On Sunday night Jeff and Katie enjoyed a tour of several Duluth inns, including Solglimt, one of our clients. We enjoyed an evening of fantastic architecture and jaw-dropping beauty in these turn-of-the-century mansions. Our friends Anne & Niles Deneen from Deneen Pottery, had made many of the inns’ stoneware mugs that we saw on display or in use during the tours.

Monday was a busy day; Jeff Logan presented Minnesota with their new Bed and Breakfast Association web site, which will be going live in May. We have loaded the site with great features that only InsideOut is providing, such as seven different ways to search for an inn and an interactive map that will allow users to search for inns within a certain radius of their desired location. The site will help the members coordinate within each other to target market specific attractions that bring guests to their area, and administer their individual listings whenever they want.

The crowd went wild when they saw the site, and everyone hurried to follow Jeff into his presentation on Google marketing after lunch was finished. The presentation went smoothly and was very helpful and informative for the innkeepers.

It was great to see some of our current clients, such as Chuck Dougherty from the Water Street Inn, a lovely Stillwater MN waterfront inn, who’s new site had gone live only a few days before the conference.

On Tuesday morning, Jeff and Katie did a presentation on Internet Marketing with Facebook. It was a great success, with a packed crowd and lots of good questions. Visit our facebook page to see some pictures and real-time updates. Facebook is becoming a very important space on the web, and our team is researching the newest developments and trying to keep our innkeepers informed. We look forward to updating this presentation as trends develop, and sharing it at other conventions.

Katie Pate & Jeff Logan: Internet Marketing with Facebook

As always, we enjoyed meeting new innkeepers, talking with them about their potential for online marketing and sharing with them a ranking report that indicates their position online for various search phrases. We run these ranking reports for almost all the conferences we attend, and provide them to innkeepers for their knowledge.

Now that the Hood Canal bridge will be closed up here in Northern Washington for the next month and a half or so, we will be limited to the Northwest at least for a little while. But summer conferences are just around the corner, and we look forward to seeing you at one of them!

In October the writers for Mason County Tourism visited our office to do a training session on site editing. We trained them on blogging with WordPress and editing of the sites content with Joomla. The Mason County tourisms web site can be found at www.explorehoodcanal.com