Internet Marketing

We have recently created a news feed for each property’s bulletin board.

For those who’s not familiar with the concept of feed: 

Feed is a stream of news content created using the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) format. The standard is now widely adopted by all the content publishers. 

Therefore, Feed makes it easy to exchange content between different sites and applications.

For each property on Whiich, we have created a news Feed for the bulletin board. 

The bulletin board Feed URL can be found on top-right corner of the bulletin board page.  (See example: Quintet bed and breakfast). You can import this feed to any sites that can import/receive RSS content.  

If you have a Facebook Page, let me describe how to do this in Facebook. I’m going to use our Whiich Page to demo the process. 

Step 1>

Facebook Page use Notes to receive external content.  
Go to your Notes section, you will see a link: Import your blog on the Notes setting. 

Step 2> 

Enter your bulletin board Feed URL from Whiich

Step 3> Finish !! 

That’s it, it’s very simple and powerful.

Now the content will be automatically pulled from your bulletin board on Whiich to Facebook Page.  This is a great way to syndicate your news to different channels on the internet. 

Here is a demo of putting our owners’ bulletin news posts on Google Map. This will help bring in more direct traffic to owners from Google map search.

We encourage owners to post their hotel news and events frequently, the more information you post about your property, the better you will be found by the travelers through our efforts in maximizing your visiblity in search.

Each post is associated with its property’s gecodes. If geocodes are not available, the city’s geocodes will be used. Geocodes information is becoming important as more and more consumers are switching their mobile phones to GPS-enabled phones. We hope to make Whiich’s information mobile as well.

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I would like to share some of our internet marketing tactics for Quintet Shanghai Bed and breakfast. After opening for 1 month, we have already reached about 30% of occupancy rate. I’m not sure how good this number is for a new place, but I guess it’s worth celebrating when it looks like we are gonna have a positive cash flow for the 2nd month.

So, what have we done? Here’re the basic 4 steps that worked.

1) A well-designed website
Coming out from the internet industry, we truly believe that internet is the most important channel for a travel business. Relationships and contacts are useful, but you cannot reach immediate travelers faster than the internet. So we decided that, the Quintet website has to look good, and contain all the necessary information to impress our travelers. It’s like, to impress a stranger, you must present yourself well, simple as that.

2) Make sure your content is searchable
Search engine cannot index images, flashes and videos. Most of the time, web designers do not pay much attention to this part, they just take your text and build the graphics and pages for you. However, a simple design, good navigation and well-written title, body text can help search engine index your content properly and create a better result.

3) Increase exposure
After you have a great website, you need to market it. But how do travelers find you other than search? Your website along cannot compete with all the other travel portals out there. That’s why you need to list your site in public website like Whiich.com. In addition, posting your website externally can also help you increase your ranking in the search result. There are a lot of free sites out there; however, most of them do not allow your website URL unless you pay a fee. Users from such sites always tend to ask more questions because they cannot get enough information from the listing.

Try to identify the most important channels in your area to start with. Every place may be a bit different. Since China is so big, and there are already so many expats spreaded out in China. We picked English city portals and well-known classifieds as our channels.

4) Blog about it – Express your attitude in hospitality
Most of our customers are converted after they read the Quintet website. They are impressed with the design, the concept, but mostly they are sold by the genuine voices from the innkeeper’s blog.

And this is the fundamental concept we build into Whiich. You don’t need reviews, and you can still win over your customers with your knowledge, and your unique offerings. Plus, the more you write about your place, yourself, and the local environment, the more you will be found through search.

We are getting 30 -40 visits every day now through internet. 40% comes from search engine, 20% comes from Fay’s other blog about Shanghai, and the rest comes from a few websites we list on.

This is probably one of the greatest challenges for a new community site. It takes time to grow and accumulate credibility. We don’t have a rich dad, and deep pocket, but we know what it takes to build a successful site.

If you don’t have time, you buy the time. But money doesn’t always work without a great product either. We think that the main reason why eBay Taiwan (or eBay in Asia) failed to dominate the market largely has to with its unsuccessful product strategy for Asia.

When I was in charge of Kijiji Taiwan (eBay started Kijiji classified business in 2005), we also had the luxury of using marketing budget to quickly acquire new users and build traffic. Luckily, Kijiji is free and very easy to use. Users try it out, slowly it works, and then they come back. At the same time, we were also making sure that not only we continue to pump in the money, but also focusing on product usability and generating seeds for long-term free traffic–the result of SEO effect (search engine optimization) and consumer loyalty.

Those are the basic tricks I brought with me to Whiich.com. So back to the topic, how do we build our traffic?

Building Free Traffic through search engine
We build the entire site with SEO in mind, from page html design to feature design. We do not trick the search engine by placing the wrong keywords and content, our philosophy is to focus on usability and the right content. A good user friendly page is also a search engine friendly page. Our homepage reaches at a page rank of 4 in just 2 months, and this is a nice surprise to me. Whiich.com has about 4000+ pages indexed in search engines (at the time of writing), which contribute to 30% of our site traffic right now.

Extend reach to free community channels
We also look at open environment like Facebook.com to build our reach. We have developed a few travel related applications on Facebook. The main application is called Travel Buddies where you can build your travel calendar and share you trip events with your friends, send postcards and share trip thoughts.

Our next project is to bring owners into Facebook and help them gain exposure in social network-something we are currently experimenting with. We are also planning to seed our content into the google maps community.

Building more user generated content
In previous paragraph, I mentioned that SEO also has some influences on how we design our product. One example is the bulletin board feature. The bulletin boards allow owners to build a more direct and real-time communication with the potential travelers. I personally like this feature a lot, because if owners take advantage of this, they can 1) help travelers to discover them and learn more about the local neighborhood, thereby 2) establish owners credibility as the best local resources 3), increase exposure in search engine - all the bulletin posts are indexed individually with property’s name in search engine. The benefits are both-way. We help owners, owners help Whiich.

By now you probably heard a lot about the importance of SEO (search engine optimization) and internet marketing.

I noticed that a lot of bed and breakfast websites use Flash and images and that often blocks the page from being indexed properly in search engine. Search engine doesn’t crawl Flash media or images. If you do a search on your property’s name and your offical website doesn’t show up in the first 3 results, then you might want to take a look at how your website is designed.

As far as I know, most small hotels have their websites done by a graphic designer. And most of the time, graphic designers know little about SEO which is the reason why a lot of the websites are not done properly. But SEO basics are very simple, simply follow the following rules, and it should help you to increase your ranking on search results.

There are several things you want to check
1) Is your hotel introduction written in Text?
2) Is your hotel name appears in browser title?
3) Did you provide a helpful description in the meta tag?
4) Did you use text in your nagivation? Text help google identify the context of the page.
5) Did you use meanful keywords in your URL ?

Whiich.com is designed with SEO in mind. I just want to bring up the importance of SEO here and I will share more SEO techniques soon.

One of our internet marketing strategy is to leverage social network and build an effective marketing channels for our owners. More and more companies are trying out various approach to advertise on social media. We also think we can do something to help owners gain effective exposure and bookings through social network.

We have built a few travel related applications over the past few months on facebook.com to experiment user behaviors on social network.

Once we get enough owners on Whiich, we will start featuring our accommodations on our most popular travel application: Travel Buddies.