Top 10 Jan. CT Advertisers

And the winner is Asia Minor Travel & Tours  with 110
Web Page Ad views. The company consistently draws visitors by listing its current trips and staying in people's minds by having contributed articles to The Cultured Traveler.

Try telling this to your local newspaper or regional lifestyle magazine:

“We’re going to run an advertisement with you, but we won’t pay you for it unless we book actual tours from it.” The fact is, you wouldn’t say such a thing to a print publication because you know it wouldn’t fly. When you run a print ad, you’re counting on exposure to enough readers that some of them will contact you for more information. There’s no way you expect the ad to magically convert a reader into a booked tour without some effort on your part. But we’ve actually had some would-be advertisers tell us the line we quoted above. What we tell them back is that ads on the Internet are exactly the same as ads in a print publication: They can draw horses to water, but it’s up to you to make them want to drink.

Speaking of newspapers: Is the Old Grey Mare taking a page from our book?

The New York Times has announced that it’s planning to begin running magazine-style vertical half-page ads in its online edition. According to a Times spokesman, readers don’t mind advertising as long as it’s not disruptive. For us, this is gratifying news. It’s nice to have a great American institution confirm what we’ve been saying for three years: The way to attract readers with online advertising is to do what magazines do – place well-designed ads, stand back and let readers respond. The idea that you have to pile on the pop-ups and special effects has obviously backfired, and the Times is acknowledging it. Daily life is filled with enough clutter without making web sites one more occasion for assaulting people’s sensibilities.

Why it makes sense for you to tell everybody you do business with about us

You know by now that even though we’re small potatoes, we think that in a couple of years Cultural Travels will be a major force on the Internet. To get there we need you help us create traffic to our site. We’d like to ask you to tell each and every person you do business with to come take a look at us. Yes, we know that the people you invite may see your rivals. But think about it this way: Every day millions of people visit shopping malls. Seeing all those rival stores cheek-to-jowl increases sales because people are attracted to busy places where they have lots of choices. So, please, send your people here, and the other tour operators will send theirs. Pretty soon we’ll have thousands of more people visiting this site – all the more to see you

Where to place your print ads? Try in-flight magazines

Tour operators who place print ads often wonder if they’ve made the right buy. Much advertising has a pig-in-a-poke aspect to it: Are you reaching the right people through the right print medium? It turns out that a partial answer to the dilemma might be in in-flight magazines. Scarborough Research reports that an average of 21% of adults in 74 U.S. cities took five or more overnight trips during 2002, most of them by air. Their profile is attractive: 38% of them have household incomes of $75,000+. This group is exposed often to in-flight magazines, which because of their travel-oriented nature, are perfect places to advertise travel-related services. Don’t forget the bonus: Airlines routinely invite passengers to take in-flight magazines with them, a very advertiser-pleasing tactic. 

Make people pay for online content or not? There’s no easy answer yet

It’s not a debate, call it a heated and earnest discussion instead: Should people be charged for the information they access online? You’d think the people who’ve made money charging for content would say yes, but think again: Neil Budde, founder of The Wall Street Journal Online, the Web’s most successful news subscription service, says a “herd mentality” may be making people rush mistakenly toward a paid-content model. He’s right. Charging a fee makes sense in the WSJ’s case because it generates a lot of timely, high-impact information on its own that nobody else can duplicate. But charging a fee for a weather or breaking news report makes little sense. We think the future holds a combination rather than an either-or approach to content: People will access most information for free, but will authorize payment of a nickel or dime from an “electronic wallet” anytime they want to access more detailed, proprietary info.

Good news for tour operators: Broadband’s increasing use boosts your online marketing

By 2004, 30 million U.S. households will be using broadband connections – cable or DSL – to access the Internet, according to research firm eMarketer. That figure is 27.5% of all U.S. households, a figure that puts broadband way past the early adapter stage (where only the wealthiest, most educated people are the first to take up a new technology). Since broadband is so much faster than the classic dial-up modem – up to 50x – companies with web sites can put richer, more complex graphics on them without worrying that visitors will have to wait too long for images to appear. By the way, U.S. households average two people, meaning that 61 million individual users will be broadband-equipped in 2004. In 2001, that figure was 22.4 million.

Take a look at how we compare with the travel web sites that are most like us

The table below compares Cultural Travels with four other web sites that come close to our dedicated content or purpose. Each site is ranked on a 1-to-5 scale in terms of how well it does against a parameter (5 is best). Here’s what each parameter means:

• Independent: All tour operators get a free listing, not just those who pay.
• Newsletter: Does the site have an online newsletter with original, dynamic (updated monthly) content?
• Print: Does the site circulate a print version of its online content?
• E-marketing: Are trip listings for operators free?
• Ads relevant to content: Does the site place ads in categories or next to articles that are relevant to tour operator ads? Only Cultural Travels does this.
• Advertising-driven: Sites that make their money from display advertising  are the most likely to attract traveler trust.
• Commission Driven: Sites that make money from commissions favor companies that pay the most –  the big guys – most likely not you.