Consequently, Chapter 4 Digital Media Review and Bonus is now live here >>
Chapter 4 Review and Bonus
The new page summarises Chapter 4 and provides more details on social media. The bonus, normally restricted to members and book buyers, is now available to anyone who cares to read it. It includes 7 tips on how to master Instagram. Instagram, the fastest growing social media platform, has excellent engagement. It is being used extensively by travel brands.
The bonus offers a private tip on how to expand your network by working with Influencers. It provides detailed instructions on how to repost amazing photos by professional videographers and photographers.
Originally Posted by Photographer Antonio D. Carreira
Benefits of Reposting
There are many benefits to reposting trending and professional photographs. They include:
1. Increased Engagement. Beautiful, interesting and topical videos and images will engage your visitors. Consequently, many users who are not following you may well click the ‘Follow’ button.
2. Increased Reach. You inherit fantastic content, a well-know name and all of the hashtags. As a result, you will generally expand your reach. It will help you get seen by many more people who are interested in your niche.
3. Increase in Followers. For the two reason above, you should expect to increase your followers and interactions.
Reach Out & Respect Copyright
Remember to get permission. Just leave a comment saying how much you like the photo or video and why. Try to give an informed and expert opinion. Comment on form, contrast, framing, colouring, angles, composition and special effects.
Add that you would like to use it on your Instagram and give them full credit. Most will reply quickly and thank you for reaching out. However, if they don’t reply, move on to another influencer.
Be sure to follow them. If they see that you are sending them new reach, they may well follow you too.
Instagram photographers are the secret weapon for travel brands and tourism destination. The beauty of the sharing economy has a huge spill over for hotel travel marketing – click for detail on how to capitalize on social! Photo by Antonio D. Carreira
Get the Review and Bonus Tips
Get details on how to do this at Chapter 4 Review and Bonus – Spreading the Word
In this article Phocuswire does away with all the excuses small hotels and tourism operators face when trying to market in digital media. There are many obstacles, not least of which is the predominance of huge players that dominate the landscape. It’s time they say to get over the obstacles and focus instead on “How Small Travel Brands Personalize Vacations ”
They suggest that independent work with Influences to personalize, make optimal use of their websites and think small. Apparently Millennial’s are all-in travel enthusiasts and show a preference for texting and emails. They want to know more about the quirky, out-of-the-way, authentic and character based elements of a destination”. Email is one of the very best way to reach help them discover who you are.
Its a matter connecting the persona of your property with the travelers personal interest and character.
More people Travel than Ever Before
Travelers are taking vacation more than ever before. this is good news fir hotels and accommodation of all sorts. Its good news for Hotel Marketers and for tourism operators and destinations. But their are many options and getting on top of a bucket list takes focus and engagement at each step of the journey. Most importantly hosts need to “understand what journeys were most preferred by visitors. Host need to find the elements of those journeys had breakage or hurdles to conversion”. With this information one can optimize the connections between their own campaigns and website and set the stage for personalization along the way.
“Travelers ultimately want a relevant experience, and the best way for marketers to provide it is to put personalization first.” Source Phocuswire
Research Shows Personalisation Increases Conversion
The latest findings by Monetate’s Ecommerce Quarterly Report provides compelling insights into how this works. It found that customers who were exposed to 3 pages of personalised content had double the rate of conversion. When exposed to 10 Personalized pages the rate increased 10 fold.
For this to work one must truly understand the travelers journey and be able to infer needs from behaviour. Websites are not designed this way and instead gives traveller endless choice to wade through. Travelers wantrecommendations not more choice.
Psychologists have understood that colour is an important emotional trigger. Hospitals were designed with green, as it is a soothing colour for a stressful time. Colour Psychology is now a hot topic in Marketing. Researchers have now made important discoveries regarding the psychology of color and its impact on mood, feeling and behaviour.
Why Blue?
The Blues in Marketing – As dull as it may sound and as sad as you may thing the blues are, in Marketing, it is an entirely different affair!
“Blue is known for its trust and dependability. It’s reliable, responsible, and mentally soothing. For that reason alone, it’s one of the most-liked colors across the entire world.”– CoSchedule.
Blue is a distinctive colour known to emote trust. It is also associated with quality and reliability and has become the darling of high tech companies such as IBM (known as BIG BLUE). Ford, Chase, Lowes, GE and Samsung are also big blue brands.
In Tourism, Sandals, a Luxury All-Inclusive Resort, uses blue predominately on all its websites. Blue and white are their prime colours. It signifies all noted above but it is also the colour of their Sea and Sand Vacation Destinations. Aside from representing Caribbean holidays, the blue and white combination has the highest score of trust of all colours.
Sandals recently added Black to their website navigation. The various shades of black denote quality more that any other colour. It is a clever use of colour to represent their brand and the destinations they work in.
Blue and white are the Colours of the Caribbean – Ocean, See and Sand. It’s also the colours of Sandal Resort Brand!
The Social Media Leaders Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn use blue extensively. In Marketing, Salesforce and Constant Contact are bluers. In Finance, American Express, Visa and PayPal choose blue!
And the list goes on…
The point is that big brands understand that colour is important and use it accordingly.
In a recent test by HubSpot A/B tested call-to-action (CTA) colors, they found that just changing the colour of the Call To Action (CTA) increased the conversion rate. They also discovered that some colours work better than others. In their test, a red CTA button outperformed a green CTA button by 21%.
Colour Theory
Primary colours are the main ingredients for colour at large. But what they are depends on your point of view.
If you are an artist, then it’s the pigment that matters most.
If you are looking at light as the source of colour, your primary colours would be cyan, magenta and yellow.
For print, it’s CMYK and for screens or monitors, it’s RGB.
For general purposes in art and design, it’s red, blue and yellow. These are the 3 colours we need to make all others and they are the building blocks of colour psychology in marketing.
Colour Psychology
Understanding colour is helpful in design but it may not help you understand what colour means in terms of mood and emotion. For that you need to talk to a colour psychologist.
Blue has powerful positive and negative emotional resonance and like all colours, one must use it wisely.
Blue’s emotional triggers are widely seen in nature – from the Blue Ocean to the Blue Sky to Blueberries. Because of these emotional connections, blue is omnipresent in marketing.
Other colours each have a different significance that may be more aligned to what you do, who you are and the emotional.
Just click on the blue chart here to see the spectrum of colours and their personality traits and meanings.
We just added a page to the Chapter 3 on Contact Marketing. The new page provides tactical information on how to optimize content to get featured.
Content must be presented, formatted and organized in a specific way so that it can get indexed, ranked, found and featured. If you do it right you may also get your content published on the news category of search. This will have a major impact on your visibility. It is something every travel marketer should aim to for.
The new page explains exactly how to optimize content to get featured. The 9 most essential criteria are identified and ranked in order of importance. Normally 4 or 5 tactics are all you need and these cannot be be omitted. More can be added if the keyword is very competitive.
Also considered are off-site strategies including bookmarking and link-building. The page links to information on how to tweak your content so that it can get featured in Google news.
Getting your blog featured on Google News makes a difference in many ways. Not the least is that it automatically notches up your Authority and puts the article in an expert and trusted class. This will improve trust and set you apart from others.
Not all posts will get into news however, as both the quality of the post and the author can have an affect on this. Google will not approve rubbish authors who are known for spam or affiliate marketing and that are not going to make the grade. Your article also has to follow basic standards of journalism.
Major Traffic Boost with Google News
Neil Patel says you can get thousands of clicks to your site from Google News. In fact, he say your visits can jump by over 300%.
“Smart bloggers, news publishers, and digital content marketers are already tapping into this huge resource for targeted traffic and better search engine visibility. As an example, Search Engine Watch increased its average monthly visits from the Google News sitemap by 329%.”
Well, we can’t all be like Search Engine Watch and it’s not likely that a small hotel or your average blogging site will see this kind of return. Being in Google News is certainly going to increase your visibility and traffic. Google News drives 6 billion clicks per month to publishers all over the world. That’s a lot of traffic.
How to Get your Blogs on Google News
You best bet is to work with an author who can do the work for you. You don’t have to be an accredited author to get on the news. As Google says, news is “newly received or noteworthy information, especially about recent or important events.”
When you look at Google News, you will see that Google is not totally focused on news-related “current events” content. There is now a level playing field for bloggers and all digital media publishers who have quality content and good insights. Style, substance and good journalism still matter. Honesty and objectivity are essential to making it to the newsstand.
It’s vital that your articles are properly structured with links to other quality sites using anchor texts and meta tags that are descriptive and not promotional. It helps to be an expert and write with an authoritative voice. Good journalists research the subject deeply and do not write for search engine optimization. You will still need to Optimize Your Content for SEO.
You must not however write for the news editors as they will decide if the blog is newsworthy. Editors like information to be in order, by the level of importance. So put your best insights and most interesting points first. It must be original and accurate. Be sure that your sources are impeccable and that you credit all original work.
Use Natural Links & Anchor-text
Linking back to your site from a GNA site must be natural. Keywords inAnchor-Textare often a flag to Google that it is promotional. Many GNA site are using only generic text like: read more, view more, check this, visit here, sitename, site name, sitename.com, www.site.com, this, website, web site, here, this website, click here, BrandName
Promoting Your Blogs and News
You can’t just get in the news and forget it. Like everything else on the Internet, you need to have people looking at it and other sites linking to it.
Blog About Your Featured News
Add an announcement about this to your website blog. Also add it to other sites via Guest Blog and link to it from relevant pages where it will make sense.
As an Example: In the image above, you will see one of our articles on “7 tips on how to plan a smooth vacation“. The image above links to the Google News search page that currently displays the blog. We also linked the actual blog with anchor text that simply says Plan A Smooth Vacation. That gives a valid link that will be tracked by the Google Algorithm and added to its rating.
This is the sort of syndication you need to do to keep your news alive for as long as possible. It will not stay on the news site forever, as news is supposed to be current. However, if it’s a popular article and has good quality links to it, it will get to the top of the list and stay there longer.
Bookmark It
Social Bookmarks are not the highest quality authority links but, done right, they will help. A good strategy is to post an announcement of being featured on your top social sites – LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest and Scoop.it. Do more 3rd party bookmarks to the blogs and guest posts you created above. This will create a good chain link structure and boost the ranking for your featured news content.
Get Your Website Google News Approved
Getting Your Site Ready
If your content isn’t news, it will not get approved. Google is looking for content that might appear in Media sites like the NYT and it will not accept content that is for promotional. It will not accept product reviews, hotel promotions, island wedding, tour descriptions, tutorials, job postings, and other non-journalistic informational articles.
According to Google “News content should be timely, authoritative, focus on current events, and attempt to adhere to journalistic standards”
Google News also require compliance with its formatting and technical requirements that are listed at Google News technical requirements
Here a quick summary of several important requirements.
Permanent section headers — No Dynamic organization. Must be permanent and accessible. News should be organization into sections if they cover many topics.
Permanent URLs — For a “news of the day,” page which changes regularly will not be eligible.
HTML format — It must be HTML formatted to best practices. Define the content type, name of your publication, language, access (subscription or registration), genre, publication date (W3C format)
Site Structure- Use a Magazine Style theme with sections for each type of news: Education, Entertainment, Politics, Technology, Tourism and so on.
About Us – Contact Us – Authors – Media Kit Pages
Meta Tags and SEO Optimize. This goes without saying, You have to optimize your page with titles, heading, image-altags, keyword focus and meta-tags.
Site Map -A Google News Sitemap is a great way to further segment your news content.
Navigation and Naming
Don’t call you news site a BLOG. the address you want is NEWS – so for example https://barbados.org/blog is a great site for stroies about island news, activities, tours, visitors stories, reviews and product descriptions. It is not appropriate to just add a NEWS section as it will be diluted with what is essentially not news.
The URL should be Yourbrand.com/News
A distinct Navigation might be
Barbados | Business | Technology | Tourism | Lifestyles | Entertainment | Education
Submitting Your Website to Google News
You need to apply at Google Publishing Center. Google will check that your site qualifies and follows their guidelines. Choose your News Page/Blog to submit and make sure it is newsworthy. Edit out any articles that are not high quality. Google will not accept all self-serving content or anything that is too promotional.
Digital Media Marketing Book for Business
– Expand Your Horizons
Founder of the Most Visited Caribbean travel site in Barbados for 20 years in a row! Best selling author Ian R. Clayton is now sharing valuable insights, tips and resources in his book “Digital Media Marketing”
Do you need to drive additional traffic to your site using Digital Marketing?
Do you need invaluable insights into digital marketing?
Is your site prepared for the New changes to Googles’ Site Ranking System?Goggle has once again changed its site ranking system and most marketers are doing it all wrong!See what this means (1 minute video) https://youtu.be/P2oP34_ZQEM
Is your Marketing team knowledgeable abut these new digital marketing changes?
Ian (CEO AXSES Systems Caribbean Inc and best selling Author of WEBSITE.
Winner of Atlantic Canada Opportunity Agency Award for Technology Innovation).
The Case For Business
The tips, techniques, tools and resources shared by Ian in this remarkable book apply to any business, any industry, profession, trade, charity or service. While the examples and illustrations are related to tourism the strategies, resources and techniques apply to anyone marketing anything today. In his video of the opening introduction for the book, Ian shows you why the book is so important. Everything is digital and no matter what you market, promote, share or communicate, digital media is a powerful medium that cannot not be ignored. The book will help you harness the power of digital communication on the Internet. It will help you get featured in the right channels and seen by the people who are most likely to buy your products, use your service or fund your cause, no matter what you message is.
Twitter
The new page summarises Chapter 4 and provides more details on social media. The bonus, normally restricted to members and book buyers, is now available to anyone who cares to read it. It includes 7 tips on how to master Instagram. Instagram, the fastest growing social media platform, has excellent engagement. It is being used extensively by travel brands.
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