing services and I investigated several. In the end I ended up with OpenSpace, the publishing arm of Amazon. As a new Author you don’t get tracked down by a publisher. But you can do it yourself. 

I was inspired to launch this book by a Class I took. It was a class of Main Street Marketers who were having the same problem. We had all had great systems that make a difference but we were removed from day-to-day basics.

We needed a simple plain-language authoritative book that explained in non-technical language what an anchor text was and what was involved in online marketing and just how to build your business online. We needed a simple text on how to build your Brand and how to market it using the internet and online media: Something that business managers could understand and enjoy reading even, if they had no interest in technology.  

We were a diverse group with as many options and views about what the book should be as we were people. We decided to pool resources and hire a publishing team. We would each build our own book with our own points of view and with our own content and perspective. Sharing publishing resources made it cost-effective to produce a helpful guide about online marketing for each of our respective industries. 

My intention was to write a book on travel. I was persuaded to make that the second book which is now in process. Travel is a very specialized industry; the Global Distribution Systems, Tour Operators, Online Travel Agents (OTA), airline reservation systems, holiday packaging, seasonal rates and offers, have few parallels in other industries My texts about all this bewildered the team. My editing assistant said, "Ian you can't put all that into a simple easy to read book". Hence, all of this is in Book 2.  

For book 1, we ended up with a very simple version, thanks to an editor who was ruthless with words. Several of my insights and concepts were dropped because they were too technical or too philosophical. Ideas and paragraphs were re-crafted. "Your writing for ordinary business people, not the Harvard Review" I was reminded. It amazed me how, in the hands of a good editor, whole paragraphs of complex ideas were reduced to a single sentence that everyone could relate to. Having an editor is a very good idea!

“How to Build Your Business Online” will help any business understand what technology is available and how to use the online media to build and market their brand, be it in the health field, in food services, in automotive or hairdressing.  In retrospect this is a good move - a general book on brand marketing using the internet and all online media, opens new avenue for our skills in Barbados to help small businesses on an international scale. 
 
My current involvement with the book is to create a series of business marketing tutorials for each section of the book. I will also maintain a blog and website where book patrons can share their ideas and experiences, and ask questions of the group.

I’ll share more about the publishing process, cost and option in my next blog. Keep watching.

For more on the book and how it might help you see http://HowtoBuildYourBusinessOnlineBook.com


Resources

Subscribe to our newsletter and Tutorials on the latest Tourism marketing technology:  The Social Index Engine

Buy the Book: http://Amazon.BuildYourBusinessOnlineBook.com

Bonus For Book Buyers: Bonus.BuildYourBusinessOnlineBook.com

Video Review: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3gCKUsmlsc

Interested in Publishing Your own book see BizonlineBlog 
(http://www.howtobuildyourbusinessonlinebook.com/about-publishing-a-book-case-study-buildyourbusinessonlinebook/)

Useful resources for Online Marketing 

 

Case Study: Hotel Social Marketing that Boosts Bookings

SocialIndexEngine Hotel Marketing Campaign Case Study

The Social Index Marketing campaign to promote St. Lucia’s Marigot Beach Hotel is less than 6 months old, but the results have been very encouraging. 

With our new SocialIndexEngine Travel Strategy, special offers and promotions were loaded into our travel publishing systems and blasted out to a vast network of travel sites. Content from the same systems are published to Facebook and to our own network.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p17knXD0o70

The Social Marketing is combined with the blogging, article marketing, SEO Mobile Marketing, Travel Blast and Videos. 

It is a complete, done-for-you social media management and brand marketing  that drives bookings directly to your website and builds sustainable brands.

Compared to the same time last year, the hotel has had a 200% increase in bookings. The page rank for their website, MarigotBeachClub.com, has increased from PR3 to PR4.

The campaign is a kick-start package. Following a successful kick-start, we will re-evaluate the position of the Brand and devise a strategy to build on new niches with consistent blogging, video distribution, mobile and social media management services providing information to build authority and give answers to travellers.

This success was a result of the new strategies and technology built by AXSES. About a year ago, we noted that traditional Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) was not working. Getting links from other sites used to help us get top position in Google and other search results. Then the Engines like Google saw that a lot of this was paid-for links or reciprocal links (I link to you if you link to me). The result is that reciprocal links now don’t count and general links from directories etc have little or no SEO value.

>>>> More to get the full tutorial and whitepaper on the new SEO and Relationship Marketing sign up at http://SocialIndexEngine.com 

We used to comment on blogs; now Google looks to see who is commenting, what their history is and what their score is. Yes, SCORE! – Google actually rates advertisers and applies a Quality Score based on the merit of the work. This Quality Score was first used to weed out advertisers who were not contributing ads of good value; now it is one of the components of the social index that determines who you are, your authority, your influence and your value. Today it is used everywhere – But beware! Putting up a Squeeze page (a page that tries to grab an email and provides only promo material) will decrease your Quality Score. Have a slow-loading site and down goes the Quality Score.

Then there are articles. Article marketing was hot in 2010, but in 2011 a whole bunch of article sites got slapped by Google for populating duplicate content. This was Panda; many site just disappeared over night and articles with duplicates were ignored. Later in 2011, Google started assigning a negative score to website with non-original material. This hurt the e-commerce sites and particularly the affiliates who resold the product and copied the content of- like hotel room description, rates, etc. - from an OTA like Expedia.

All of this was unfortunate for bona fide distributors and travel marketers. The fact is that Google was not after the reputable marketers; it was clamping down on the absolute nonsense that affiliate marketers where putting on the net to game the system and sell their affiliate offers, like Teeth whiteners. The net had become proliferated with poorly written, low-value articles and a lot of trash. They had to do something, as search results were becoming irrelevant.

In marketing today, you cannot ignore Google. It is massive. ComScore reported in September 2011 that Google had almost 66% of all search traffic. So you absolutely must know what it is doing.

To be successful in today’s media, one has to know what Google is looking at, where it is looking, what it is looking for and what it does not want. Make a mistake and Google will slap you right out of the ring.  

To be successful in internet marketing today, you need to be where Goggle is looking

What I can tell you is that Google is looking at Social Media. It is looking at what you are doing on social media, social networking sites like Facebook, sharing sites like YouTube, bookmarking sites like Delicious, Wikipedia-type sites, and news sites like Twitter. It is very interested in mobile sites which are, in fact, the most social of all, and mobile is soon going to overtake OC as the main method of Search and Internet access!

We have noted that Google likes video and that consumers are searching for videos to evaluate a product or service and get answers to questions. Hence, we use a lot of video. They are informative videos; not too sales-oriented and definitely not glitzy. Videos that work in Social Media are local, personal stories and honest accounts, if they get too polished and too glib they loose appeal. Never put fancy effects and glitz into your videos.

Knowing all of this, our SocialIndexEngine is about building your social presence and making it work. It is not restricted to Social, but pretty soon there will be little else but Social. It really is the new way of marketing, permission-based, non-invasive and informative, supportive and engaging communications. 

Gone are the days of hype and spin. Mostly all of that has been the result of too many products in the market. It was not always like this, the cave man did not wonder around with a placard marketing his wares. In fact before commerce, man existed in agregrian communities bartering with neighbors. 

Now we have Pepsi reusing the word "Refresh" for its emotional appeal and Coke competing for emotional space with "Open Happiness". I think it is all rather ridiculous.  

The new marketing is going back to its roots in many respects. Friends, acquaintances, business partner and one's own circle or community are a growing factor in influencing what you people buy and where. The new technology is drastically changing the way we market. With so many consumers becoming vocal, publishing options, sharing views and insights: the traditional media of newspapers, radio and the broadcasters and finding themselves lost in a sea of voices and the new paradigm of participation. I talk about this in the preface to my book "How to Build your Business online by Ian R. Clayton"

>>> http://buildyourbusinessonlinebook.com

It's available in paperback on Amazon and Kindle, as easy read and full of helpful insights and how to's. Will share with you the process of publishing it in an upcoming blog - Keep Watching!

This new marketing is at the core of our approach to SEO. We have built an overall strategy that includes our e-commerce engine and our publishing machine. We even do magazines and all the usual brochures, but now always published on on-demand, available instantly, online with digital format for download to mobile devices and by regular mail. 

Everything is going online and you need to be there with the best you have in a format, message and engagement appropriate to your niche.

>>> Subscribe to SocialIndexEngine Free newsletter and tutorial to find out more

New Video blasts boost booking 200%

We have just published another video blast for Marigot Bay in St. Lucia for http://travel2exoticplaces.com/ . Unlike the previous video, which focused mainly on the Marigot Beach Hotel, this one is featuring the destination of St. Lucia.

We are publishing a separate blog that describes the success of this campaign, explains what we did and why and offers some insights as to why this technique we call SocialIndexEngine works.

It certainly did work. The hotel bookings increased by 200% over the previous year. Not only that, their Page Rank (PR) went up from 3 to 4. PR is a Google measure of the site’s relevance. The higher, the better. Barbados.org has a rank of 6. Expedia is 8 by comparison. Small hotel websites rarely get higher than 3 and to increase rank is very difficult.

More about the tecnology and marketing strategy see video below

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5MZWrz3OYY

The system we use is a new set of integrated technology and strategies that we have perfected in late 2011 and are launching now in 2012. It involves using our own e-commerce systems to blast out travel content and promos to social media and 100s of travel sites. We are building an elaborate array of our own sites such as Travel2ExoticPlaces.com and working with established travel portals, shopping sites and social media (posting offers and bookings to Facebook).

A large part of our success is now based on strategic use of social media, using it as a platform for marketing and also building sales funnels into services like Facebook. 

For more on this, please make sure that you subscribe to our blog at http://feeds2.feedburner.com/blogspot/kXYq

 – That way, you will be advised when the next blog is published.

The next blog is going to be very helpful. Not only will we tell you why this campaign succeeded, but we will also tell you why traditional SEO is dead. That’s right: SEO is DEAD. The old techniques do not work and we will document why.

Just subscribe to our blog at http://feeds2.feedburner.com/blogspot/kXYq to be sure you get this.

The video is being blasted out to video sites and it is featured on the video channel http://www.youtube.com/user/traveltheexotic . It is also being blasted out to the social networks and made available for the Marigot Beach Hotel to post on their own website.

The video promotes Marigot Bay as one of the most picturesque bays in the Caribbean and one of the most exotic coves in the world. It is nestled in the west, in a secluded section of St. Lucia that is surrounded on three sides by steep hills covered in tropical rainforest. This historic Bay has been a refuge to ships, pirates and adventurers for centuries.

To get to the Marigot Beach Club Hotel, you take a short ferry ride in local pirogue-style boat. It is a wonderful way to start a holiday: your first dip into the Caribbean Sea in a local boat as you drift across the bay to the soft white sand beach where you step off and into the Marigot Beach Club Hotel.

Guests staying in the Marigot Bay area will be delighted by the beautiful landscape, made complete by the variety of flora and fauna on the island. Travellers can book a tour with the hotel to see St. Lucia’s natural attractions. These include native animals - birds, reptiles and other creature that have made this exotic island their home.

Guests can also visit the many scenic places for on activity-based tours, such as hiking on rainforest trails, taking an off-road jeep ride, or sailing in the bay.

Sailing in the Marigot Bay is quite popular, as it is an exceptionally relaxing experience. It provides great photo opportunities, and you also get to rub shoulders with other international travellers who may just be in the night, or for the weekend, on their way to or from the other Caribbean islands.

Organized scuba diving trips, as well as scuba classes by certified professionals, also enhance the trip for those more active travellers.

For the full article, see our hub at http://irclay.hubpages.com/hub/Travel2Exotic-Marigit-Bay-Stlucia
 
Subscribe to our blog at http://feeds2.feedburner.com/blogspot/kXYq to get the latest news and research.

We can learn a lot from afiliate marketers

Jeff Johnson is probable the best Affiliate marketer ever. We use some of his techniques in our http://SocialIndexEngine.com.

He constantly wins competitions and out preforms in building traffic for his Brands.

Pay attention to his solution and to his warnings - Its easy to run afoul of Google.

 

 Here is his story and his warning:

http://www.salesautomator.com/app/?af=1407239&u=www.nonstoptrafficformula.com/sq/7867-140k

 

 

Helping Bolivia Cultural Tourism

In our research in building the marketing strategy for our client, we decided that Bolivia would be best promoted with appealing tours and packaged holidays. All will be locally managed with local experts who have an understanding at the grassroots level of the special places and popular attractions. It’s a huge country and travellers will need to visit several cities to see its many unique points of interest.

Today we have published a new Video on Bolivia. You may see this on the YouTube channel. 

It is also published with separate and unique blog posts on several other channels and, of course, here in TravelWatchNews.

In addition, there are several articles and several more videos planned to help promote Bolivia Hotels and Tours for our client.

We take pride in this work as Bolivia is a beautiful country with a culture and lifestyle that has existed almost unchanged for centuries. It is the home of the  Incas and the Tiwanaku before them and the ruins of their monuments, temples and building are scattered in the landscape.


Our client, Hostal de Su Merced, agreed and went to work on creating the tours and teaming up with other hotels to deliver a countrywide experience. There is much to explore in Bolivia, from the footprints of the dinosaurs to the floating island in Lake Titicaca as well as amazing landscapes and wildlife.

The program is in the early stages and we are implementing a basic Social Index campaign that has already shown results. This includes publishing several videos, articles and blogs. We have created a social network for Bolivian hotels including authority social bookmark, status sites and video sharing portals.

Stay tuned for more as we progress with this project and update our blogs. Enjoy the video and we hope that you learn something about this unique country. Perhaps you will visit Bolivia and stay at Hostal de Su Merced, or contact them to discuss their special 3-City tour.

For more information on the tours and hotels see http://BoliviaHotelSpecials.com

For more about this type of content and video marketing, keep tuned in to this channel. Coming up next, we will share with you a video and review of article blogging for Dominica. In this case study we share the successes and disappointments. What we have learned is put to good use in our new fully managed SocialIndexEngine and its marketing strategy.

Search as Media #4: Google's Hotel Finder

Today we look at Google’s Hotel Finder. This is still at the experimental stage. It's supposed to be open to the world but you can't find the Caribbean or any place in the Caribbean that are like their places. Google is targeting major destinations first.

It starts with an intelligent mapping system that allows you to define a catchment area for the hotels that you want to see. and they are displayed in the hotel listings.

You can change your dates, which would make a difference. If the date change causes a different price to be calculated, then they would be reflected in the results up here. But, as you can see, you’re getting star ratings and prices.

Right away, Google is treating hotels as somewhat of a commodity here; nothing on the features as yet, but that will probably come. The 'word on the street' is that Google is planning to do a lot more with regard to filters for hotels. When you click on a hotel, you get hotel details similar to an Expedia layout here or an OTA of any kind.

Note that there are hotel reviews by Google users; they’re quickly moving into the  TripAdvisor space. 

You can add a hotel to your shortlist, a comparison list similar to what we do with Barbados and the mapping systems. This allows you to select the points and add them to a list.

You can at any point go back to your shortlist, have a look at your shortlist on the top and remove an item from the shortlist or, in fact, book it on the shortlist. 

And you get the options to book with Expedia, Travelocity and the major Online Travel Agents or go to the owner's site!

The information is well presented and useful. This is a powerful solution for anyone that’s looking for the hotel in a particular destination, and you need to be in here. I don’t think you can not be in here. 

If you are not a Travelocity or a major brand, you are not automatically going to be on Google radar and thus not included in these listings.

How to get listed

The way to get on that radar is through search engine optimization, listing in authority information sites, and building your u,brand authority with social media and social indexing to create a presence that Google will take note of.   All this and more is done with the SocialIndexEngine.com marketing services.

It is time to start thinking about it because this is the next phase of Google as Media. It is going to be very easy for travelers to get to this service and to avoid having to wait through all of the other services that are in there, including the organic search results.

So that’s all we need to say for right now. Another reason to consider marketing yourself, another reason to consider making sure that you get on to Google’s radar and another reason to look at services such as SocialIndexEngine.com which will put you in the right place.

To get more information, go to http://SocialIndexEngine.com 

-  enter your email, first name and website address and we will get back to you immediately.   

Related links.
 The New Media

#1: Is search the new media
#2: Crowding out organic search
#3: How small hotels can compete in the new media

Get more details on SocialIndexEngine for Hotel & Tourism Marketing