Technology For Making A Grand Canyon Day Hiking Business Successful
As the long-time CEO of a hiking and backpacking adventure tour business, I have learned many lessons about what technology to use that is effective and what technology doesn’t work and isn’t worth the investment. Many of you won’t be interested in this exact type of company, however any business that markets trips or tours will find this article of interest. Whether you’re booking cruise tours, bus tours, vacation packages…etc, the same principles are relevant.
Marketing is of course the crux most businesses, and especially with vacation or tourism businesses. There are many different marketing mechanisms you can choose from, but the first to focus on is internet-based marketing technologies. The first and foremost mission is to get on pay-per-click advertising, because you can start getting business immediately. Get a good website with your search phrases emphasized in the main text on each page and on the main link section, and then immediately start your pay-per-click marketing campaign. This will get business rolling in immediately. Hire a specialist for this - it’s a long learning curve and you’ll waste valuable time, money, and energy trying to figure it out yourself.
Your next mission is to get top organic rankings on Google, Yahoo, and MSN (in that order of importance). How to do this is to blog, blog, blog and subscribe with an article exchange service or a link-exchange service. Either way, you want to get a TON of links directed to your site.
backpacking in the Grand Canyon
Website design is the next most important feature, as now that you have traffic coming to your site, the people need to feel compelled enough to make a call. If you’re starting on a small budget, designing your own site is an option. Microsoft Frontpage is an consumer-friendly website-design software program if you’re up for that. If you don’t have much computer or design background, then your time is better spent raising the money to pay someone else to create it.
Finally, let’s discuss databases. You will want to start a database very quickly to begin to keep track of clients, inquiries, booked trips, and payments due. I recommend using Oracle products, as they are the leading database software provider in the world.
