While many firms and websites are suffering due to the current economic trends, one online business segment is up - DEALS!

Simmons Market Research Bureau just released a report indicating that coupon use is up by 22% over the same period last year. Web search trend monitors such as Alexa show some discount related sites enjoying triple digit growth this year.

“People are shopping earlier, and looking harder for deals,” says John McAteer, head of retail at Google. “Two years ago, people thought coupons were dead, that consumers didn’t have the patience to cut and clip them. But there has been a resurgence.”

This trend is bleeding over to the travel sector in a big way. While many mainstream travel sites have seen a downturn in visitors, niche sites offering specific destination savings have seen a surge in traffic. Travelers that have already made a destination decision are searching for the best deals on everything from lodging and meals, to activities and services.

“My email box is full of specific requests for savings coupons every day.” says Steve Hoodecheck, CEO of Vacationcoupons.com. “Our winter ski vacations site, Skicoupons.com is seeing record visitor trends, up 113% in November 2008 compared to the same period last year. People know exactly what they want; specific lodging price points, ski rental deals, discount lift tickets along with resort activities, services and dining coupons.”

Here are a few ideas on how your website can take advantage of this search traffic trend.

Create a deal, discount, web special or coupon page on your website. Contact us here at RighNow Communications to optimize the page, so it can be found in the search engines. “These types of search terms have a high probability of success. The competition is light, making them relatively soft targets for search engine optimization.” says Chris Tucker, Owner of RightNow, Inc.

Expand your Pay-per-Click campaign to include savings specific search terms, and direct those clicks toward your web-specials landing page. RightNow PPC customers can contact us directly for assistance with this process.

Add a coupon to your Google Local page. There is a location that you can add a web coupon that is easy to update. This is an effective method for converting customers, even after they have arrived at their destination. Learn how to create a Google Local page.

Get listed on travel coupon sites like skicoupons.com. Web searchers are already looking for resort specific deals on these portals, generating additional potential customers for your product or service.

These strategies will pay off big-time in the coming months for those marketers willing to embrace the discount and deal mentality of online shoppers.

Coupon Traffic - Up, Up, and Away!

Tags: coupons, discounts, search engine optimization, travel

Every so often RightNow Communications offers a nice little freebie to our clients, with an open offer to “Take Advantage” of our service. Last month we served up the Free Video Offer. This month we bring you the … Press Release Deal!

What You Need To Do: Send us a copy of your press releases in .doc, .pdf or .html format, then sit back and relax. Your part is done!

What We Do: We have a network of blogs, articles sites, partner sites, and content resources where we place content as part of our Linking Program. We will take your PR and embed a nice link back to your site that supports your target Search Terms. This will help your website perform better in the search engines!

Why, So What, and Who Cares? The value of distributing press releases has two primary functions. The first (and primary) reason is to “get the word” out on the net. A well placed PR will drive traffic back to your site, and create brand awareness. The second (and often overlooked) benefit of placing press releases on the web is the links it can provide back to your site. Not traffic links, but BackLinks that support your SEO goals. These are the links your site MUST have to perform for competitive search terms in the organic search results.

Note: This service is included as a regular part of our Link Development program.

Send your requests directly to Link-a-Billy Dave, or call to discuss.

Tags: articles, links, press relese

The online video revolution is over! Today, online video has become a common element that visitors expect to find on your website. The video sharing site Youtube has become the 3rd most popular social media site on the Internet (behind MySpace and Facebook.) This has opened the door for marketers to develop serious inbound traffic back to their websites via video. The Youtube platform is free, so the only cost is developing content to upload.

So what does it take to funnel traffic from YouTube? Here are some guidelines to developing a steady stream of visitors from the Tube.

Setup:

If you don’t already have a YouTube account, create an Account and User Name.

Choose your brand name, or a key target search term for your account User Name.

Customize your Channel home page – make sure to include an original text bio of a least one paragraph. Do NOT just copy and paste some text from your webiste. There are options to create a custom look and feel to your Channel. Here is a fine example of a YT page - Arizona

Netrafic Clients – Contact us for assistance in this process.

Content:

Here are some of the most popular methods to creating content for your YT Channel.

Repurpose video that is being used elsewhere in your marketing. This includes virtual tours, flash presentations, and existing video that you might be sharing with customers, clients, and vendors.

Request video from your clients, advertisers, customers, vendors and anyone else you do business with. Explain how it will be used, and how it will benefit them with increased visitors.

Montage a series of quality photos that targets the theme of your video. Add music and/or voice-over, and you will have a nice video presentation. Example: Cabo Pulmo

Contact the teacher or department head of local education facilities and request student assistance. You would be surprised how may film students are looking for projects to turn in as assignments!

Grab a video camera and start creating! Get in the habit of shooting short clips that can be edited together. You will quickly find out what works. Assign this to someone in the marketing department.

Outsource to a content creation company. You will get high quality video, but it comes with a price tag.

Important Tip! You must “watermark” your videos with your domain, phone number, and contact information. This is the primary way to turn video views in customers.

Confused? Did you take advantage of the Netrafic Free Video Offer?

Upload and SEO:

Uploading a video to YouTube is a simple process that only takes a few steps. There are several critical steps here that can make or break the videos SEO performance. You want the clip to perform in both the YouTube Network and the search engines, like Google.

Repeat the process! One upload is NOT an online video marketing program. To have success, you must upload content on a regular basis. Just like your website, more content equals more traffic.

Netrafic Clients can contact us for guidance in uploading their video.

In this economy you need to squeeze every visitor out of your online marketing program. Once you have created a video, you can upload it to dozens of other video sharing sites like Myspace, MSN and Yahoo Video!

Quick Stat: YouTube Attracts 100 Million U.S. Online Video Viewers in October 2008

Tags: Marketing, Video, youtube

With tight budgets these days I get asked regularly, “what can I do to improve my business online in 2009 even if I can’t expand my budget?”

I have found, many entrepreneurs and small business people are in the dark when it comes to gauging how successful they are with their web marketing. It’s not their fault. They wear a lot of hats on a day to day basis.

But here is something you can do for FREE that will have good implications for years to come. Google offers free traffic analyzation software. The sooner you get Google Analytics installed correctly on your web site, the sooner you will have a better handle on where your web business is headed.

If you install this software before 1/1/09 you can have statistics for the entire 2009 year. Because, it really takes gathering this information for a year before you can begin to compare and discover success or failure in your online efforts. For over ten years we have been supplying our clients with regular Search Engine Ranking Reports. In fact, of course, they ride along in our monthly newsletter to you ! What we are now beginning to see is the need for more decision making information than just “where does the website rank”. That is one part of the equation. But now that you have established a presence on the web, it’s time to improve ! That’s where analyzing same-month, year over year data can really come into play. A successful search engine optimization campaign should show an increasing amount of traffic from the search engines. So if you had 100 visitors from Google in January 2009 and when we get to January 2010, we find that you receive 125 visitors from Google a year later, that could be construed as a 25% increase in search engine traffic, year over year.

We would be happy to help you install Google Analytics, or consult your web developer. It is important that the tracking code be placed on every page of your site. And when you add new pages, that you include the code to them as well.

In concert with all of this, we are unveiling a new two-tiered Maintenance Package to our clients. Right now, our clients go into SEO maintenance after we have delivered three Ranking Reports. You pay a nominal amount and we continue to send you reports and are available for consulting on any web marketing matter, as well, as long as you tell us you have changed or added a web page, unlimited SEO work on those new and changed pages. This activity keeps your site fully optimized to capture the maximum possible traffic. Without this, your web site would slowly erode over the course of time until it was no longer optimized causing a loss of search engine rankings. Now, we will continue to offer this super, low priced retainer service. But additionally, we will offer a higher level of Maintenance to those clients wishing more. This level will consist of quarterly Analytics Review as well as annual Usability Review, designed to wring the most out of your Web Presence as is possible.

If you are interested in learning more about a more aggressive Maintenance package going forward into the new year, just drop us a line. But, even if you don’t, take a few moments to put traffic tracking into play before the first of the year, so you can have a full year of data to compare this time next year!

Chris Tucker

VIDEO: Google Analytics - Everything You Need to Know

Tags: analytics, metrics, seo

Don’t know what CYA is? Keep reading!

This month I had the unpleasant task of wrestling with MySpace to recover a trademarked name that was being used on their network. MS was good about the whole process, and returned the account to its rightful owner – the registered owner of the trademark. A lot of valuable time could have been saved if the registered owner had performed a CYA maneuver two years ago when we discussed it.

Here are two CYA procedures that I highly recommend your organization perform immediately.

This Needs to be Done by Your Organization
1. Register your domain name in all the important extension formats. This includes .COM, .NET, .ORG, .BIZ, .US, and .INFO In addition, I am going to suggest covering the .MOBI and if you are a travel organization, you might consider the .TRAVEL. The reason for registering these is primarily to protect your brand from abuse. There may be some very good reasons for developing these into assets, now or in the future. Better “safe than sorry!”

Netrafic Clients can Receive Assistance With This Task
2. Register your trademarked brand or business name in all the popular social networks. If you are not using these now, you will be in the future. Here is a partial list of the top social networks to cover.

Flickr, Youtube, Squidoo, Hubpages, Wordpress, Typepad, Blogspot, Myspace, Technorati, Delicious, Digg, Linkedin, Picasa, StumbleUpon, Twitter

You might also consider registering your brand name at Ebay, to prevent people from associating your brand with an Ebay seller.

Netrafic Tip: You can check your brand name vs. registration username for most top social networks on one website with the click of your mouse, visit usernamecheck.com – thanks to Scott Fish for that little nugget!

Still confused about CYA? Just Google it!

Tags: brand name, branding, social networks

Don’t shoot the observer … Shoot at the observation!

The online travel sector has experienced a general downturn in visitors looking to “get out of dodge” in the fourth quarter of 2008. Its easy to explain, but hard to deal with. Money’s tight, transportation costs are up, the economy is staggering, and attentions have been focused on politics, just to mention a few factors. Estimates from various sources inside the travel industry put the decline in traffic from 10% to over 40% compared year over year, 2007 to 2008.

Looking at some of the online travel blue-chips metrics courtesy of Alexa you can see an overall trending decline since summer.

Here we Compare Expedia, Travelocity, and Orbitz traffic trends for the last 12+ months.

There is no quick and easy turn-around solution, but let me give you a formula for failure; Worry and Wait to see what happens. The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines the word, “Wait” as “to remain temporarily neglected or unrealized…” Now that’s no way to build your business!

Here is what are we doing over at Netrafic to help you fight this trend. Plus, some ideas to help you keep and grow your market-share during this stagnant period.

Build Organic (free) Traffic:

Netrafic Can Help With the Following:
Tune your organic SEO program to get the best positions you can.

Optimize your inclusion in Local Search

Build additional relevant pages about your market to attract more natural search.

Launch a blog, news feed, or article area on your site to keep fresh content in front of the search engines.

Socialize your brand by creating content on top visited networks like YouTube, delivering visitors.

Ideas You Should Explore Within Your Organization:
Create alliances with similar businesses in your market to swap banner advertising. Pick up the phone to expedite this.

Offer an incentive or discount; price conscious travelers are looking for saving.

Joint Venture with website owners that send out regular emails to your demographic. Ask for a plug, and return the favor by offering a link, a banner ad, or some other exchange.

Tap your email database to offer past customers incentives to return and revisit.

Re-market to your current visitors by offering an incentive to return this season, stay longer, or a “friends and family” style discount.

Increase Paid Advertising:

Analyze your Pay Per Click advertising for ad effectiveness and ROI.

Lower your PPC advertising cost by improving the quality of your landing pages. Google rewards websites that offer top quality content with a reduced cost per click, without losing position.

Improve the conversion potential of your landing pages by offering multiple methods of contacting you or finding out more about your service or offer. Keep it simple!

If You are a Netrafic PPC Client We Already Have You Covered!

The good times will roll again, things will get better, and businesses that market aggressively will survive. If your travel market segment is winter travel, pray for snow. If you are a warm weather destination, pray for more snow!

Travel Stocks, Now That’s Another Story…

Tags: metrics, stats, travel