The Travel PR Blog

If you have a Mac and use WordPress, here’s a great way to set up a test blog, somewhere you can try out the latest version of WordPress with your favourite plug-ins or tweak your design off-stage. SImply download MAMP, grab the new version of WordPress, then watch this screen cast. Follow the instructions [...]

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Thanks to the ease of publishing and low cost of equipment, creating online video has become an increasingly viable option for travel marketing departments, but just because you can doesn’t mean you should. For a start, I would advise against posting anything about your travel business unless the content ticks at least one of these [...]

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The Smiley Cat Blog has a great overview of US tourism websites with a screenshot from every state in the union.  It makes a good visual primer for other working in this field though I find the Snap previews hovering over each image even more irritating than usual. The standard of concept and execution may [...]

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I am always interested in how clients present information to the search engines. For example, the importance of that snippet of text which accompanies the title and link is often overlooked. A recent Microsoft study considered the effect different sized snippets had on the user and there’s a round-up on the SearchTank blog.
Perhaps more interesting [...]

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I am always looking out for good WordPress designers, preferably within a few hundred miles but that’s not imperative. While I am naturally enough interested in how Hill & Knowlton gets on with its latest bloggers campaign for the new LG phone, at this moment I am just drooling over the design work.
It is [...]

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Most PR companies I run across in the travel business don’t have a clue about search engine marketing. You can tell that from their own websites. However, here’s a German PR firm that seems to know only too well how Google works. Via Google Blogoscoped an exposure (literally) of 4iMedia’s dubious keyword practices. Their site [...]

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Bizarre ad placement of the day. Can someone tell me why there is a big flashy ad for the super soar-away Sun in prime position in the middle of Gigaom ? Surely that is a site whose constituents - if they have any allegiance at all to UK hackdom - are far more likely to [...]

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One of these days a captain of industry will say something like this and I shall slap the quote all over my business sites before you can say “reputation management”.
Until then I will have to make do with the always-quotable Robert Scoble.
One thing I’ve learned is to always do a Google search on a [...]

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A comment on Thomas McMahon’s blog mentioned that Blogger is letting users map their blog to their own domain. Now that we have a new and much improved version of Blogger, allowing advanced template tweaking and a lot of improved functionality, this could provide the cheapest way to publish a professional-looking business blog.
I couldn’t resist [...]

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I really need to get quicker on the blog draw. I was working on a landing page for my Business Life article and I started to write about social media optimisation when I realised the inherent restrictions of the term.
SMO presupposes there is something there already to optimise. It fails to cover the actual creation [...]

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One of the great things about WordPress - and a possible reason it trumps every other blogging platform - is the number of great plug-ins being written daily by geeky volunteers with time and code on their hands.
Some are more useful than others but few have better names than the funny “What would Seth Godin [...]

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When it comes to turning strangers into friends into customers, there’s a direct link between trust and content. That’s why I think every travel webmaster could learn a thing or two from a 21 year old part time student from Brisbane. Chris started dabbling in Adsense while he was still at school and now rakes [...]

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