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In the Lounge
helping small businesses in travel & tourism with online technology

In This Issue

A Word from Andy
Hi All,

Is it just me or has February flown by?  January was humming along nicely, and then blink – it’s halfway through Feb.  I’ve been watching the economic markets closely lately, and while there’s a lot of mixed messages, I continue to hear about new small businesses having early success.  I still say 2010 is going to be a good year for tourism.

I’m not sure where you are, but some places have had massive blizzards, which is either great or terrible for business – hope you weren’t impacted negatively.  And my hear goes out to Haiti and the terrible tragedy that’s happened there.

There’s lots of news and interesting stuff going on this month, so read on.

Andy
Managing Director, Travel Online Partners

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Stop Annoying Your Customers Via Email
Earlier in the month, we received what amounts to spam from a company we have a lot of respect for used to have a lot of respect for.  They abused our email address and gave us no way to get off of their list.  So Andy wrote about it in an article, 3 Ways to Annoy Your Customers via Email.

UK_Stop_sign

We Lose, You Win

Our loss in this frustrating experience is your gain. Why? Well, during the month of February only, we are offering a STOP Annoying Your Customers check-in. For only £75 GBP (that’s $121 US Dollar), we will write up a one page report about how well we think you’re doing. You can apply this package to:

  • your email newsletter
  • your print newsletter
  • any other “mailing” that you send to your clients on a semi-regular basis.

If you’ve got more than one kind of newsletter, that’s ok – at only £75/$121 per newsletter, these are a steal! One of our clients, Julie Gibbons, who is Vice President of Marketing at Peoplemaps.com, had this to say about the check-in we did with their first email newsletter:

A BIG thanks to Andy who is not only wise, but generous with it – and *really* knows his stuff. His tips for improving our email newsletter were simple, straightforward, and easy for us to understand and implement. Marketing genius!

This is a bit of an experiment as we don’t normally off this service on a larger scale, so we can’t say we’ll continue it beyond February. So if sounds like the feedback you need, don’t wait.

Ready to STOP Annoying Your Customers? Then click reply to contact us with your details and we’ll get started!

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Is your business running you?
As small business experts, we’ve been asked often about recommendations for small business tools and resources.  And while there is plenty of content out there, we felt there was some additional value we could offer.  So we’re so excited to launch our first “entrepreneurial” product, the TOP Travel Business Toolkit.

TOP Travel Business Toolkit

It’s essentially a two-part product:

  • Our TOP Business Guide which explains how to take a proactive, holistic approach to your business – both your online and offline to do lists!
  • Our TOP Business Dashboard, where you can use our three worksheets to help plan, evaluate, and objectively manage your workload.

As Alex Fayle said after doing his own worksheets, “This gets people working on only the things that will produce an effect and leave more money in the bank account at the end of the month.”   Not sure we could say it any better ourselves!

Click here to find out more and download your copy of the TOP Travel Business Toolkit today.

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Latest TOP Articles
Some interesting discussions over in our article section – especially on our interview with the team from Authentic Seacoast in Nova Scotia, where we had an outpouring of support for what these guys are doing.  Be sure to have a look – it will inspire you.Other hot topics this month:

Did you know that if you have an RSS reader, you can subscribe to article updates? It’s a great way to get timely updates on articles when they come out.  (If you don’t know what an RSS reader is, click through to the page, where we explain it all.)

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TOP Radio Launch
As we mentioned we launched our new podcast this month.  Our first episode was called the State of Tourism and featured two very interesting guests!

TOP Radio

Click here to listen to the call.  It’s about an hour long and there’s quite a few notes on the download page on the discussions about new technologies, how to improve your business in 2010, and other great tips.

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When you’ve finished reading this month’s newsletter, be sure to:

  • whitelist emails from “www.travelonlinepartners.com” so that they don’t end up in your Spam folder!
  • forward a copy to a friend who might enjoy these tips and tricks – there’s always a seat for a new friendly face.
  • click reply and let us know if there is anything we can do to help or if there is a topic you’d like to hear more about.