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

backpacking in the Grand Canyon

Marketing is of course the crux 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 good 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 long learning curve and you’ll waste valuable time, money, and energy trying to figure it out yourself.

Trekking in the Grand Canyon

Your 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 get involved with an article exchange service or a link-exchange service. Either way, you want to get a TON of links directed to your site.

Grand Canyon hiking

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 an option. 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 background, 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 organize your list of clients, inquiries, booked trips, and payments due. I recommend using Oracle products, as they are the leading database software company in the world.

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Exchange My Mail has finally been added to the Microsoft Service Provider Solutions Category on the Microsoft Website.
We have a listing in the Hosted Exchange section.

In order to be listed in the directory, companies must meet certain requirements, which to be honest seem to vary depending on who you talk to.There are minimum requirements that must be met; Microsoft Gold Partner, member of SPLA licensing program, and report a minimum amount of revenue to Microsoft. In addition, you must meet minimum requirements of adding several hundred new mailboxes each month. This is to show that the company is continually adding new customers, and will be a viable partner with Microsoft.

We are extremely excited about finally being listed, as we have been working on this for quite some time now. Our understanding is that this new service provider portal will be replacing the legacy system which had been in place for a few years now. Our dedication to Microsoft Exchange, and it’s related services cannot be compared. As of this writing, Hosted Exchange is the company’s main focus. We don’t get bogged down with web hosting, pop mail servers, CRM, VPS servers etc. All of those items have their place in the industry, and maybe some day we will begin to offer those. But for now, Exchange My Mail continues to focus on Hosted Exchange 2007 and stay dedicated to it core business.

Our customers appreciate this dedication to one specific niche as we have been extremely successful at acquiring new customers, and adding mailboxes. Our dedicated sales and support teams can stay focused on Microsoft Exchange and all of it’s benefits without the need to draw away their attention to other systems. This has given Exchange My Mail a distinct advantage over all of our competition.

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