Savvy Operator

Coupons and promotions have been around for a long time and are commonly used to drive business by providing price incentives.  As a tour or activity operator, there are a lot of ways you can use a promotional coupon to drive new or repeat business to your website.  In the traditional model, a customer would [...]

Every in-destination tourism company (whether it is an attraction, tour operator, or activity provider) prints brochures and rack cards for distribution to tourists.  It doesn’t matter what market you are in, you will find these brochures in the lobbies of hotels, store fronts, and tourist offices.  Hundreds of thousands (perhaps even millions) of dollars are [...]

PPC or pay per click can be a very effective way of driving traffic to your website especially if your website does not rank well on Google search results because of high competition for your keywords.  As part of any Google PPC campaign, you will have access to using Google analytics to track your campaign [...]

There are a lot of web designers, some good, many bad, and a bunch in between.  So how do you, as a tour operator, know what to look for in a good web designer?  Well, there are a lot of resources on-line to help you build a list of questions to ask your prospective web [...]

I realize I am dating myself when I say that there was a time when building your own website meant having to code in HTML, using FTP, and programming CGI scripts.  Fortunately for you, there are many tools available now that allow you to design and build your website without the need to write a [...]

So now that you’ve got the basic video requirements down, you’ve got a place to host your sites, and you understand the basics of shooting video for the web, the next question is… how do you make your videos more compelling and actually generate revenue from them.  To be clear however, we are not referring [...]

Let’s face it, photos are great, but conversions are better.  So how do you use your photos to increase the likelihood that a viewer is going to visit your site and book your tour.  There are several key factors that will determine how successful your photos will be at inspiring a viewer enough to actually [...]

Prerequisites: You should have a digital camera of your choice to use for business purposes. Estimated Time for Completion: Reading time of 20 mins. Details: Do you recall the old saying “A picture is worth a thousand words?”.  Well, with the search engines, that’s not entirely true, but pictures can go a long way to [...]

Prerequisites: In order to successfully complete this daily action, you will need the content that you aggregated and sorted into your physical and electronic “Website Content” folders.
Estimated Time for Completion: 2-3 hours (depends on the size of your website)
Details: Web content plans are traditionally very complex documents to complete.  They are used by web developers [...]

Prerequisites: In order to successfully complete this daily action, you will need:

An Internet connection because you will be doing on-line research.
A file folder marked “Website Content”.
A folder on your MAC or PC called “Website Content” with sub-folders for documents, photos, and videos.

Estimated Time for Completion: 1-2 hours
Details: By far the most difficult part of [...]