There's a battle being fought everyday on the internet. Search engine dominance, keyword bidding wars and stealth content optimization are all fronts in the modern e-commerce war. With over a trillion indexed web pages on the net, being seen by potential customers is harder than ever. But this is the modern marketplace, and new leaders are being shaped and discovered daily.

To compete on the web battlefield, effectively positioning your business is necessity. So how do you stack up? Take a quick look under the hood of your website and e-marketing strategy by answering the following questions. If you can't answer “yes” to all questions, your company is in danger of losing ground to the competition.

My Website Strategy – I can easily...

• Add to and edit my web content?

• Update and re-order my trip images?

• Track visitor paths through my site?

• Change my metatags globally and on individual pages?

• View website statistics and traffic sources?

My Web Marketing Strategy – I know how to...

• Research and bid on keywords?

• Build and manage PPC campaigns?

• Write and distribute press releases?

• Use Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites?

• Build and send email blasts?

The web offers the most cost-effective marketing tool in the world. So are you using it to its fullest potential? The web design and development experts at the Thinkery can help your company analyze and enhance its position on the web. Using our proven website design and online marketing strategies, you can fortify your current position and advance your company's interests in the on-going battle on the world wide web.

Call or email today to learn more about the Thinkery's e-marketing strategies and web development tactics.

For nearly a year we've been watching the economy seesaw with no apparent rhyme or reason. Every day you can choose from hundreds of articles reporting on the latest fallout from the "down economy." Companies in every industry are examining and cutting budgets in order to offset lower sales. Doom and gloom is omnipresent, and especially hard hit are companies that offer leisure activities -- including adventure travel. But there is an upside during this hard time -- leaders are being shaped, and some companies will emerge from this recession stronger than they entered. Will yours be one of them?

During hard times, marketing is often one of the first budgets to get slashed. This action is a double-edged sword. While it's easy for bookkeepers and accountants to applaud a marketing cut, what they don't realize is that they're also cutting your company's ability to reach its target audience with sales messages. This can lead to further stagnation of sales which requires additional budget cuts, thus creating a wicked downward spiral. We think a better decision during hard times is to examine your marketing budget closely, trimming those items that show little return on investment. SEO consultants, web maintenance fees and old pay-to-link portals will likely surface during this marketing expense examination. And if you really look at your current website (be critical, your potential customers are), you might find that your entire website is actually an anchor on your sales.

Your adventure travel website is the most cost effective way you have to reach prospective customers. Nearly two billion people use the web today and that number only continues to grow. Like it or not, your customers are researching you online before they buy, so you need to be certain that your website is performing. Many adventure travel companies have limited marketing budgets and yet their single best tool to get stronger during this down economy, their website, is actually making them weaker. Poor images, poor keyword targeting and SEO, broken links, cluttered content, sloppy navigation, dated design -- all of these elements conspire against your company's success.

Leaders will emerge from this down economy, same as they have with every down economy. This time around, leaders will be leveraging their websites to gain the edge. Will it be easy? No. Will it happen overnight? Not a chance. Fewer people are traveling right now. This fact doesn't mean you should hunker down and wait it out. It means that it's more important than ever to display your adventure trips in a clean, informative and visually appealing format. Your content and META tags need to be optimized for better search rankings. You need to be able to update and edit content, and add or remove trip dates for accuracy and credibility. You need to be able to track your customers through your adventure website to quantify your marketing effectiveness. It's going to take some work, but the web design and development experts at the Thinkery are here to help.

Trip Agent puts the tools in your hands. We'll set up and build your new adventure website. We'll train you thoroughly. Then we'll hand it over with no strings attached. Of course, we'll always be available to help with anything you need, including copywriting, e-marketing, branding and more. But we won't lock you into any on-going contracts or monthly fees. Once you buy Trip Agent, YOU own it. And with it, you can emerge from this down economy a stronger adventure travel company, maybe even a new industry leader.

Give us a call or email today to discuss how Trip Agent and the Thinkery can build and opitmize your company's online presence.

Here's the third and final part of my series on using free Google tools to help with marketing your adventure travel website or eco-tourism site.

We've touched on Analytics, Sitemaps, YouTube, Talk, and more. . .today we'll cover Base and Local Business Center.

First let's do the easy one-- the Google Local Business Center. If you're not in there already, follow the link at left and get yourself added. You'll have to build a description of your business, add in your location and website URL, and most importatnly, pick out your service categories. It's best to upload an image or two, just to give some eyecandy, and fill out everything in there you can. Your goal is to have a totally complete, totally accurate listing. You'll be surprised how many times your business will show up in a generic search thanks to this additional avenue, and you will probably add a good number of click thoroughs at no cost.

You can also add coupons if you like promoting a trip or adventure you are also pushing on your website-- a nice little differentiator from your local competition, and an easy way to track the effectiveness of your online marketing work (if a bunch of people suddenly show up with your Google coupons printed out, you'll know you're doing great on the search engines!).

The second tip is a little more obscure. Though it's been around for a few years, if you ask most people what Google Base is, they'll just give you a blank look. Google Base is basically an attempt by Google to hoover up ever more information by allowing us, the content providers, to push data into their warehouses rather than them having to come get it from us, using their spiders and crawlers.

Base has a whole lot of very useful data types-- housing, employment, products, and the one we're going to look at-- events and activities. The really cool thing about Base is that you're in control of your data, and you can specify all the parameters of what you want to provide, including developing custom data types if you want to, to really nail down your specific offering. Then, once your data in in Google giant system, anyone on the web can pull down the data very easily via Google's API system (if you're not familiar with an API, don't worry-- it's a programmer term). So potentially you can syndicate your trip and adventure travel listings across a huge network of like-minded partner sites, without having to lift a finger!

Ok-- let's get started. First, you'll need to apply for a Google Base account. I'll wait here while you go do that.

Got it?

Now we're going to create a text file with the trips you want to add to Base. It's easiest to use either Microsoft Excel or Notepad to do this, unless you're one of those rebels who likes to use free stuff like OpenOffice (I love free). We're going to use the tab-delimited format, so after each entry you're going to hit the tab button if you're using Notepad (if you're using a spreadsheet like Excel or OpenOffice, just pretend each vertical line in the cell is a tab).

The basic layout in your spreadsheet is like this:

A couple notes: make sure you use ISO-8601 format for all dates-- and you use the slash between the start and end dates if it's a longer trip. Also, you need to use the actual trip page for the link, NOT your homepage. Don't use ALL CAPS in your title or description. And for the image link, use a real, full size image of the actual trip, not a logo or placeholder or thumbnail. And the ID field cannot change between uploads-- so if you choose ot include it, make sure it's your internal trip ID, not just a random number.

Once your Base feed is set up, you can upload it to your Base account, using a simple uploader mecahnism. If your trips change frequently, it's probably easier to keep the file on your website, and tell Google where to come get it. You can even schedule a pickup, so you can refresh your data on the first of every month or whatever.

For much more information about creating a tab-delimited feed, please see this link. Here's more information on the events & activities data type-- link.

Happy Base-ing! And as usual, if you want the Thinkery to help you with this, or develop custom, dynamic XML feeds to Base so you don't have to do the grunt work, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it !

Ok-- so I've been beating on the topic of leveraging Google to help market your adventure travel website. I've just got a couple more points to make on this topic, and then we'll move on to (perhaps) greener fields in subsequent articles.

So we've covered a few of the more productive ways you can get Google to help you cut the costs of your marketing efforts and to increase your awareness of your site's performance in search engines and on the web in general. Now let's talk more about pure marketing-- that is, the stuff you'd be paying a slick design firm to create for you. Things like brochures, presentations, postcards, etc.

Not so long ago, the height of cool in marketing was distributing a CD-ROM with your marketing materials on it. This cut down paper consumption, gave people less to clutter their desk, and just had a "whiz bang" factor that a lot of people loved. If you were really on top of your game, you might even have a professionally produced video on there, with your movers and shakers telling the corporate story and putting forth the approved marketing message.

While undeniably kinda neat, the CD-ROM was far from viral, far from portable, and often quite expensive. When you consider 99.9% of these will end up in a drawer or in the trash, it starts to look a little ineffective for our target businesses.

This leads us to point number one-- YouTube. YouTube is an incredible resource for small to midsized adventure travel and tourism companies looking to market what they do. But YouTube is not just for Rick Rolls and funny videos of dad falling off the skateboard-- it's an incredibly effective marketing vehicle that can get your unique tourism niche and trip offerings in front of an audience of millions of potential customers. And, as with almost everything I've blogged about, it's FREE!

So what do you do? Create a user, and for your own sake, name it something that makes sense for your business, like "alpineskiadventures" not "skibunny123". Then gather any video you have (ask your longtime clients-- you'd be surprised how many might have some great footage) or get a local professional videographer to take a trip with you (and you might get a great price break if he wants to go on the trip anyway!) and start posting those videos to your user account. Make sure you use effective keywords in the titles and descriptions, so your videos can be found by anyone who's interested in what you're offering.

Finally-- stay on top of it. Try to police the comments section, and delete comments from spammers or competitors. Encourage healthy debate and conversation, answer questions, and keep it useful!

So what's point number two, you ask eagerly?

Wait til next time my friends. . .