Here at Enterprise Webs you’ve been to our “front room,” Cultural Travels, and are pretty much familiar with it. Now we’d like to introduce you to our “back room,” TravelWebs.net. TravelWebs is the newest service to be launched from Enterprise Webs, the company that produced Cultural Travel’s formidable database and wonderful monthly newsletter, The Cultured Traveler. Now we’ve decided to offer TravelWebs’ services to the travel industry by rolling out a low-cost web site hosting program that will put you right in the middle of heavy online traffic . For full information on TravelWebs, go to www.TravelWebs.net. For a peek at how TravelWebs’ hosting capabilities can change your marketing right away, read the two items below.
 

There, we said it. Our whole claim to fame (besides having the world’s largest database of specialty tour operators) is our Web Page Ad concept: We design a page for you on our site that functions as a mini Web Site (thus, “Web Page Ad”). It lets you receive traveler inquiries and list your trips, and it links directly to your own home web page. The concept is so good that advertisers’ WPAs rank as high as or higher on search engines than their own home web sites. Search engines glom on to the fact that a WPA on Cultural Travels is linked to dozens of pages of travel content, thus improving both Web Page Ad and home site rankings. Talk about being in good company!

Wait, there’s more:

Your web site’s current host – whether it’s Earthlink, Jumpline, MSN, whatever – can’t help you market your business. We can. It can’t assist you with ads, newsletters, online articles or directed e-mail. We can. It can’t offer you an interactive Trips database that’s invaluable to both you and your clients. We can. How can we do all this? Very simple: Since we built the infrastructure for the CulturalTravels.com site, we can offer you the same quality of service and specially designed travel industry bells and whistles, for a fraction of the costs that you would pay to create them on your own. Our specialty is our unique talent to offer a fully integrated online marketing program rather then just passively hosting you site. It’s our job to know how to do these things. We’ve given a lot of thought to an integrated, reasonably priced marketing solution that lets smaller businesses enjoy as impressive a presence on the Internet as their far larger competitors. Contact us at 888-443-8687.

You know how it goes: Cultural Travels, a small company, keeps saying it’s on to something important and the big boys and girls just yawn and say, “Go outside and play.” Well, the Travel Industry Association of America (TIA) and Smithsonian Magazine recently said what we’ve been saying for four years, only their numbers knocked us on our tushes: 81% of U.S. adults who traveled in the past year – 118 million people – consider themselves “historic/cultural travelers” – people who include an historical or cultural activity on their trips. TIA and Smithsonian added that “cultural travelers” spend more money on their trips ($623) vs. the average U.S. trip ($457), and that 30% of them say their choice of destination is influenced by a specific cultural/historical event, activity or site. For a more complete look at TIA’s report, go to The Cultured Traveler's Lead Story for October  and scroll down to the second item, “Study Confirms Our Bias Toward ‘Cultural Travelers.’”

What’s this stuff we hear about people browsing the Internet having short attention spans? In September, we clocked over 44,000 visitors who spent an average of 14 minutes per visit at our web site. That’s almost 3 minutes longer than people “stick” to Microsoft’s MSN portal site, according to E-Commerce Times. We also noticed that 33% of our visitors viewed 19 or more pages per visit – a sure indication of more than passing interest in Cultural Travels’ content. International viewership is rising, too: 18% of all visitors to our site now come from outside the U.S. Right now our growth rate is 20% per month – one of the fastest of any travel portals on the Internet.

Professional web content writer Charlene Rashkow says that more than 1 million new web sites appear each month on the Internet. What do the successful ones do to get noticed? They follow 8 rules of writing that draw people in: 1. Don’t worry about nitpickers. Aim your writing at those you know will enjoy its content. 2. Write about half the copy on the Web that you would in a brochure or print ad. 3. Don’t try to be all things to all people – focus on your core audience. 4. Inspire, teach, astound, delight – don’t write like a bureaucrat. 5. Change your web site copy often, or else add a monthly newsletter or frequently updated articles. 6. Encourage readers to take action and make it easy for them to contact you. 7. If you’re not excited about your product or service, why should casual visitors be? 8. Make your site easy to read and navigate. Highlight main points and anticipate where readers will want to go next. To read the full article click here. (If you’re looking for help writing web copy, contact Sheri Leigh at 888-443-8687.)

SearchEngineWatch.com (www.searchenginewatch.com) is one of our favorite places for keeping up on search engine trends and technology. Although it specializes in helping people get better rankings, the site doesn’t bow blindly before the gods of search engine-dom. Recently it offered some advice that bears repeating: “While search engines are a primary way people look for web sites, they’re not the only way.” It turns out that people often use more traditional methods to find or arrive at web sites: print ads, word of mouth, links from other sites, web directories and newsgroups. The personal element here can work in your favor: positive newsgroup mentions of your company as well as casual e-mail or face-to-face conversations between people who like you can draw traffic to your site. Do not be afraid to offer reciprocal links to other travel companies you like, but be careful, it is not the number of links but the quality of sites linking back to you that matter, see Item 3 above.

• Sex differences are showing up in perceptions of e-mail, says a study by DoubleClick Inc. A survey of 900,000 adults revealed that 65% of men consider e-mail “that comes too often” to be spam – even if it comes from companies they’ve done business with before – vs. 55% of women who think the same. Women may tend to see a previous relationship as making an unexpected e-mail “OK.”
   
• Americans may love their cars, but Nielsen/NetRatings figures show they love travel even more. In late September, unique online visits to the top nine Internet travel web sites numbered 14,932,000 vs. 6,812,000 unique visits to the top nine automotive destinations.
   
• Keep on eye on “local search” and "topic search" (think CulturalTravels.com) as the next Big Thing for small businesses on the Internet. The Kelsey Group reports that 30% of the 1.6 billion searches people conduct weekly on the Web ask for specific geographic areas, usually home towns or local shopping areas, or thematic topics. Look for search engines like Yahoo and Google to begin offering to fold local businesses into the results they present to queries from specific locales.