Seasonal Site Enhancements for Vacation Rental

To ensure some good 19-inch dumps, we do a snow dance to the Scandinavian snow god, Ullr. Apart from favorable conditions, you might be surprised at how few in the vacation rental and luxury lodging industry think about the importance of seasonality on their website. For would-be travelers there’s almost nothing more important. Here are a few simple tips for to prep your site for success this winter:

Theme your site for the season. Whether you’re located in Hawaii or Colorado, choose pictures that help your prospects picture themselves enjoying your resort. Change pictures of people rafting or mountain biking to nice shots of people taking face shots in untracked powder. Better yet, configure your site to have a summer theme and a winter theme that your site visitors can select, and that you can quickly update to display as the default theme as needed.

Integrate real-time weather feeds and reports. Snow reports, surf reports, and tidal forecasts will bring potential travelers back to your site again and again, especially during the lead up to their vacations. If you have activity packages such as snorkeling, flyfishing, yacht rentals, lift tickets, ski lessons, etc., be sure to advertise them on your weather page.

sources: http://www.bluetentmarketing.com/blog/

Cool Google Tips & A Free Report

I've been following along with a new launch where this guy is sharing a lot of cool videos.

He works from home focusing his internet business on list building, and selling unique digital products...

Using these simple Google hacks that Chris Vendilli is going to show you, it's almost like he can download all this information directly into his brain!

He stay on top of ALL of those newsletters & blogs by putting his computer to work for HIM!..

source: http://internetmarketingebooks.blogspot.com/2009_03_01_archive.html

Blogging With Social Media

Web 2.0 or more commonly known as Social Media has changed the way how information is shared and exchanged across the globe. This unique tool has put together people from different parts of the world to share their ideas, passions, services and skills. Blogging being one of the significant social media tools prove to be a great success for businesses.


Both Web 2.0 and Social media go along together and they relate to how individuals can interact with one another in the internet. Blogging being as essential web journal updated frequently. Therefore Web2.0 blogging not only refers to sharing o content but it also allows people to interact within the content thorough contests, polls and by giving comments as well.........

source: http://seodiscussions.blogspot.com/2009/07/blogging-with-social-media.html

Marketing for iPhone Applications

We’ve recently received several requests for help in marketing iPhone Applications. Because we provide a lot of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) services in a variety of industries, many of the companies that contacted us assumed that the strategies we traditionally employ would work for iPhone apps. Does Apple provide a way to pay to have an app listed or featured more prominently on the iTunes site, similar to Google Adwords? Should I have a website, blog, twitter about it?

It’s difficult to give a definitive answer, but here’s what we’re seeing so far. Creating a viral buzz throughout the iPhone community is tough. iPhone users find the most popular apps through iTunes, but also learn of new apps through reviews, forums and blogs through traditional online searches. A search for iPhone apps on Facebook reveals over 500 listings, and who knows what the absolute number is. What seems to be the most efficient is an organic approach that consistently and effectively approaches as many review sites, blogs and social media outlets as is possible, while tracking the activity of your downloads.

YouTube Marketing Now Stronger with Call To Action Overlay

Call-to-action overlay is one of the most recent features that have been added to YouTube keeping in mind the marketing potential of the platform and I am sure this is going to make YouTube a much more powerful tool for marketers. This Call to Action overlay is available only for Promoted videos though.

YouTube has been offering the Promoted Videos for all its users in US for quite some time now. Promoted Videos were earlier known as Sponsored videos and are nothing but YouTube advertisement. You can basically select one of your videos, add some text to it and select the keywords for which you would like your video to get triggered. When a user searches for any of those keywords besides the organic results your result also shows up.

Promoted videos are increasingly gaining prominence in YouTube and with this new call to action overlay feature I would not be surprised if it becomes a rage among marketers. This call to action overlays allow the advertiser to drive traffic to their sites where they can make purchases, sign up for email newsletters or whichever action an advertiser wishes.

Setting up this call to action overlay for your YouTube video is pretty easy.
a) Start your promoted video campaign
b) Under My Videos go to Video Details Page
c) Fill out the easy form with the necessary details for call to action

YouTube Insights has always been a very helpful tool for YouTube marketing and with this call to action overlay coming into picture, Insights would be an indispensable tool for all marketers.

The lethal combination of the huge traffic base of YouTube, availability of Promoted Video option followed by this Call to Action Overlay feature and YouTube Insight can actually prompt a lot of marketers to consider YouTube as a main stream marketing channel.

How To Achieve A #1 Ranking On MSN In Three Months Or Less - Case Study

Challenge: An established machine shop in Tyngsboro, MA, called Eastmar Inc. needed a website to showcase their services and bring in new business. The challenge was to design a website quickly, optimize it for the search engines using the keyword phrase “cnc machining” on a fixed budget, and rank #1 “organically” in the search results. It turned out after conducting extensive keyword research that “cnc machining” was a VERY competitive keyword search phrase, but I was confident and assured the client it could be done. (Note: I never guarantee #1 or top ten ranking because you never know…. what works one day, may not work the next)

Result: A nine page fully optimized, search engine/user friendly website went live on 4/23/06 with the only cost (excluding my fees) going to web hosting - $120 and registering a domain name – less than $10. This was a LOW budget tactical operation in every sense of the word. All on-page SEO tactics were implemented including adding the main keyword phrase “cnc machining” in the title tag, meta description and keyword tags, H1 and H2 tags, ALT tag, bolding the keyword phrase within the content, and making sure the last thing the search engine spider see’s is the keyword phrase on the page. Very little off-page optimization was ever completed. The end result on 6/20/06 (less than 2 months into the project): - #1 organic ranking on MSN for the search phrase “cnc machining” out of 1,131,085 results.