What is Web 2.0?

Travel agents are often on a shoe-string budget to market their business, and thus, marketing can often take a backseat. This is the road to failure.  Please know that effective marketing is the key to your success.  You cannot overlook this.  It’s easier and easier now to market your travel business on a very limited budget.

So, if it’s a shoe string budget  you are after, then you will need to understand Web 2.0, otherwise known as social marketing. This article will breakdown exactly what Web 2.0 is, and will give you three very good reasons why social marketing is so important. 

Web 2.0 is simply a form of marketing using one or many of the social media outlets. Those outlets can be broken down into 6 different types.

1. Social Networking – the most popular of these outlets include Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, DirectMatches, and Ryze;
2. Social Bookmarking – well known ones include Digg, Technorati, Del.icio.us, Reddit, and StumbleUpon.  Originally, social bookmarks were places you could store your favorite bookmarks online, so that you could access your bookmarks from anywhere, not just your own computer.  Social bookmarking has evolved as people began to share their bookmarks with others.
3. Content Sharing – best known sites for content sharing are Wikipedia, Squidoo, Hubpages, Gather and E-zine Articles.  Content sharing sites are great for people who don’t have any web skills but want to share content on the internet.  This is a perfect fit for travel agents, because people always want to learn about places to travel.
4. Media Sharing – most well known are YouTube, Flickr, SlideShare, JamGlue;
5. Blogging – go to my recent post on Blogging to learn more, Blogging 101
6. Adapters – Amazon, Google Products, Cafe Press – these are traditional websites that “adapted” their products to the social marketing scene.

Why Focus on Web 2.0?
The answer is simple.  FREE marketing of your travel business. What’s so powerful is the multi-dimensional nature of the free marketing.

1. Social media sites and content get excellent search engine placement, so that when a potential traveler searches on “India”, your social media content may rank very high and they will find you, for free;
2. If you have your own website or blog, which I highly recommend, you can create links from your social media posting to your website or blog, called inbound links.  The inbound links to your website or blog from every piece of social media post and content, substantially improving your website rankings – and that means potential travelers will find YOU and not Orbitz, when they are researching online for their next vacation;
3. The quantity of people using social media outlets is huge, so the potential traffic is enormous.  Just to validate this point, as of today, Alexa, the website service that ranks traffic on websites, ranks Facebook as the number 2 most visited website, just behind Google.  In addition, YouTube is number 4.  Thus, of the top 4 most visited websites, social media websites have 2 positions.

Web 2.0 gives independent travel agents powerful tools to market their travel business, without costing much money, and the ability to compete with even the most impressive competition, like Travelocity.

If you are feeling overwhelmed by all of the different options, have no fear...just pick one or two social media outlets and focus on them until you have mastered them.  This effort alone will put you on the path to success.  Only then, should you look to add other social media outlets to your marketing pie.  Start with the ones that come most naturally to you.  It will be fun and your business will thrive.

Home Based Business Opportunities

Years ago, travel agents did not have to focus much time or effort on marketing. Today, with so many people using the internet to search for things like information on their next big vacation, the emergence of online booking engines may seem like competition, but shed a different light on it and you will see a fantastic opportunity for travel agents to snap up new business.  However, this means that you, the travel agent, must go online to get your prospects.  And that does NOT mean relying upon your agency’s website with a little bio on you.  It DOES mean that you need to have your own, personal website.  The good news is that using online marketing is very cost effective, anyone can do it (including internet virgins!), and it can be a whole lot of fun if you understand what you are doing.

Online Marketing overwhelm

My goal today, is to get you to understand the big picture of online marketing. There are a lot of hot topics and terms that we are bombarded with on a daily basis like Facebook, Twittter, MySpace, SEO rankings, LinkedIn, YouTube, Keyword Research, tags, and the list goes on.  There are so many bits and pieces floating around, it can make a travel agent’’s head spin and feel so overwhelmed and intimidated, they want to give up.  Don’t give up!  This post is going to be immensely helpful to you.  It’s going to show you how to use online marketing as a HUGE asset, rather than see it as competition.

Let’s go back to the old days for one minute, before the internet existed. If you were a travel agent back then, you most likely worked out of a brick and mortar location (and got paid salary, not commissions).

Today, there’s a good chance you work from home.  Even if you don’t, you must think like you do, because you are in business for yourself. So nowadays, the only difference is that your brick and mortar will be your website.  This is your hub, where people can learn more about who you are, how you can help them create vacations to last a lifetime and how to book their next vacation with you.  Your website can be as quick and easy to set up, as a Wordpress blog.  Read my post called “Blogging 101″ to learn more about setting up a blog.

Once you have the websiteblog established, you have 2 simple goals:

1. Get visitors to your website (AKA traffic)
2. Convert visitors into buyers

Website is your hub

Getting Visitors to Websites
Getting traffic to a website is far easier and cheaper than it sounds. This is how you can compete with any other travel planner.  All of the social media outlets, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc, are simply ways to drive traffic to your website.  In addition, they are powerful, effective and FREE.  That’s how these outlets fit into the big picture.  The reason they are so popular is because they are fast,  incredibly effective and FREE.  So, clearly, these are outlets worth paying attention to, if your budget is limited.

Conversions are where the rubber meets the road

Converting Visitors into Clients
Converting your traffic into paying clients is the where the rubber meets the road. This is the piece that draws the line in the sand between success and failure.  Anybody can drive traffic to a website, but if you are good at converting your visitors into buyers, you can make millions.

Some super clever internet marketers, in the 1990s, figured out a system that is very effective for converting website traffic and is called the “sales funnel.” In the next few paragraphs I will explain the “sales funnel” to you show you how to apply this clever marketing strategy to your travel business, resulting in a consistently full pipeline of high paying, ideal travel clients.  It will be so easy, you won’t believe it.

There are three goals of a sales funnel:

1. build a relationship with the prospective traveler
2. filter out the people that would not be ideal clients (you don’t want them anyway!)
3. convert them from prospective client to buying customer

The powerful part of the sales funnel, is that it works on auto pilot, in your sleep.  That’s the incredible leverage of the internet!  Even if you are a one-man shop, you can build an enormous database of awesome, high paying, ideal travel clients.

IFO

A sales funnel begins with an “irresistible free offer” on the home page of your website. Let’s say your specific expertise is luxury cruises.  Many, many people search the internet on a daily basis trying to find the best deal on a luxury cruise.  Because you have done your research on the best keyword phrases, and your website is optimized because of clever useage of social media outlets all directing traffic back to your website, this potential cruise traveler finds your website at the top of the Google search page.  When they get to your website, they see an amazing offer to receive a fabulous FREE report called “The Top 10 Secrets to Saving Money on Your Next Luxury Cruise.”  That visitor thinks, “Wow!  That’s exactly what I was looking for.”  In order to receive this wonderful and educational piece of information, he must complete a form asking for his name and e-mail address, and perhaps other contact details.  If your website visitor bites, he has immediately taken one step closer to qualifying himself as an ideal client, and you collect his contact details in a database where you can begin establishing a relationship.  It’s a win-win.

The name and e-mail address of your website visitor go straight into a program called an automatic responder (A/R). Here, you have set up a confirmation and thank you e-mail sent immediately to your prospect, and includes your free information.  In addition, you will have set up a series of follow up e-mails that keeps your business in front of this prospect and continues with developing a relationship.

Sales Funnel

The sales funnel continues through correspondence with this prospect in your A/R. At some point, you will offer or recommend cruises that you have enjoyed, and detail how working with you maximizes the cruising experience.  You might begin offering lower priced cruises, or specials which are not necessarily the bookings that will make you fortunes…but if you are only focused on selling the big ticket item, then you are missing an important piece of the sales funnel.  For each response to your cruise special, your prospect continues to qualify himself and, eventually, may call you, inquiring about the special, but then talk himself into your big ticket item, without you doing a thing!  In addition, the client will have learned so much about working with you, thanks to all the free information you continue to drip to him through your auto responders, that the booking process is shortened considerably.

I hope that you can see the power of the sales funnel and that I have clarified how it leverages the internet to build thousands of relationships, lets the client self qualify and even possibly puts money in your pockets, all while you sleep.