Internet Marketing, Make Money Online

Having recently done a two month vacation, I can tell anyone who listens that the quality of staff in hotels, restaurants and other hospitality providers differs a lot, so much in fact you'd wonder if some of them have any training at all.

Countries like Spain are particularly poor in service standards, and my memeory of travelling around the US a few years ago wasn't much different in many places, and it occurs to me that hospitality isn't just waiting tables, but even if it was, a smile, professional conduct, and taking a small interest in the person who ultimately pays your wage shouldn't be too hard achieve.

Do a quick search for training providers and you find websites like hospitality management schools, so really there is no excuse for anyone who wants to progress in the industry, take a look at the Batchelors and Masters degree programs.

Yet, I'd be willing to bet the majority of people I encounter probably never undertake a degree program, and they expect me to spend my hard earned money in their establishments? I'm sure you agree with me, if you go on holiday or visit a local restaurant it would be nice to think the manager understands the basic principles of hospitality and will insist on certain minimum standards from their staff.

How often do you feel this actually happens? I do understand that most small hotels and restaurants are probably managed by their owners, and maybe money is tight, but a hospitality degree will actually help increase bottom line turnover, so is an investment in their future, and if the business doesn't succeed at least the owner would have a qualification that would get them work elsewhere.

Even amongst large chains, you often find the manager is simply a person who ws able to gt funding to buy their franchise, then they're given in-house training to run their business. Some in-house training programs have excellent reputations, but the majority of these organizations seem to don't seem to look for degree educated managers.

The result is an industry with hugely varying standards of service, and where things like star ratings become meaningless because the management don't have the skills to maintain the rating. It would be nice if hospitality providers would understand they make their money from keeping people happy, and staff need to be educated to do that effectively.

This is a great debate, and one that gets a lot of discussion in webmaster forums like digital point or netbuilders, and most people seem to come down on the side of one or the other. Essentially the debate is between on page SEO vs off page SEO.

A lot of MFA promoters tell you to create a small 3-5 page site, through some articles up on ezinearticles, add your Adsense code and wait, and in the past this system could be considered very successful, actually it might still be effective if you fly under the radar, but the bigger your site becomes, and the more traffic you get, the more you start to compete with established sites that do a lot more for their ranking.

I'm not going to sit on the fence, I'm going to tell you to do both, and I'm going to tell you why. You can do an experiment to prove how well this works if you have three new websites in the same niche and on different host accounts. Start a blog on each one, and give each blog maybe 5 posts of similar length, all targeting the same keywords.

To make the experiment even easier, forget about registering domain names, just grab a free blog from Blogger.com, Wordpress.com, and Blog.com, they all give you a subdomain so each blog would be competing fairly, instead of having a mix of top level domains, subdomains, and subfolders.

Then on one of the blog only interlink between posts using keyword rich anchor text, on the second blog don't interlink between posts instead only write articles for ezinearticles, and on the third blog do both interlinking and ezinearticles. Now ping the major RSS readers for each blog and sit back and watch your stats to see which one gets more traffic.

I'd be willing to bet that 90% of the time the two blogs with the ezinearticles will get traffic faster than the blog with only interlinking, but wait a little longer. Soon you'll see the blog with only interlinking will catch up with the blog that only has ezinearticles backlinks, but the blog with both will stay ahead of both of them and after 3 months will have several times more traffic than the other two.

OK, so that isn't an example, I'm not stupid enough to disclose my test blogs, that would ruin the test and I'd have to start again, but I can tell you that I used the results of this test to promote a client who has a website here in Spain and her little B&B that was previously only on page 4 of Google shot up to the #1 position in 2 months.

I did that by interlinking all of her content pages using her main keywords, plus wrote 3-4 ezinearticles for each page on her site, and then just sat back and watched. Of course real SEO never stops, and I'll need to keep adding backlinks and if she wants to target extra keywords she will need more content, but her reservations have increased, her booking ratio is above 50%, and she's very happy. Try this with your own sites, you'll see it works.

In a previous local SEO article I talked about using Facebook and Twitter to promote a local business, here in Spain I've found them to be very effective for driving search engine rankings, though not always effective for connecting with genuine customers, often you'll connect more with other business owners.

Connecting with other business owners is a great concept, you never know when one of them will become a referral or a customer, but with respect the Twitter and Facebook, a lot of their users are there to be entertained, so how do you connect with more business minded contacts?

The answer is still in social networking, using ecademy and InterNations, but the services are different, and I should point out if you are promoting an MFA or non-business website these sites may not be appropriate. But my local clients in Spain get a lot of mileage from them for business networking. For pure SEO, another option is to create a profile on Brown Book.

Let me tell you a bit about the clients I have in Spain, some are owners of small hotels, others are real estate agents, but I also support translators, holiday home management, restaurants, and people who own shops. All of them are finding the current economic crisis is hurting their bottom line, and they all want to connect with customers to build relationships.

Of course any smart business person will know that clients can come from knocks on the door, website referrals, advertising, but the best business always comes from personal connections who know your business and pre-sell your service or product to their friends.

This is where ecademy and InterNations are so valuable - both are professional networking sites, the first is for business people all around the world, the second is for people who are expatriates and have global connections. Do you see why these networks could be so valuable?

Small shops dealing purely with local customers might not get much advantage from membership, but in Spain most of my clients are somehow involved in the tourism industry or they deal with property owners and investors, most of whom are not local.

In bigger cities or regions where business networking is an important part of doing business the story is different and a lot of success follows from joining ecademy. Similarly, people involved in tourism get a lot of value from InterNations because statistically expatriates travel more, and they talk about travel more.

I want to quickly talk about the difference between travel websites like TripAdvisor, GoGecko etc, and ecademy or InterNations. The difference is the level of professionalism and the quality of referrals your business can attract, and in many cases the volume of referrals you can get.