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.