How to Explode Your YTB Travel Business
By: BRENT VANDERSTELT
Building website traffic is the single most important issue surrounding the promotion of your new website and business. I have spend hundreds of hours as a new internet start up myself on a shoestring budget, as most off you will too.
The first thing you need to get is a good website software package that you can easily build yourself and have up and running in literally a couple of hours. I use Website Tonight for my vacation rental business and this domain and web hosting business among several others.
The first step to getting traffic is choosing keywords for your website, take all the time you need here. Think about your products, your customers and your target ) or niche market. You do not want a "shotgun" approach to marketing to the masses, you need to define a niche market. For example: I chose to target the travel, vacation and vacation rental business. Why? Because I needed a niche market and my interests are in among many things, travel and vacations. I could not afford to go after and compete against the "big guns", with unlimited advertising budgets in the domain name, web hosting and website business, so I developed a niche market.
The next step, is to build a content rich website. You develop a content rich website just like I am doing here. I am writing original, useful and informative content that is appealing and compliments my keys words and my target or niche market. Not sure that you have the ability to write a content rich website? There are companies that will do it for you, such as Constant-Content (which I have used to purchase several articles from) or you can goggle for "content writers" or "freelance writers".
Now that you have your "keywords" and your "content rich website" you need to market your website/business. This next step entails getting your website listed on as many search engines and directories as possible, as quickly as possible. The fast and easy way to do this is through Traffic Blazer, which will submit your "url" or website address to literally hundreds of search engines and directories automatically and some manually.
I do not recommend all the "free submit" offers out there. Is what will happen is, they collect and sell your email and personal information that is required for the "free submit" to every spammer and junk email company in the world. Your "in box" will literally be flooded with junk mail and spam. The money that you will need to spend to get a good spam preventer software is not worth the cost of Traffic Blazer.
I have also included about 50 travel and vacation specific directories that you may use to jump start your traffic, in conjunction with Traffic Blazer.
By now you should be seeing traffic to your website through goggle analytics and/or the "hit counter" that you may have added from your Website Tonight package. You will need to be patient here, many search engines will take weeks or months to get you listed, but the main 3, goggle, Yahoo and MSN are fast and free and are included in Traffic Blazer.
Once you have your content rich website, developed a strong list of "keywords", utilized the submission and traffic facts ( included free with every web hosing or Website Tonight account) from Traffic Blazer, you are now ready to start making money 24/7 from your website.
But you are not done! you will need to peroidotically submit fresh content to your website to prevent it from going flat, just like the can of soda on my desk. How do you submit fresh content? The most effective way is to add an "articles" section to your website, just as I have done here.
Once a month, you should write or purchase an original article on your business, products, niche market or general travel article and post it to your 'articles" page. You may use information you receive for your travel business as ideas for stories, etc.
Done? Not yet! You will also have to continually add fresh links to your website as another ongoing maintenance program, along with the articles. Quality links are just as important as the other items mentioned here.
Articles are also a good source of FREE advertising for your business by submitting good quality articles to several article submission directories you can add quality links to you website. I write and submit articles to ezinearticles,Article Base and Associated Content. You should write and submit 1 quality article at least once a month to these article directories.
Sick of writing articles yet? Better not be, because now you will need to write articles or Blogs for your own blog or blogcast. This is another source of FREE advertising for your business.
You should set up your blog as soon as possible and post articles there daily, or even short promotional articles about different vacation ideas or vacation destinations, tips for the traveler etc. The more you write, the more FREE traffic you will get to your website, and this means more sales.
FREE classifieds are another excellent source for getting FREE traffic to your website, avoid the free mass subscription services, they are usually a waste of time. Manually submit 1-3 unique and different classifieds in different locations once or twice a week.
Drive red hot referrals to your website, Peak Impact, offers real time national leads to your YTB Website. They offer Better Leads, Better Service and Better Results. Guarentee your success and order your leads here. I order 100 leads per month or 3/per day, this is easily managed for me sense I have other businesses to run, you may choose to order more or less.
eTravelfortuneoffers a top notch online travel marketing system. You can and should use this system in conjunction with Peak Impact and your other travel marketing tools. eTravelfortune have an excellent 9 email marketing program that keeps sending your leads constant messages every few days. Research shows that your leads need to see your message an average of 7 times, before they decide to purchase.You can never have to many marketing resources.
For now, I will give you one more excellent source of FREE publicity and quality links to your website. This, is to write and submit interesting and useful Press Releases at least 1 every 3 months and submit them for FREE on these FREE PR websites such as iNewswire, pr.com and PR Lead.
You want to avoid submitting too many press releases, because they will look at it as spam and ban you from their services.
This sounds like a lot of work, and it is, but very important if you want your website found, and found at the lowest cost possible, and is only found if you do these steps.
Remember, you might be competing with other businesses with an unlimited adverting budget. Unless you are independently wealthy, you need as much FREE advertising as possible if you want your Internet business to succeed.
The #1 reason businesses fail is lack of capitol or money, don't let your internet business fall into this trap.
When setting up a budget for Goggle Adwords, you do not need a large budget here either, I use about $2.00 per day. The key here is to select just a couple key, "keywords" that match your target or niche market.
Internet Home Business-How To Choose A Domain Name For Your Website
A domain name is the web address to your website. When a person writes website.com, he is telling the browser to go to an IP address. Everything on the net is searched via domain names. Your website.com will become recognition of your business in the coming times. It is important that you choose this name carefully. Here are few things that you should take into consideration when choosing a domain name. Your domain name should be as relevant to your business as it can be. It is . . .
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