What infuriates me in the online industry is that it is really easy for ill-intentioned businesses to take advantage of smaller businesses who don't know what they don't know.

Stay away from tourism rip-off sites

This Gold Coast based business (I won't mention their name) is contacting members of their local tourism association to offer the following:

• a 1-3 minute web video which they will host on their site (edit: the site has a very low page rank, as per Wikipedia's definition a PageRank results from a "ballot" among all the other pages on the World Wide Web about how important a page is.)
• a promo dvd of your story
• a copy of the video for your site (you would hope so!)
• a dedicated webpage
• and all this for - wait - $1,500!!!

Personally, I think this is very unethical. Approaching tourism operators and flogging them a quick video for such a huge amount of money without even giving them the tools and knowledge to do it themselves is ludicrous. I wonder how these people can get out of bed and feel "good" about their work.

Videos for tourism that work 

1. People now want to see other people just like them having fun at your tourism business - not a professional video of some sort showing beautiful views, expensive champagne and skinny models laughing around the pool.

2. You don't need to pay someone to come and video your guests - do it yourself, by asking your guests if they don't mind being put on youtube: something just like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTSmfjrx3Wg

You need to have not just one video, but different videos for your different pages, target markets. All you need is a digital camera, just like that one:

Which brings us to Youtube....

Youtube is THE site that is popular for videos. Don' rely on a 3-rd party site to display your videos and promote your place, the web searcher is never going to find that site (especially if it is not launched yet, therefore not indexed with search engines!!)

Learn how to place your tourism videos on Youtube and in your site

(just like we have done above...) If you would like to learn more about how to market your tourism business online, download the tourism e-kit. I am currently working with the ATDW on updating the content and a brand new tutorial about how to create videos for your tourism business using Youtube is about to be launched in March. If you would like to share your stories about having been contacted to fork out a lot of money for little return in the tourism industry, I am all ears. Leave your comments in this blog post. If you have had a good experience with developing your own videos and posting them on YouTube and then linking them to your website, share your comments too, I could include it in the e-kit!