Next week begins the travel season for the InsideOut Road Warriors.  This year, Silas Fuller, Sales and Business Development will join Patricia McCauley at all Conferences and Trade Shows.

First stop, January 18th–20th, Cody Wyoming for the annual Dude Ranch Association Convention. Patricia and Silas will jointly be giving an interactive presentation on, Critical Elements of Effective Websites, Social Media, Trying to Stay on Top of the Continual Changes, Smartphone Websites, Do You Need One?  We love the Dude Ranchers, they really know their stuff when it comes to the value of the Internet and the conference is always really well attended and FUN! Yahoo!

Next stop, January 23-25th, Little Rock, Arkansas for the Professional Association of Innkeepers conference.

We will be at Booth 523, so come by and say hello. We will also be taking appointments to review your Internet marketing and branding strategies.  These appointments are with both Pat and Silas, double the expertise, register online at  insideout.com/paii.  Looking forward to seeing so many of friends who are also clients.  See you in Little Rock!

Many other trips are planned for this year including Montana in April, PAII New England,  and the South East PAII conference in South Carolina just to name a few. If we miss you this trip hope to catch you down the road at one of the other shows.

Happy New Year, and let’s keep traveling!

A List of Tucson & Southern Arizona Bed and Breakfasts new website.

A List of Tucson & Southern Arizona Bed & Breakfasts has been a client of InsideOut since 2002, and this is the second website that InsideOut Solutions has developed for them. Some of the features available on their new site include searching by city, name, or available amenities. There are also Google Maps that display all members within a particular radius – allowing for a very intuitive search by location option. Members of this association are able to manage most details of their own listing, including updating their photos. ListBB’s president, Rosemary Brown, runs her own inn as well, Hacienda del Desierto, and InsideOut Solutions has had the pleasure to work with her to manage her own inn’s website in addition to the association’s.

Visit the new website at http://www.listbb.com

The Trudy O’Reilly award is given to those who “contribute generously of time and spirit to the Texas Bed and Breakfast Association”. When we look back on all the work we have done for the TBBA, it is very flattering that they have acknowledged us in this way. Some of our major goals for them has been member education and enhanced search engine placement for TexasBB.org. Through webinars, presentations and one on one conversations, we have shared the power and importance of blogging to members. We have also seen great enhancements the association site’s search engine placement.

Jeff is happy about the award. He is squinting from all the sunshine in "Sunny Sequim" WA

With our efforts, we have seen great growth for the site. Visits are up by almost 40%, time on site is up from just over 5 minutes to 6.5 minutes. The bounce rate is down a HUGE 20% and traffic from search engines is up 20%.

Overall, we are so glad that the TBBA has appreciated and learned from the marketing education and advice we have provided. We enjoyed attending both recent Texas B&B events, the combined meeting with PAII this March in Austin, as well as the meeting in Granbury in 2009. InsideOut was fortunate enough to be speakers at both of these events.

The Alberta Bed and Breakfast Association Site

Our newest association site design is for the Alberta Bed and Breakfast Association. Their site contains some of the great tools and features that our Association system has become known for including our Google maps, editable specials and revenue options for the association.

They have a beautiful new site design that is not only lovely, but highly functional. It contains a great foundation for Search Engine Optimization, with each page containing unique titles, canonical URLs, fully built using CSS styling.

Some of the other great benefits for Alberta innkeepers include the ability to edit all aspects of their listings and and randomly generated search results for inns unless the user chooses to view them alphabetically. This ensures that each inn’s listing is displayed in a fair manner.

This makes 18 state or province association sites InsideOut has built – with no small effort from our lead association programmer, Jack Waknitz. Thanks, Jack! Jeff Logan will be heading to Alberta next month to showcase the new site to members at their annual meeting.

Features of the new site include:
- Auto detecting of mobile users
- Find a B&B by city, region or special
- Cascading Style Sheet Design for Uber-fast loading
- Matches the current website design
- View details on members listings with photos, map and more

Examples below from Apple iPhone

Home Page

City page

Member listing

To view the new site just head on over to http://www.obbg.org with your Apple iPhone, Palm, Blackberry or other smart phone.  If your association has interesting in development of a mobile version of your site please get in touch.

The Web Site for Bed and Breakfast Association of Tennessee

We created our signature search tools for Tennessee, which include a variety of means for visitors to search for lodging, including city, region, specials and alpha. We also have built a special section all about Tennessee Wedding locations. This is a tool to help the Association make a little profit, while enhancing the member’s listings. For a small extra fee, members can create a listing that focuses on their wedding facilities. Weddings are a great way for inns to make extra income, and the web site now ranking the top 15 on Google for the great wedding terms “Tennessee wedding locations” and “wedding locations in TN“.

Jeff had a great time seeing some of our current Tennessee clients, and getting to know more innkeepers and their annual meeting. He spoke to the group on Facebook and Google marketing.

We are glad when we get the chance to meet face-to-face with our clients, especially when we have worked together on a large project like an Association web site. Jeff enjoyed Nashville, and looks forward to continued projects with the Tennessee Association.

The New Site for B&B Association of Kentucky

Our goal, like with most Association sites, was to create a tool that would benefit the members. The first week of statistics have been great, with an extremely low bounce rate of 13.37%, 10.20 pages per visit, and 8:14 minutes average time on site!

Our interactive map is colorful and engaging, allowing the user to click on the region they are interested in, as well as on the title of that region from the map key. This click brings them directly to the page with the B&B listings for that region. These listings are not organized alphabetically, but rotate randomly so that each inn has a chance to be the #1 listing for their region. However, the user does have the ability to organize them by alpha should they prefer.

The regions map is not the only way a user can search for a Kentucky Bed and Breakfast. The member’s listings are also available by city, alphabetically, search field or even specials and packages.

There is also an extensive section on interests and destinations in Kentucky for users to explore and browse in conjunction with the Kentucky Tourism web site.

We are so glad to have worked with the Bed and Breakfast Association of Kentucky, and look forward to seeing the site pay off for their members!

Kentucky is a beautiful state that is rich in history. Many of the bed and breakfasts are historic inns: a secluded farmhouses on a hundred acres; a renovated Shaker Tavern; an 1850s log cabin. There are newly built inns as well, some in contemporary style and some more traditional. The new site will make finding the right bed and breakfast a pleasant experience for travelers in- and to- Kentucky.

We look forward to working with the Kentucky Bed and Breakfast Association, and to creating a seamless new look for them.

Many visitors are interested in exploring the varied terrain of Nebraska. The landscape has ranch and farm land, woods and rolling hills, surprising sandhills, and crystal clear rivers and streams. There are inns spread out along miles of trails that cross the state, inviting bikers to inn-hop. Some inns cater to outdoor sportsmen, and even provide kennels and extra-large freezers for their guests. Other inns are steeped in the history of the region.

In short, there is much to praise in Nebraska, and we at InsideOut are determined to build a site for the Nebraska Association of Bed and Breakfasts that underscores that. The new site will launch in August.

BBNOLA, as we have so fondly referred to the site, went live on Friday. It is a beautiful site, full of nifty features and insightful traveler information.

The site also features one of our signature maps – thanks Jack! – showing the city broken down by neighborhood. It is a great Google map displaying the sections of the city with B&Bs highlighted and color coordinated.

MEMBER ALERT! Make sure to download the BBNOLA graphic to your homepage so that you can proudly proclaim you are a member of this exclusive group, and also link to the association Web site. We are recommending that all members do this for marketing and SEO purposes. The more links the new Web site has, the more it will growing the rankings. Therefore, the better your business’ visibility will become through being linked to an important site like BBNOLA.

The Homepage for Professional Innkeeps Association of New Orleans!