HD Tourism Webcams
We are all looking for ways to get a better return on our advertising dollars. Over time, I have tried a number of things to get noticed and I want to share one now that you may not have considered: webcams.
Now, to be completely transparent, I have a relationship with Skyline Webcams. But you may judge the effectiveness of these tourism cameras for yourself. You will also notice that I’m not asking you to call or even giving you any contact information.
Most forms of advertising require you to pay for a certain number of views or clicks. Webcams work differently: you buy a camera and install it, this is a one time charge and should last for the next ten years or whatever.
You will need to pay for your regular Internet service. These cameras don’t take so much bandwidth as to require a separate feed. They simply plug into the standard wall jack you already have and run in the background.
The other charge is a yearly thing for access to the video network. For example: if there are say seventy-five people watching at once, you need to be able to handle that number of video feeds. That requires a service to broadcast your camera and it runs around €75 or so a year.
There are several different kinds of cameras. Some have microphones and some even work underwater. There are some that you can control (pan & zoom) yourself. I would recommend that you not get a camera that requires a separate plug-in because many visitors will not download the software.
The marketing idea here is simple, if you get enough people to watch, you will get some to click through to your website. That brings us to our sales funnel. Do many people watch these things? Yes… and if you think about it makes sense. Say a small tourist town has one-hundred YouTube channels. That is a reasonable number. YouTube has many millions of viewers and many of them will visit several of the channels — say two or three hotel videos before booking.
This same town will have maybe two to five live webcams. The pie is much smaller but it’s only getting split three ways (or whatever). Not only that, the visitors will skip from camera to camera. So any one camera will get tens of thousands of views a month. If many of these visits happen to be a page on your website, so much the better.
Video Transcript
Did you know that nine million visitors
visit the EarthCam website alone every
90 days? It's a good opportunity and I'm
going to tell you all about it right now.
First of all, in the interest of full
disclosure, you should know I have a
financial relationship with a company
called Skyline webcams. However, I sought
them out and I sought them out after
doing a lot of research into webcams and
how webcams are being utilized by
tourism based businesses. You see a
tourism based company will report an
increase to website traffic. In fact 86%
of tourism based businesses do. Now
Google uses the number of visitors to
your website as a key
ranking factor: the more visitors you
have to your site the higher Google is
likely to rank your site. Now if you
think about it,
this makes a little bit of sense. Let's
say you have a tourism destination in a
small town. This small town probably has
500 YouTube channels and there are
thousands of little videos all about
every aspect of this small town. But that
same small town may only have four or
five live webcams. So it's a smaller pie,
but you're dividing it very few ways. The
result is for any given webcam many
thousands of visitors. I want to show you
something and, and you'll see a little
bit more about what I'm talking about.
Here's a website that reinforces what I
was telling you a few minutes ago about
the relationship between having a live
webcam and the number of visitors coming
to your website. And of course how Google
and the other search engines view that
particular relationship. Here is a
selection of live webcams from around
the world. Right now it's the middle of
the night in Times Square, so although
this camera does have a microphone
there's really not going to be much to
hear at all. I wanted to show you how one
of these websites works. Here is a live
feed. These are fishing boats and you can
see a couple of men there working on the
boat. You have info tags where you can
add some information.
For example, that happens to be the back
of a basketball board. We can see today's
weather forecast and all the pertinent
information, including this small map. Now
on the map it's going to show an
outcropping.
Those line up with these walls. Now this
is a high-def feed; we can hit full
screen and this is of such quality that
you could actually play it back on a
full 1280 hi-def television in your
living room, no problem. The payoff is
right here, this particular banner will
be there for years to come.
As long as that camera is there and
that's the kind of advertising that you
pay roughly 700 euros one time have the
thing installed and you'll have that
forever. This particular camera is
perhaps four months old or so and has
had two hundred and two thousand hits. 35
people are online right now. Now that
doesn't sound like a lot but by the end
of the day that is going to add up to a
couple of thousand people. Down below
more live feeds that we can see people
also take screen captures and they can
make comments on what they see. So
overall this is really kind of a neat
program and it will drive people off to
your website. It also helps website
rankings because there are a large
number of aggregate sites and what I
mean by that is websites that will take
a feed from a number of different
cameras put it on to their websites.
Those all count as backlinks for your
website. You can get cams with
microphones or underwater cameras.
There's all kinds of cameras that you
can buy to help your business. Guys
that's going to do it for this
particular lecture. Coming up next time, I
want to talk about social media and why
you should be involved in social media.
That's going to do it for this Tourism
Marketing Tip. I hope you learned some
and if you did please subscribe to our
YouTube channel. You can also get a hold
of me on the website with any other
questions and we have another video for
you. Thank you and I'll see you soon.
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