And now, we are entering the 6th months of the a4trip Project.

We have came up with 3 guidebooks (one in beta), and by the end of the year, 36 guidebooks will be on sale.

Along the way, we’ve learnt alot about the travel writing business. From the first writer to join the team to the current team size of 60 talented writers, translators and mappers across the globe, we’re moving closer to the “500″ target.

To keep the big ship’s momentum, we are going to be rollling a few things very soon.

Most of you might not have the courtesy to join us in our Daily Marketing Briefings, yes, you read that right. The briefing is a daily ritual in the mornings that usually last about 1-2 hours, every “business days”. While you’re busy writing your guide, or drawing icons for your map or looking up funny words in the translation websites, the Marketing team has been working over the clock to see that the Guidebooks is reaching out to the travelers. The interns that just joined us now are also performing much better than we expected.

After running the Daily Marketing Briefing for about a month, we are now moving to mini-campaigns. Each team member will design a marketing campaigns of their own and then track their own campaign effectiveness.

Next, we are also working on the a4trip.com Manager module. This will make it very simple for the Operation team to notify download stats, earning reports and facilitate payment related issues. We are looking to start using the new a4trip Manager by end of June. We will roll out a4trip.com Friends module too. It would be used by all of you to manage the progress of guidebook and sales of download.

And, leaving the best for last…the new a4trip.com Website! Believe me, you are going to be thrilled to see all the new features we’ve added and improvised. The underlying philosophy of the new site is to simplify the buying process and providing useful information to the travelers the moment they loaded the very first page in a4trip.com. The new site design is due end of June, to all dear writers, ensure your guide is ready for release by then.

The Marketing Team is ready to adopt any tactics that can help to increase the awareness of the a4Trip Guidebooks. If you have a good idea, share it with them!

The Development Team is constantly looking at modifying the a4trip infrastructure to improve the Guidebooks buying process. They could use a little help too if you have a great idea to contribute!

Meanwhile, fasten your seat belts and get ready for the upcoming features!

I haven’t been keeping myself quiet either as I’ve been secretly tweaking a4trip and hopefully increasing our future visitors from Windows Live Search too~ Looks like I am able to help a4trip improve a little bit on the marketing side as the result shows that with certain keywords like the one above, we rank 5 out of a maximum of 5 on Windows Live Search alone~

With this result, I felt much more passionate than ever before~
So, “Ganbatte” everyone on making a4trip a cool place to obtain Travel Guides!

Updated- Regularly update your blog will help to ensure “freshness”, which is something major search engines take into consideration when evaluating the “importance” of your site. 1-2 new post a day is a good practice. Also, keeping existing information up-to-date is important especially if you want to keep visitors coming back.

Useful- Needless to say, nobody likes to read irrelevant information. Your job as a guide book blogger is to inform and to educate your visitors. If possible, you should be the voice of authority in the topics that you blog about. Use tools like directories, listings, travel related calculators and various other “useful” information on your blog to attract visitors.

Unique- This is the tougher challenge. Making your blog unique requires more than just copy and paste information from other sources. In this section, originality will help alot. Think of all the possible ways on how you can make your blog the most comprehensive information silo on the traveling destination you are writing about.

That’s basically the 3U to get you started on building your traffic. It’s going to take time, probably 3 months to 6 months before you start seeing the effort.

An example of a blog can be seen here:
http://a4guide.com/en/cambodia/siem-reap/

A blog can greatly assist in the effort of marketing the guidebooks, and I shall be sharing a few tips and tricks which you can use when you are writing your own blog.

Here’s the compiled list of blogging tips and tricks which I hope will assist you.

Good luck, a4friends ;-)