If you don’t already know this, please make a mental note and seek professional advice :

• There is no point in having a website that is never updated
• Updating a website doesn’t mean changing a couple of words or prices on a page

Your online content is your most important asset

It is the voice, the brain, the intelligence of your online sales person: your website. It is the content that gets indexed by search engines, that highly influences your search engine rankings and, most importantly, that turns a “window shopper” into a “customer”

To update your website, you will need a content management system. I might be repeating myself here but there is no point having a website that you can’t update. It would correspond to you sitting in the corner, with your hands tied and your mouth shut at a networking event.

What new content can I write?

Ok, great, you have a content management system. But now, what do you do? What can you write about? STOP - don’t blatantly promote yourself. Write something that will fill a need your target market may have, that will interest them.

You are lucky, tourism, our industry is an industry of industries. For instance, it includes events.

Here is one good tip to get you started.

Visit the calendar of events of your regional tourism organisation.

To do so, simply visit your local or regional tourism associations’ website (eg. www.verygoldcoast.com.au/events/ for the Gold Coast) or pick up the phone and call them!

Take a whiteboard marker and add 4 events relevant to your clients on your yearly planner. Now here is the trick. Take a red marker and use your most legible hand writing to write “new web page” on your yearly planner, 3 months before each event is due to happen.

What you will do is create a new page on your website, and publish it 3 months before the event is due. On this new page, you will put a special package or offer together for the people attending the event. Why publishing it 3 months before? Because you need to leave time to search engines to pick up your new page and people also plan in advance.

Eg: if you are based in Mt Isa, QLD, and have an accommodation busines: publish a special page on May 1st to offer “Rodeo accommodation in Mt Isa”. (the Rodeo is on in the first week of August). Make sure you structure your page properly using Title tags, headings, and hyperlinks within the content.

If you also do print advertising, make sure that the call to action isn’t on your website itself but direct the people to www.mywebsite.com.au/my-rodeo-page

How have you been writing new content for your website so far? Have you been writing new pages based on your local events?