Our new trip itinerary feature is smokin’ – and there’s more on the way!
Last month we introduced a new management feature for our Web Page Ad advertisers that allows them to go to one secure online place to update their Cultural Travels listings and trip information*. Our advertisers tell us that “Web Page Ad Marketing Management” has made administering their presence with us a lot easier. Now we’re getting ready to add another powerful feature: the ability to publish day-by-day itineraries. Potential clients will be to see the full scope of an advertiser’s custom tours – a great selling tool. We said last month that we intend to keep making Web Page Ads as indispensable and even better than our advertisers’ own home web pages.
Current advertisers can review your Web Page Ad and Admin back-end right from the Ad Directory!
(*To see a demo of this new feature, go to: www.TravelWebs.net/WebAdDemo Click on the paper clip. You’ll immediately be taken to the demonstration CT Web Page Ad Marketing Management console. All of the features are self-explanatory.)
This chart might open your eyes wider about e-mail
We ran across this article a few days ago on E-Mail Insider and thought it was a convincing, straightforward explanation of how e-mail, properly used, can help any business get more business. Simply put, well-timed e-mail can be shown to have a direct link to increases in queries and purchases. Chart Of course this was no surprise to us as we have been watching our user sessions jump every time we send out mail. Fifty percent of the e-mails CT sends are opened within 24 hours! Those of you receiving trip requests right after a Trips and Specials e-mail see the effect. Do you make the most of e-mail? If not let our TravelWebs.net hosting solutions drive traffic to your site. Need help? Review our past articles on the issue.
The Cultured Traveler’s November theme: Indigenous Cultures
The theme for November’s The Cultured Traveler will be indigenous cultures. We’re not talking about sitting around a poi pit in Oahu watching professional dancers shimmy, or visiting “colorful” native tchotske shops in Borneo. Our features will range from Tenejapa Homecoming (about an American making the transition to living in a new country) to Belfast Walls (a witty walk-about in the surprisingly charming epicenter of the “The Troubles”) to a look at Australia’s Mungo National Park, one of that country’s most important preserves of aboriginal culture and art. The November issue will be online by October 25. If the theme appeals to you, please feel free to link your web site to our newsletter.
We are still accepting articles for December's Garden and Nature issue. Interested? Let us know. . .the deadline is Nov. 2.
Hey, why don’t you tell us where to go (and what to write about)?
Over the past four years our newsletter themes have ranged from global Christmas recipes and the world’s greatest museums to opera, food, Roman ruins and war memorials. There’s no end to good travel topics to write about, but we know that “many hands make the work lighter.” Which is to say, we invite your story ideas and theme suggestions. Just to prime the pump, here are a few ideas we recently received from Lowell, at LynchPin Tours, an occasional contributor to The Cultured Traveler, whose articles (and charm) always make us laugh: Those Great Garbo Moments (a look at destinations that provide splendid isolation); Smallish Boat Cruising (getting there on elegant smaller craft); and Gambling (great places to squander your fortune, from Vegas and riverboats to Monte Carlo and everywhere in between). We’re planning our 2005 editorial calendar and would appreciate any ideas. Please drop us a line: E-Mail Us P.S. feel free to let us know which of these issues you'd like to contribute to.
How we keep the articles we run from becoming puff pieces
If you’re a tour operator who’s never before contributed an article to The Cultured Traveler, you may wonder how we handle references to writers and their companies. Our guidelines are simple: We put the writer’s name, company affiliation (“XYZ Tours”) and link to your Cultural Travels listing in a byline at the top of the article. In the article itself, we allow a brief reference to the writer’s company so that readers can understand why he or she is qualified to write the article. We edit out continuous references to a company or how swell it is because we know our readers’ BS detectors will ramp up to full alert and they won’t finish reading the article. Our contributors don’t mind these conditions because we’re upfront about them and treat all contributors the same – it’s an even playing field. Our readers appreciate that we’re able to bring informed, often impassioned, insights and descriptions from distant locales. There is never a charge to contribute. As a thank you, we offer a special six-month news ad on the article's page for only $25 per month. With an average 10% click-thru rate (and peaks of over 50%), these ads allow instant gratification for readers looking for more information on planning a similar trip.
Google’s new search feature could mean more hits for your Web Page Ad
Here’s a nifty new acronym to remember: SMS. It stands for “short message service” and it could help your sales. Here’s how: Google is currently testing SMS to allow people to conduct Internet information searches from wireless and hand-held devices. Given these devices’ small screens, SMS information will be limited to prices and short listings. For example, somebody might enter “pitcairn island goat tours” and receive a text message listing those tour operators who offer such tours and their prices. Information like that, while not copious, could be enough to prime the pump and get a casual information seeker seriously interested in your offerings. For now, Google says it won’t charge any fees for the service – the companies that come closest to the search criteria will be listed first.
- According to the Travel Industry Association (TIA) 35 million travelers currently are signed up with travel suppliers’ web sites or receive promotions and other related news by e-mail. While the number of Americans who use the Internet for travel planning (64 million) didn’t increase over the past year, the number of them who book travel online rose to 45 million from 42.5 million, a 6% increase.
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Research firm DoubleClick (www.doubleclick.com) says that paying more
for search engine keywords may not be the best use of your marketing
dollar. Its recent report, Search Engine Marketing Considerations,
says that 60% of keywords that produce at least one click per month cost
20 cents or less, while keywords costing $1 or more accounted for only 6%
of such click-throughs.
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Are you really missing out if you can’t run TV ads? Maybe not: The Online
Publishers Association (OPA) reports that more than 50% of Internet users
between ages 18 and 54, when asked to name the medium that’s most
important to them, chose the Internet over TV. Overall, OPA says
that 80.2% of all respondents in that age group named the Internet and TV
as their top two preferred media, way ahead of newspapers and radio.
- People don’t trust information they find on the Internet as much as they did only a few years ago, according to the USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future. In 2001, when Internet users were first surveyed, 58% of them said they believed that most online information was accurate or trustworthy. That figure declined to 50.1 in 2003. The most trusted information sources continue to be government (73.5% rate of user trust) and mass media (74.4%).