Improving the worst part first

On the Saasu blog this last week was an interesting comment about different ways to improve your business.

It’s funny where you pick up great insights. I was watching a national gardening program and one of the winners of their annual Gardener Of The Year prize was asked by the host how she succeeded in building such an amazing garden. Her answer floored me…

I just keep improving the worst part.

It is an interesting concept and one which I think has a lot of relevance for the tourism industry and for managing websites especially for smaller businesses.

Rather than try and fix all the problems at once why not start making a list of things which need doing whether it be replace the carpet in a room, update to a more online accounting system, take new photos for your website, SEO, etc.

A good way to manage this is using google docs or google applications.

Simply create a file and keep it updated with ideas. Then you can prioritise and work our which bits you want to do first and also see the benefits and cost.

When you are running a company like RainbowTourism.com there is always more to do. For example when we were developing our new website with Canz Design we made a file of future ideas. It meant we could keep working on the site but not loose sight of good ideas. Some of these still are to be implemented but by getting the things we needed first rather than getting distracted by lots of other issues our site was completed.

This along with other items will be looked at each month to decide which part needs to be improved first.

Of course there are arguments to fixing everything at once but if you are a small company this has lots of hidden dangers in that if you don't have the time you can easily have the changes take more time - so why not focus on the worst part first.

Make friends and partnership links

Whatever type of tourism you are in, you are bond to know what other services are around your area, and further afield.

Link partnerships with places nearby.
If you have a CMS website, where you can make small changes yourself, it is worth making link partnerships with complementary services. E.G. you have a hotel website and in your area there are 6 tourism operators, they all have their own little websites, if your visitors ask you what there is to do in your area, you often recommend these people.

So why not get together with them, and set up a website link exchange, get everyone to write one sentence about their particular business. Then agree to add all the links to your own website.

Links with other places to stay future away.
Then you may know of other hotels that are in other towns close by or hundreds of miles away. Do the same thing with them.

The end result, if your website will rank better in search engines, because other websites in your area link to you, and rank even better again since other websites that do the same thing as you, offer accommodation also link to you.

By taking these easy steps you could help your website immensely, as well as the websites that you have the linking arrangement with. It is also quite possible that your website will get found when people do a search for accommodation near a tourism activity that you have a link exchange with.

Great service for your clients.
This is a very good service to offer your customers, if you own a fishing charter, and a visitor to your website see’s you recommend a hotel nearby, chances are they will book a room at that place, it only makes sense they wouldn’t have to decide to take your fishing trip, then have to go search the web for somewhere to stay before and after, it would be much easier and quicker, to go with your suggestion wouldn’t it.

More services to offer.
Once you found this worked well, you could even go one step further and make a package deal, a customer’s stays at this place, does your fishing charter, and get’s a cut rate at each place, if both sites offer such packages you could be getting bookings from two sources, do this with everyone in your link list, and you could quite be doing quite a good business out of it.

regards Lynny
Serious SEO Services

Rainbow Tourism is Live!!!

Last night the Rainbow Tourism website went live, after 3 months of building, testing, rechecking, what a relief to know that at last the site is build, online and having new visitors.

Go check it our

RainbowTourism.com The spirit of Gay and Lesbian Travel

Lynny
The Best SEO

How to tell if your SEO has done their homework 1. B&B

Tonight while doing research for what words to optimise Rainbow Tourism.com new website, I remember an interesting trend I leant some time back that might intherest those of you that own a B&B.

Most people thoughout the world search for
Bed and Breakfast

As a rule this is the order of searches

Bed and Breakfast
B&B
B and B
Bed & Breakfast

The two highlighted in red interchand depending on what country the search was done from. Americans Tend to search nore for B and B rather than B&B

This tells me of course that if you have a B&B website, and have already had the optimisation done, that a good SEO would have known this trend, and even if the name of your business is something like Molly's B&B that a good SEO would have told you about this, and asked you to consider calling it Molly's Bed and Breakfast on the website.

Look below at the search trends for Australia, United Kingdom, United States, and New Zealand.
New Zealand is really interesting, Kiwi's didn't even start searching for B&B is general until late 2006!!! I wonder why, Bed and breakfast places have been around for years.

Anyway, click the picture below and look at the trends,

If you are interested in study's like this, you might read this one, where I looked at the most popular searches for accommodation in general

Regards Lynny

SEO by Canz

How Secure is your data

I read the following interest blog on Saasu's blog today called Winning The SaaS Security Challenge

Of particular importance are the following questions:

• Can you achieve better security than us?
• Is that laptop of yours (with accounting software on it) safer in your car, home or office than in our international data centre?
• Does your laptop have a guy with a gun standing in front of it to protect it?
• Do you back up your data as many times as day as we do?
• Do your store credit card numbers in your MYOB or Quicken file? What is your liability if you lose these?

You might ask the same questions about your online booking system.

So here is another reason to choose online systems compared to off line systems.

For example Rainbow Tourism uses Saasu accounting software and all our invoices and documentation is stored online safely and securely for a small annual fee. We email all invoices and receive all invoices electronically. This saves a large amount of money in paper, postage and printing and reduces our environmental footprint.

Similarly Rainbow Tourism uses the Seekom booking engine to manage all our bookings again storing all our documents securely.

So the question is how secure is your data?

Just for Fun take a look at websites that were

This is nothing to do with anything, but I was just looking through my Favourites Links, and found this link Webpage Archives if you have a website that's been through a few changes, or are just interest in seeing what your favourite website used to look like, just type in the url of the site and have a look way back.

If you can't think of a url, try our main website www.canzdesign.com and in a couple of days you can check out the old www.RainbowTourism.com we are just putting the finishing touches to the new RainbowTourism.com website, and it will be live by this weekend 9-11-07 maybe sooner.

I hope this one gives you all a smile, or jogs your memory.

Have a Great Day
Lynny Bishop
The Honest SEO

Online Availablity... Check your emails twice a day

This post might seem silly to some people, but we have come across accommodation websites that reply to enquiry's about avaiablity of rooms upto 2 weeks after we email them, with the excuse that "we don't get a chance to check our email very often"

Get real, if you have a website, then turn your computer on, login and download your email twice a day, it will take 5 minutes each time.

And check your spam bin. An email from someone new emailing you will often end up in the spam bin, so check the spam bin or folder each day and empty it.

Handy Hint Combatting Spam.
If you are finding you are getting too much spam through your main email, make a new email in your website control panel call it bookings1@ yourwebsite.com or enquiry1@ and put this new email on forward to your usual email, and change the emails on your website to the new email, when that one starts to become a spam magnet delete it, and make a new email booking2@ or enquiry2@


Handy Hint 2 Combatting Spam. If your main email is over run with spam, make a new email, and go through your email address book, sending out an email to everyone saying please update your address book with our new email, you have gotten email like this from time to time, and are happy to update the email if it means something haven't you.... then just wait for about 6 weeks, until all you recieve at the old email is junk, and simply delete the old email address.
You spam will be cut down heaps. If you combine this with the first hint you will get your spam problem under control easily.

Handy Hint 3 Combatting Spam If you are having a new website built never ask for the 2 defualt emails admin@ and info@ many spambot's now just gather url's and send emails automatically out to these 2 addresses. If you have one of these addresses, then reread Hint 2

Cheers
Lynny
NZ's Best SEO

Online Availability - Make your life easy

One of the biggest issue accommodation providers and other tourism providers face is ensuring that their rates are up to date on all websites and availability is up to date.

The simple solution is to use an online booking system on your website that it is part of the Open Distribution Network (ODN).

Why is this important you ask?

The concept behind ODN is one of shared inventory i.e. you update inventory and rates in one place and all your suppliers access this shared inventory.

This means instead of updating availability rates for example:

• via email to your agents who might sell one or two rooms a year
• blocking out rooms for resellers who may not sell the rooms
• updating wotif.com
• updating hotelclub
• updating worldchoice travel
• updating your own website
• updating your manual book

You can update all rates and availability in one place.

Rainbow Tourism uses an ODN software called Seekom. We strongly recommend this product as it has all the above functionality and the New Zealand developers of this product have worked hard to intergrate this product with other systems.

Seekom also has a number of wholesalers and agents which you can automatically access with minimum of fuss.

Examples are:

• Jason's Travel Media
  
• Tourism Distribution Systems
• and the list goes on.

What Seekom does is operate a good Open Distribution Network online booking system and provide it at a very competitive rate. So what are you waiting for - compare systems today and then compare prices and you might be surprised. Seekom is not only full of features but very cost effective.

Scam number 3

Here is a slightly different scam but is a good example of things to look for:

• The To address isn't your address
• The person claims to be a travel agent but can't book airline tickets - what are they then
• The email address is yahoo.com
• A simple search shows the company doesn't exist at that address - in fact there is a genuine travel agent at that address.
• No real details on the booking just we want tickets

In this case I just deleted the email as it so clearly a scam.

Check out our other scam posts for more information and use our comments section to let us know of some scams you have seen come via your mail box

Date: Mon, 5 Nov 2007 19:34:21 -0800 (PST)
From: Mrs Mary Lynn
Subject: ENQUIRY URGENT PLEASE.
To: info@beontopranking.com

Dear Sir/Ma,

Good day to you. I saw you contact on the internet concerning Travels
and tour (AIRLINE TICKET AND HOTEL RESERVATION). I would like to make inquiry as regards the service on E-ticket and Visa processes to your country, I have some clients will want to travel to various destinations on various airline internationally. Kindly reply if you can offer this services for me and my clients.

I will want to know if you can make air ticket booking on this
following: airline. BA, KLM, ETHIOPIA AIRLINE, VIRGIN AIRLINE, EMIRATE AIRLINE, KENYA AIRLINE, ALITALIA AIRLINE, SOUTHERN CHINA AIRLINE.EGYPTAIR, TURKISH AIRLINE. AIR NEW ZEALAND, BRAZILLIAN AIRLINE, ETC.

Kindly reply me as soon as possible also, send me your direct contact number so that i can mail you with the passengers travel details and name.Also, this is my yahoo ID if we can chat online. airworldagent@yahoo.com. or airworldagent2@yahoo.com.Kindly mail me with your yahoo ID . I shall be making payment for your service via my secured credit Master and Visa Card as soon as i
have your booking confirmation.

Thanks and hope to hear from you soonest

Mrs Mary.

70-71 Wells Street
London W1T 3QG
Tel: +447024064156

NOTE: IT IS ALSO OKAY IF YOU CAN MAKE THE BOOKING FOR ME VIA EMAIL AND
AND YOU SEND ME A PAYMENT SITE WHERE I CAN MAKE THE PAYMENT ONLINE, OR RATHER IF YOU CAN MAIL ME WITH A SITE WHERE I CAN MAKE THE BOOKING AND ALSO PAYMENT ONLINE BECAUSE IT IS MORE FASTER AND MUCH MORE EASIER AND IF NON IS AVIALABLE, KINDLY SECURE BOOKING NORMALLY VIA EMAIL AND I WILL SEND YOU

OUR PROFILE:
AIRWORLD AGENT TRAVEL CONSULT. Was founded in January 25, 2003. Our aim is to offer clients the widest possible choice, the highest standards of service, top quality holidays and real value for money. We are there to help our clients before, during and after your travels and they will do everything possible to ensure that you get a hassle free journey. We are friendly, helpful and efficient. We have accumulated a lot of experience over the few years of operation in handling flight journeys for private, family, business, corporate, religious, university and governmental and NGO travelers.

We also organize land and cruising holiday tours within UK and to other country from our agent in any country that our client will wish to go. Further to our services, we arrange Domestic and international flight services for our client who wish to travel by air. Our international flight service is mainly handle by our business associate in other country because we wish to build a very strong net operation of
services that will make our client have the best of services ever.We arrange rail services within and outside UK.

Among our service to our client, we offer accommodation to our clients. Accommodations is offer to our client base on there demand. From the services offered by our associate in other country, we can provide hotel of different classes ranging from 1* to 7*. we can also offer a airport pick-up services and car hire in and to any location that our guess would want
to go.

Desktop versus Online software

For small operators one of the biggest issues is how to manage the paper work for the business.

Whether it be any of the following:

• Emails
• Brochures
• Accounts
• Bookings
• Rates
• or any other data

These all have different software which can assist in keeping track of all these.

Now the problem is what is the best software?

Will there is software from Microsoft and accounting software like MYOB but the big problem is they are tied to your desktop.

• What happens when you are away and you need to access these.
  
• How can you only share the documents you want and keep others secure

What are the alternaltives?

• What not try Open source software such as Open Office - this is an excellent product and is very simple to use. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Microsoft Office but do you really need them?
  
• What about Google Docs? A great way to share your documents and access them securely. Better still why not check out Google Apps The free version allows you to share data within your group, have an online calendar, access gmail and more all from a secure login. The paid version even offers back up deleted emails for 90 days by the adminstrator.
  
• For accounting why not check out Saasu - Software as a Service - keep all your accounts securely online. Manage overdue accounts and if you ever have a tax audit then all records are readily accessible.

The real advantages of using online options are:

• Accessible anywhere in the world
  
• Simpler to share access with other users
• Often better backup and more secure e.g. Saasu back up their servers and also store a back up in another location - but always check the back up policy of online services
• No upgrading of software required - it automatically happens

The main disadvantages are:

• If you don't have internet access then you can't access the service.
• A slow internet connection will make the software feel clunky and awkward to use.

What you can do though is decide for example to use gmail and also download your email to your pc, you might run google docs but download documents on a regular basis or work locally on your PC with open office then load the documents into google docs for future use.

As you can see there is no right or wrong answer just what works for you.

One thing to remember is check out reviews of software. Remember price doesn't tell you anything about how good the software is - it only tells you how much money the software provider wants for the product.

Why not use the comments section and tell us of your favourite software