Savvy Marketing in the Information Age

Last week we received an email that read “Please review my site www.HotelBookingPro.com. Would appreciate an unbiased honest opinion. Be gentle”. Although I’m not really in the web design consulting business, I have been at this for quite some time now and noticed some things I thought might be of benefit to anyone looking to start a business online.

My first impression, before I even looked at the web site, was that the request is very vague. When asking someone to evaluate your work, whether it’s your business plan, stationary, brochure, logo, website or whatever, make sure you’re specific in asking what it is you’re looking for. If you just drafted a logo for your business, don’t ask “What do you think?”, but rather, “Do you feel this logo represents my business? Why or why not?”. Ask with a purpose. Help the person evaluating know what it is you’re looking. This way the person evaluating can focus in on your goal and give you more constructive feedback.

As I clicked onto the site I immediately began scanning the page to find something that gave me a clear meaning of what the site was about and why I should to be there. Nothing really stood out. This means at least 50% of the site’s traffic is lost because their clicking the back button within a few seconds of landing there. But since I was there to evaluate, I stuck around.

Being a web designer by trade, I tend to see design and code elements on a web page a little differently than what “normal visitors” see. I immediately began to suspect that the design and main task of the hotel search we’re not related. As I took a look at the code, I confirmed my suspicion finding that the search module was powered by http://www.hotelscombined.com. A quick visit there and I find they offer an affiliate program where affiliates can earn commissions either by revenue sharing with the PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ads on the results page or by setting up individual affiliate accounts with hotel booking websites like hotels.com, expedia.com, etc. and getting a portion of the revenue generated from hotel bookings.

So now I have an idea of the business model behind the site. Drive traffic to the site, get them to search for hotels, hope they click on some ads or book a hotel room and cash the commission check. Here’s the problem, it’s an awful business model. I would describe it as trying to catch a fish with your bare hands by diving in the ocean. Why? Because that’s how hard it will be to get quality traffic to the web site. Why would someone use this site over hotelscombined.com, hotels.com, expedia.com or any one of a dozen other travel sites with multi-million dollar marketing budgets?

Focus on how YOU can help people.

My unbiased honest advice is to scratch the affiliate hotel search module in favor of starting your own travel/destination blog. Offer visitors something unique. Start small, with specific hotels and destinations, and then expand to other destinations as things catch on. Use comments and various widgets designed to promote user interaction. Allow visitors to interact.

A travel blog designed around a specific region has the potential to be very successful. All travelers have either been to a destination or not. If they haven’t, they’re usually open to real opinions and local knowledge about their desired destination. If they have, then they often like to share their experiences. Either way, a blog offers something for each one.

You can easily monetize a blog’s content with Google AdSense and earn 100% of the click-through commission instead of just a portion like hotelscombined.com offers. You can also sign up as an affiliate for specific travel booking services like Expedia and Hotels.com and direct readers to these services to get their vacations booked. If the readers have found your blog to be helpful, they’ll have no problem following your link to a service they’ve probably already heard of and trust.

This is savvy marketing in the information age. This is how to succeed in today’s online marketplace.

Reader Comments

Joe McKean says...April 17th, 2008

This post pretty much sums it up. Since it is easy to become overwhelmed when analyzing web analytics. However, it isn’t that difficult if you start out by focusing on key performance indicators, such as the following:

1. New Visitor Conversion Rate
2. Return Visitor Conversion Rate
3. Pageviews Per Visit
4. Items Per Order
5. Average Order Value
6. Landing Page Bounce Rates
7. Landing Page Load Times
8. Traffic Sources
9. Orders Per Customer Per Year
10. Shopping Cart And Checkout Abandonment Rate

By simply gaining a grasp of what’s really happening on a site and making wise corrections based upon your stats, you can more than double your revenues almost overnight. Stats can only help you if you effectively mine the information and work with it on a regular basis. Again, GREAT POST!

Brandi Cummings says...April 18th, 2008

Thanks Joe. Your list of performance indicators will definitely come in handy for figuring out where to start looking when evaluating a site.

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