There is a war brewing within the online travel agency space over Google’s recent move with Google Flights and Google Hotels. And its new competitors in the $110 billion online travel industry aren’t happy about the search giant crashing the party, according to a recent  Wall Street Journal  report. Travel is hot for 2012 and beyond.  An An increasing number of people say they’ll do more leisure traveling in the coming year, and even more say they’ll fly if they can find good deals in 2012. Business travel spend is expected to have grown 6.9% MORE >>

Content is a key element in all forms of marketing: without good and relevant content there are no emails, there is no sharing and your site or blog doesn’t rank in search engines. Using HubSpot I could trace him easily back to a post I did on the blog you are now visiting that same day. And the starting point was content, in this case a blog post. We ended up mailing and when talking about how he found me, it seemed that the digital journey he travelled to find and contact me was longer than what I could see and logically conclude. Stories travel, not content. MORE >>

Last week, Mitch Joel wrote a blog post called, “ Watching Me Blog.” ” It was in response to Chris Brogan’s piece, “ Watching Mitch Joel Blog ,” which he wrote while we were all in Norway and, literally, watching Mitch blog. In his post, he details how he blogs – from his philosophy all the way through publishing and distribution. But the reason I’m mentioning it here is because, at the end of his blog post, he calls a few of us out and says he’d like to see how we blog. Blogging Philosophy. MORE >>

know that travel consumers booking via my hotel website i.e. direct customers are more loyal, bring more revenue and tend to travel more often. In 2009, even the top 30 major hotel brands t increased their dependence on the Online Travel Agencies (OTAs)-from 25.4% Situation: Internet users now spend 17% of their surfing time on social network and blogging sites, nearly triple the percentage of time spent on such sites a year ago, according to Nielsen. Hotels and Social Media Travel Tourism is a post from: Laurel Papworth- Social Network Strategy. Odd Job? MORE >>

One question I get asked often is how to start a blog. While there are many platforms to choose from, I always suggest that if your purpose for blogging is anything related to branding, business, or making money online, then you want to go with WordPress on your own domain. Sure, there are other blogging platforms and content management systems you can use on your own domain, but none are quite as popular or powerful as WordPress. Your first step to staring a blog on your own domain is choosing a domain name. Further Reading for Learning WordPress & How to Blog. MORE >>