If you're a part of a travel company wanting to target the online gay & lesbian community, then you have no doubt come across the problem of where to begin. You've probably built a wonderful web site for marketing to the online gay & lesbian traveler, developing a site ranging from a simple online brochure describing your services to a complete website offering fully interactive features about your destination or company. You may be a gay & lesbian travel tour operator, travel agency, hotel, airline, or Convention & Visitors Bureau (CVB) - the direction on where to start remains the same.

Your first step should be listing your site with the most popular search engines, as everyone uses these at one time or another when beginning their quest online. Of course Yahoo.com and Google.com are two of the most popular search engines out there, but don't forget Excite, Lycos and AltaVista.

Be careful when approached by some of the numerous services offering to guarantee your site top placement in search engines - some of the services are for real while others are not. Always keep in mind one thing… you're far from the only one wishing to appear first in those search engines… you have lots of competition all trying to manipulate their site's key words and utilizing various other tricks in order to appear first. At the same time, it's the role of those search engines to provide the user with the best search results possible, regardless of key words used in the site itself. Our advice - go ahead and purchase a product such as AddWeb (http://www.cyberspacehq.com - cost, about $40) to help you submit your site to search engines. Using AddWeb's tutorials and various tools built into their program will allow you to go a long way in terms of improving your site's position in the search engines.

On this search engine note, there are two services out there that allow you to bid for search engine placement based on key words you select. Both Overture.com and Google.com offer these services. Google.com allows you to select a series of key words from which your site will appear as an advertiser if those key words are indeed searched. Thus, if you select "gay hotel Miami", you can purchase placement on the Google.com search engine to ensure you show up first… and the cost is quite minimal and can be tested for as little as $50.

Overture.com is a bit different, in that they developed a similar system but for use in other sites, including MSN.com, Yahoo.com and many popular search and portal sites. With Overture.com, you can set up your key word selections and place a bid on how much you will pay for every click-through you receive from them. The higher the bid on that key word, the higher the placement. The upside is that when someone using the Microsoft Explorer browser or Yahoo.com types in a search phrase such as "gay travel", you can purchase the right to appear first as a sponsored link in those search results. The downside is that popular search phrases are heavily bid on. Search phrases start at $0.05 per click-through, quite reasonable for most small businesses. However, as of February 23, 2002, the bid on "gay travel" is at $0.23 per click-through, and there are well over 20 sites bidding on that key word search phrase… again, making it a little tough to show up first.

While discussing search engines and directories, there are several excellent and free gay & lesbian search sites on the Internet. Some examples of these are GayScape (http://www.gayscape.com), PrideLinks (http://www.pridelinks.com), GayCrawler (http://www.gaycrawler.com), GayZoo (http://www.gayzoo.com), Cybersocket (http://www.cybersocket.com) and Rainbow Queery (http://www.rainbowqueery.com) - all of these sites and others offer the gay & lesbian viewer the ability to search for key words, such as "gay hotel Miami" and display only gay- & lesbian-specific sites in the search results. Of course, there's no way to submit to these sites automatically, so you'll have to seek them out and let them know you're online.

Concluding the topic of search engines, keep in mind that a variety of market research reports indicate that, on average, 7% of your web site's traffic should come from search engines. So make that your target and then consider where the other 93% of your site's traffic should come from!

Then it comes to actually considering advertising your site online. There is a mistaken belief that there are "thousands of gay & lesbian websites online - how does one know which one to choose?" In reality, there are only a small handful of web sites that actually have the key demographic you are looking for. Today, there are several strong, global gay & lesbian "general web sites", often known as Virtual Communities. These are Gay Wired (http://www.gaywired.com), Planet Out (http://www.planetout.com), RainbowNetwork (http://www.rainbownetwork.com) (UK Gay Market), Fridae (http://www.fridae.com) (Australian/Asia-Pacific Market), LesbiaNation.com (http://www.lesbianation.com) (Women's market) and Gay.com (http://www.gay.com). These sites are considered the largest gay & lesbian sites worldwide, and attract online visitors for a variety of reasons, from news to chat rooms, from shopping to travel. By ensuring you are listed with these sites - even with a free listing - you are ensuring your site a better chance of being found when someone online is thinking "gay travel", but is not exactly sure where to start looking. All of the sites mentioned above have strong travel sections, promoting tour operators, hoteliers, restaurants, nightclubs, travel agents and more. They also have editorial content geared towards the gay traveler, as well as gay travel calendars and other resources one might seek when thinking about gay travel. Most importantly, all of these sites offer advertising opportunities, where a gay travel company can better promote themselves through banner advertising and other methods of standing out prominently to the web surfer when he/she is thinking "gay travel."

Equally important in your online advertising campaign is to focus on sites that are specifically for Gay Travel. These sites range from QTMagazine.com, OutandAbout.com, PurpleRoofs.com, LambdaResorts.com, Damron.com, Gayjet.com, BluWay.com and others. These sites differ from the more general sites mentioned above, in that folks online are coming to these sites specifically with the thought of travel in mind. If you are a hotelier, you want to focus on more specific gay & lesbian travel-related sites that folks would come to when looking for a gay hotel in your area. If you are a tour operator, you want to focus on sites that folks go to when searching for general gay & lesbian tours around the world, such as Out & About and Our World Magazine Online.

Lastly, there are a variety of new revenue-generating opportunities being developed online for the travel industry. As of today, there seems to be four to five different companies offering online gay & lesbian travel product for sale from other sites. One of the first in this market was GayLinkTravel.com. The site includes a travel agency and offers travel product for sale on the Internet. Packages ranging from an Atlantis cruise to special Gay Games travel are offered. Participating web sites can then pick and choose the travel product they wish to merchandise to their own unique membership, and the travel product is then displayed directly from within their own individual sites. The web site owners are focused on their own content and membership, and by enabling travel package sales from their site, receive additional revenue and travel content.

Other companies offering such services are now BluWay.com, Gayjet.com and GayCrawler.com… it is anticipated that there will be others in the near future. For the travel service provider, this simply means you have an additional channel from which to offer your travel product for sale, at no additional cost to you. This gets your product in front of a potential consumer without you having to spend anything on advertising, and allows your product to reach gays and lesbians that may never have seen your product otherwise!

If you are with a travel agency, you need to let folks know about the services you offer, and allow them easy access to contacting you directly for more information. If you're a tour operator, you need to let folks online know about the variety of travel packages and tours you are offering over the next year. This includes getting your travel over to Out & About, The Specialist, Passport Magazine and Our World Magazine, so that they can get your information published in their magazine as well as on their online Internet sites.

If you're with a hotel, experience has shown that hotels are some of the best performers on the Internet. When someone is ready to travel to another part of the country on their first vacation to that destination, they want things to go just right. With a hotel's website providing a complete tour of the rooms and the grounds, that traveler can feel more confident that they have selected the right hotel for their trip. Hotels such as The Blue Dolphin in Ft. Lauderdale were some of the first to go online, and have attested to the fact that the Internet is now their #1 source of income compared to all other forms of advertising.

Many folks believe that the online community uses the Internet primarily to gather information, and would choose to make a purchase only over the phone or by fax. While this can be the case when purchasing a complex and expensive travel package, this is not the case regarding simple travel purchases online. Folks online are not shy about using their credit cards to make a purchase over the Internet, and the easier you make it to take them to that point of sale (credit card purchase securely online), the more successful your online business will be.

In conclusion, it is the combination of search engines, advertising in a few large but general gay & lesbian sites, advertising in a few targeted gay travel sites, and working with an online affiliate program such as GayLinkTravel.com that should provide you with a truly successful "gay online marketing mix". The Internet is still new to many folks (though their comfort factor improves rapidly), and is understandably best explored slowly, to identify what works. But the fact of the matter is that a high percentage of gays and lesbians worldwide are on the Internet, and are using the Internet as their primary resource for finding travel information, shopping and news that is pertinent to them, and this trend is only getting stronger. With your own gay online marketing mix, success in tapping into this market can become a reality for you, too!

About the Author:
Matthew Skallerud, founder of here! Interactive Media (H.I.M. Corp.), began his career in the gay & lesbian marketplace when he founded Gay Wired, Inc. (www.gaywired.com) in May of 1995. He successfully led Gay Wired into one of the premiere and dominant gay websites worldwide, translating that success to LesbiaNation.com and QTMagazine.com (gay travel site). In 2001, he launched H.I.M. Corp., a company focused on both developing niche-oriented web sites for the gay & lesbian community and helping companies large and small reach these gay & lesbian consumers through this network of sites.

E-mail: matt@himcorp.com
Phone: 323 512-2922
Web: http://www.himcorp.com