Im making a few travel sites on known but not hugely popular locations. They get enough searches though to make it worthwhile. There is alot of competition though, which each location already having at least 6-10 sites solely dedicated to it. So, in your opinion, what else should a travel site offer besides the norm? I dont want to copy my competitors, I want to better them. Keep in mind this is really an info only site, im not getting into hotel or airfare bookings (at this stage anyway). Any ideas are welcome, what makes a travel site unique and better than the rest?
Travel is our core business you have to cut through all the affiilate stuff, and work very hard to create your own brand name You will need a lot of luck doing it other ways, of which there are so many But establish a brand and market the brand Once the brand is known you can start with features and content that make it the best
Get people to blog about their experiences,if possible. Add a forum where people can ask suggestions and interact with others.( If it is not too time consuming)
Travel is very business now a days and the on line travle bvusiness is very popular. apart from basic thngs you can provide small articles related to yoga ,natural health and other on which people make serch in google and other search engines,by dong these the engine robo will also pick your site while people will search the yoga and other related keywords. u can also provide the small topics on immigration rules of different countries by doing this u can make good reanking in engines best of luck dinesh
Its better to keep your sites relevant to the topic rather starting a tagent on Yoga & health related articles. Nothing worse than seeing a site that is providing information thats not even related to main site topic i.e health articles on a travel site.
You should start discussing about your site in relvant forums, I find this is a leading travel forum as well good resources for particular travellers community; http://www.aardvarktravel.net/chat/
There are a lot of people (like me now) that run around with GPS receivers. Alternatively you can generate gps information from Google maps. On your website you find some way, to get the GPS data mashed into your database. This way, if someone wants to visit a place on your site and has a gps receiver, he can download the gps data. To research mashups use this: http://www.programmableweb.com/matrix (hover with your mouse over any of the dots and find creative ideas ) To find out more about geotagging: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geotagging One mashup that has been done too often (and I don't like it): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocaching Come up with something really creative and you will have the perfect viral marketing opportunity.
Working on travel sites can appear quite appealing to many, hell, even fun, but you have to realise that travel related keywords are very competitive, and your not just up against half a dozen sites, but millions. It has to be unique, or if not unique, it has to be something that people are going to find useful. Some people have mentioned travel communities, these are especially difficult to get off the ground, as they are literally thousands of them, and look on even the popular travel forums, you don't see the numbers of active members, all logged in, that you see on webmaster related forums. I notice you live in Australia, use your own location, and knowledge of the location to do something unique - millions of holidaymakers visit Australia every year, backpackers, tourists, or people off to see family and friends. The Australian tourist board is spending millions of Aussie dollars on promoting Australia. Don't think about Sydney, Melbourne etc. these are popular locations - think off the beaten track, destinations that people won't necessary think about going.. something unique - work with companies in off the beaten track tourist destinations, and earn an income from promoting that attraction or destination.
Darren, I am doing something very similar to what you suggested andre that idea sounds interesting, Im sure its big in the US but here and in the location Im promoting, I dont think its really taken off. I'll look into it though, thanks
Well when its off the ground let me know. If it's any good I'll promote it on my blog, which gets over 1,000 visitors a day, and has RSS feeds on tons of UK, US and Australia newspaper websites. p.s. take a look at my blog for an example of geo tagging and caching, ie. travel map - just launched this weekend.
how do travel sites work? is there a script for it? and how do you make money with it? adsense? lol i obviosly don't know much about the travel niche
A script? Well, for a start off, you have to know what your talking about, just like you do if you run an SEO or internet marketing website or blog. People think they can create a travel website, and they will earn shit loads of money. Yeah, lets slap up a travel webiste, and put some affiliate links on there, that's not a travel website, thats an affiliate website. It's no use to the visitor, and a waste of internet space IMO. Believe me when I say that it takes alot of hard work and sweat, unless you have the marketing budget of Expedia.
That is something that I have seen with you Darren, as in putting in the hard work. I ran into you on V7N a good while back and seen how determined you were to make that site work and how determined you still are.