Some people think that if you build it they will come or make a website and get instant traffic. I wish that were true, but life ain’t that easy.
We recently set up a website for 90 Mile Beach House & Villas in Golden Beach Victoria. The location is in the East Gippsland Lakes area not too far from Sale and down the coast from Lakes Entrance.
Anyway, Richard (the owner) has be very proactive looking at groups that come to his area and then promoting his accommodation in their forums. He’s obviously done it well because he got a couple of hundred visits. Links like this can be taken as spam or they can serve genuine interest. In his example, he knew of a Kombi Club that makes regular runs to his area.
I wish all of our customers would do the same. We try to help them where possible with inbound links, but the fact is that they need to stay involved. Inbound links are very important and when they resonate with buyers they’re worth gold.
Be sure to check the rules of the forum. Some will allow you to post links to websites. Some will also allow you to place links to websites in your signature.
Mark
About Mark
Founder of
Web Reservation Systems, focused on helping businesses in the Australian Accommodation travel sector get more value from Internet Marketing.
Originally, we opened up in 2001 as a supplier of Front Office Software linked to Online Booking facilities. That allowed motels and hotels to add booking buttons to their websites as well as sell through Global Distribution Systems. You could say this was an early 'Channel Manager' because it allowed the property manager to simply control price and availability for a diverse array of wholesale and retails websites.
Next, we started building websites to profile our customers (
Australian Holiday Guide). That lead to building websites for customers as a favour. Now do about 80 websites a year using BurgundySky and Joomla.
For small businesses I recommend using BurgundySky as it is very easy to start and manage. Joomla is also great, but harder to install and maintain for a small business. For a large website, Joomla is great - here's what we did for
Golden Chain Motels, Australia largest accommodation provider with over 335 locations.
Our business is based in Byron Bay, NSW. Byron Bay is a great place to live and work. I have 2 kids (12 and 14) who are both born here and my wife,
Shobhan Oliver)is a successful artist.
