I love SEO because I love free visitors. You can spend money buying links on Disney websites or pay for monthly sponsorships. I have found these are pretty poor use of your advertising dollars. Yes, you get in front of a bunch of “Disney Fans”, but these fans have been to Disney A LOT, and aren’t going to change their booking habits because of an advertisement on one site. Maybe you get in with a massive Disney site, and drop $10K a month to be their sponsor, but to what end? That means you have to book about 30 average trips a month just to break even. Helping 30 clients a month is a lot of work, and after paying for your sponsorship, you spent all that time for nothing. Maybe you have a huge agency, with 100 agents, and the sponsorship is going to bring you 100 clients a month. Fantastic! But is it? As an agency owner, you drop $10,000 for the sponsorship, your agency books an additional $30,000 in revenue that month. But, you need to pay your agents for doing all the work. If they make 70% on average, your $30,000 turns into $21,000 going to your agents and $9,000 going to you, it doesn’t even cover your sponsorship. Your agents are happy, but you aren’t.
I much prefer SEO, as it provides free visitors. Search Engine Optimization is fairly easy, but it is an ongoing effort. You can’t just write a check and be done with it. Every blog post you write not to mention your entire site needs to be optimized. However, once done, the flow of new clients is pretty decent (and they don’t cost me a penny). There are a lot of excellent SEO blogs, podcasts and services, just search around for “basic SEO” and start reading.
Before I even launched Tiki Room Travel, I launched three mini-sites. I had a few old domains lying around that I had purchased over the years. They were all previously websites, and each domain had quite a few links pointing to it (Google likes them). Now, I would prefer if the domains were in the travel area, but you work with what you have. For each site, I had an AI bot write a few paragraphs about booking with Tiki Room Travel, added a nice Disney photo and my logo and was done.
Once launched and ready to go, I made sure to Ping Google and the other search engines that my site had changed. I used Pingler, but there are other options. This instructs Google and their friends to check out your site again, and update their information. I do this when writing new blog posts, I will ping that address so the search engines are aware of the change.
This is not going to have an immediate impact. It may take a few weeks for the juice to flow to my site, but that is ok, I am just launching, so I have time. There is nothing worse than launching your site with nothing pointing to it, so some work before launch is always helpful. I will update this post in a few weeks when some change has been noticed.
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