Viral Marketing and Your Travel Site

How Conduit Community Toolbars Boost Viral Marketing of Your Travel Site

For a while now, the Internet has been the best place to look for travel deals, whether it’s hotel reservations, car rentals, airfares or vacation packages. In the last few years, Internet marketing has undergone a significant transformation, due to the emergence of powerhouse social networking hubs like MySpace and Facebook. If you want to catch the wave of viral, friend-to-friend marketing, and make it work for your travel site, Conduit community toolbars are the way to go.

Sticky Components
Conduit's toolbars allow you to offer your website visitors a free downloadable toolbar full of attractive features including newsfeeds, weather alerts, radio, video and games. A flexible template allows you to match your toolbar “goodies” to your target customers. For example, if you run a travel company that specializes in providing services for conference organizers, you might want to spice up your toolbar with handy online office accessories like calendars and virtual “post-its”. If your niche is backpackers, you could choose an interactive game that gives your customers a virtual tour down the Amazon.

Going Viral
But Conduit is about more than fun. Every user that downloads your toolbar will transform a precious corner of his or her browser into a click-through advertisement for your website, which features up-to-the-minute news about your goods and services. And the best part is that your toolbar subscribers soon become your representatives – as they share the toolbar and its features with their friends through independent, viral marketing.
When designing your toolbar, you’ll be careful to choose the goodies most likely to wet your subscribers’ market-specific appetite. Once the toolbar is downloaded, your subscribers will lead you to consumers with similar tastes. This transforms your subscribers’ friends into potential customers for your travel site, for free.

And viral marketing is more than just who you – or in your customers’ case, they – know. When you create a Conduit toolbar for your site, you’ll be joining a network that is engineered for fast and furious information sharing.

The Conduit Network
As the publisher of a toolbar you automatically gain access to more than 38 million Conduit subscribers – with more joining by the minute. If you create a catchy toolbar, it’s possible for your subscribers’ friends to import individual toolbar features with a simple click of the “Add This” button. Even if the friend is not interested in downloading your toolbar in its entirety, your gadget – emblazoned with a company logo, and providing a direct click-through to your site – is transformed into an independent marketing widget. Creative, catchy gadgets pay off – because friend-of-a-friend that adds yours to their toolbar becomes your new subscriber.