Become a Home Based Travel Agent

Google, Helping Travel Agents Succeed
By: Tom Ogg

There was a post in the HBTACommunity.com forum from an agent that was solicited by one of those “We will submit your website to a zillion search engines for only $79.95” companies and the response was overwhelming from agents that had been scammed by similar offers. What became crystal clear during the conversation is that many agents do not understand everything that Google has made available to them and how to access it. So, I thought it would be an appropriate subject for Home Based Trade.

Google has made billions by giving everything away for free. That is what Web 2.0 is all about and Google is the king of Web 2.0. They have gone far out of their way to enable even the smallest entrepreneur to succeed by giving numerous tools and applications away for free. Here is a list of what home based travel agents should be interested in. First, visit http://www.google.com/intl/en/submit_content.html as this is where we will start.

Submit a URL: This is where you would submit your website’s domain name in order to have Google dispatch a spider or robot to crawl your website. You do not need to use a registration service to accomplish this. In fact, registration services are normally considered as spam by many search engines and using one is likely to do more harm than good. A manual submission is one of Google’s highest priorities simply because it takes a real human being to take action in order to submit the request. Once Google has crawled your site it will return automatically to crawl your site for updates. The more often the content changes, the more often Google will crawl it.

List Your Business: This is something that every travel professional should do. By listing your business with Google, it will show up on Google Maps when a potential new client is looking for a cruise specialist, airline ticket or any other kind of travel purchase. Your listing will show up on your area map and it will contain your name, address, telephone number and more information. If you wish, you can also arrange to have coupons that potential clients can print out and use as an introductory offer. You decide what is on the coupons if you use them.  Enter the keywords “San Diego Cruise Agent” into Google and you can see the power of listing your business. If you are not there for your area, you are just not in the game. Again, it is free to list your business and it only takes a couple of minutes.

Google Webmaster Tools: Google has numerous tools available for free that will help you understand how Google sees your website. Google’s tools will also help you understand where your traffic is coming from, what keywords visitors are using to find your site, who is linking to your site and tons more. By using Google Sitemaps you can tell Google exactly how you want your urls to appear and which of your pages are the most important and how often they change.

Google Alerts: This is new from Google. You can provide Alerts with keywords or a phrase (such as “Indian Ocean Cruise” or “San Diego Travel Agent”) and then tell Google where you want it to search (blogs, news, web, groups or everywhere) and how often you want to be notified when it finds your keywords being used (Immediately as-it-happens, daily or weekly) and you will be notified every time that your keyword (s) or phrase appears in the media you are searching. It comes with a link directly to the content that it appeared in so that you can instantly communicate with the person using the keyword (s) or phrase. This allows agents to key in on specific terms that they are interested in promoting.

Google Earth: Instead of relying upon brochures to show your client what a resort looks like, why not Google it on Earth? Google Earth can be downloaded and you can see every square inch of Earth and zero in on areas that you are interested in. Clients love the idea that they are looking at a recent unbiased image of where they will be staying.

Google Groups: Why not start a discussion group for your next special group movement. In this way all of your group members can communicate with one another before they actually meet for the first time on the cruise or tour. Google groups is a powerful way to engage group members and a motivating way to get new group members to sign up and place a deposit on their cabin or room. Only deposited group members can subscribe.

Google has dozens of additional tools that agents can use like Google Sites (build website fast and easy) Google Blogger (start your blog) Google Talk (VoIP) Google Translate (translate web pages in different languages to English) and so on.  I would suggest that everyone take an hour or two and explore Google’s fantastic array of free tools, utilities and applications.