As the long-time CEO of a hiking and backpacking adventure tour business, I have learned many lessons about what technology to use that is effective and what technology doesn’t work and isn’t worth the money. Many readers won’t be interested in this exact type of company, however any business that markets trips or tours will find this article of interest. Whether you’re booking cruise tours, bus tours, vacation packages…etc, the same principles apply.

Grand Canyon trekking

Marketing is of course the biggest obstacle most businesses, and especially with vacation or tourism businesses. There are many different marketing mechanisms you can choose from, but the primary to focus on is internet-based marketing systems. The first and foremost hill to take is to get on pay-per-click advertising, because you can start getting business immediately. Get a solid website with your search phrases emphasized in the main text on each page and on the main link section, and then immediately start your pay-per-click marketing campaign. This will get business rolling in quickly. Hire a specialist for this – it’s a tough learning curve and you’ll waste valuable time, money, and energy trying to figure it out yourself.

backpacking in the Grand Canyon

The next mission is to get top organic rankings on Google, Yahoo, and MSN (in that order of priority). How to do this is to blog, blog, blog and subscribe with an article exchange service or a link-exchange service. Either way, you want to get a TON of links directed to your site.

backpacking in the Grand Canyon

Website design is the next most important feature, as now that you have traffic coming to your site, the people need to feel compelled enough to book a trip. If you’re starting on a small budget, designing your own site is a possibility. Microsoft Frontpage is an easy-to-use website-design software program if you’re up for that. If you don’t have much computer or design experience, then your time is better spent raising the money to pay someone else to create it.

Finally, let’s discuss databases. You will want to start a database very quickly to begin to keep track of clients, inquiries, booked trips, and payments due. I recommend using Oracle products, as they are the leading database software company in the world.