If your audience includes people in the tourism field and you’re interested in helping them learn more about using social media, you might want to join our affiliate program.
As an affiliate, when you link someone to this site, you receive 20% of their purchase if they pay for one of our courses. You benefit from the revenue, and your audience benefits from training and information targeted specifically to their destination marketing needs.
Does your audience align with ours?
If your audience includes people who work in tourism, including these types of organizations:
- Convention and Visitor’s Bureaus (CVBs)
- Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs)
- Main Street and Downtown Development Associations
- Historic preservation and heritage trail organizations
- Parks, nature preserves, botanical gardens and other nature/outdoors-related attractions
- Public Relations professionals who do tourism work
- Chambers of Commerce
- Business and shopping districts
- Niches like agritourism, culinary tourism, arts/culture, sports/adventure and educational travel
- Festival and event planners
- Tourism and hospitality professors and students at colleges and universities
- Attractions, museums, etc. that depend upon tourist traffic
- Bed and breakfasts, inns, lodges, hotels and motels
- Historic highways and scenic byways organizations
- State and city governments who do marketing and outreach related to tourism
… then you have a good fit.
If you don’t work with these folks, then this is not the program for you.
Does our material align with yours?
If you want to help your audience with online courses in social media, this may be a good way to do it. This can be an added value to offer your blog readers or community members, a supplement to your in-person consulting, or a “plug in” module that fits with your more comprehensive PR services.
Tourism professionals love this material because it works with the way they work. Each lesson includes examples from tourism, the links point to tourism pages, and the video interviews feature tourism or social media professionals. The lessons are targeted at the things they spend most of their time on: special events, reaching more potential visitors and providing tour information.
Here’s the outline of the full course. There is more detail about the ways of packaging the course on The Details page.
Introduction Workshop:
- What is this social media stuff, and who cares?
- Explaining blogs and microblogging (Twitter)
- Explaining Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube
- Video: How a city gets started in social media
- Video: How a communications director monitors Twitter
- Video: The benefits of Flickr photo-sharing
Lesson 1: How to Listen
- Google listening tools
- Listening on Twitter and Facebook
- Alltop, plus more free and paid listening services
- Improve and refine your listening
- How to respond to what you hear
- Video: How @SeattleMaven monitors Twitter for Seattle tourism
- Video: Morning coffee with @SeattleMaven
Lesson 2: Building a Home Base
- Tips for a better website
- Building a better blog
- You’ve started a blog, now what?
- Why you need a Facebook page
- Using images, video and audio to enhance your home base
- Video: Blogging lessons learned from Becky and Sheila
Lesson 3: Intro to Outposts
- Twitter for tourism: why and how, and an introduction
- Twitter starter pack: ideas for two weeks of tweets
- Best ways to use Flickr photo sharing for tourism
- Best ways to draw visitors with YouTube and online video
- Other outpost services you can use to reach visitors
- Video: How the Lynchburg, Virginia CVB uses outpost sites
Lesson 4: Building your online champions network
- Where do you find your online champions?
- Building stronger online relationships
- Bringing online relationships offline
- Easy ways for your champions to help your destination marketing
- Video: Learning to navigate the blogosphere
- Video: Strategies for finding and pitching bloggers
Lesson 5: Promoting special events
- Building up to your event
- Social media promotion during events
- Keeping the buzz going afterward
- Video: Facebook promotion for a special event
- Video: Mobile tech for festivals
- Video: Using social media to crowdsource an event
Lesson 6: New ways to do tours
- Audio tours and programming
- Video tours and basic video techniques
- Easy ways to get mobile-friendly
- Connect the web with your personal tours
- Interview: Better blogger/PR relationships and press trips
We successfully taught the regular six lesson course from October 2009-March 2010. All the course materials are complete, and it has been tested by students who are active tourism professionals. Based on their feedback, we re-worked the course into these new, more flexible packages:
- the introductory workshop for $99
- the regular course, including the introductory workshop and both short courses for $490
- two short courses for $290 each
See the exact packages on The Details page.
How does an affiliate program work?
When you sign up, and you get a special link code. When you talk to your readers or customers, you send them to that link. The servers keep track of who sent which person. When someone who came through your link signs up with us, you earn the commission.
You can use the graphics, sample text and other media we’ve prepared. Those are all on the Affiliates Stuff page, which is where you land when you complete the sign-up process.
Questions?
If you have questions, please speak up! Email us directly or from the contact form. We are being a bit picky about selecting affiliates, so we want you to be sure that this is exactly the right thing for you and your audience.
Join us
The program is subject to these Terms and Conditions.
Please read them before signing up at the bottom of the page.
Tourism Currents Affiliate Program
Terms and Conditions
To be an authorized affiliate of the tourismcurrents.com website (Affiliate), you agree to abide by the terms and conditions contained in this Agreement. Please read this Agreement carefully before registering and promoting Tourism Currents as an Affiliate. By signing up for the Tourism Currents Affiliate Program (the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this Agreement and its terms and conditions.
1. Joining the Tourism Currents Affiliate Program
Your participation in the Program is solely intended to legally advertise the Tourism Currents membership and educational programs to receive a commission on memberships referred to Tourism Currents by your own website or personal recommendations via social networking or real life interaction.
2. Commissions
Commissions will be paid once a month, 3 weeks after the end of the month. Payments are made via PayPal. For an Affiliate to receive a commission, the referred account must make payment in full. You cannot refer yourself, and you will not receive a commission on your own accounts.
3. Revocation of Affiliate Status
Your affiliate application and status in the Program may be suspended or terminated for any of the following reasons:
* Inappropriate advertisements (false claims, misleading hyperlinks, etc.)
* Failure to disclose the affiliate relationship for any promotion that qualifies as an endorsement under existing Federal Trade Commission guidelines and regulations, or any applicable state laws.
* Spamming (mass email, mass newsgroup posting, etc.)
* Advertising on sites containing or promoting illegal activities
* Violation of intellectual property rights. At the current time, Tourism Currents does permit trademark bidding via PPC, and the use by affiliates of branded domain names. Tourism Currents reserves the right to require license agreements from those who employ trademarks of Tourism Currents in order to protect our intellectual property rights.
* Offering rebates, “coupons,” or other forms of kick-backs from your affiliate commission. Adding bonuses or bundling other products is acceptable.
Tourism Currents reserves the right to terminate any Affiliate account at any time, for any or no reason.
4. Affiliate Links
You may use graphic and text links both on your website and within in your email messages. You may also advertise the Tourism Currents site in online and offline classified ads, magazines, and newspapers. You may use the graphics and text provided to you by us, or you may create your own as long as they are deemed appropriate according to the conditions outlined in Condition 3.
5. Liability
Tourism Currents will not be liable for indirect or accidental damages (loss of revenue, commissions) due to affiliate tracking failures, loss of database files, and any results of intents of harm to the Program and/or to our website(s). We do not make any expressed or implied warranties with respect to the Program and/or the memberships or products sold by Tourism Currents. We make no claim that the operation of the Program and/or our website(s) will be error-free and we will not be liable for any interruptions or errors.
6. Term of the Agreement
The term of this Agreement begins upon your acceptance in the Program and will end when your Affiliate account is terminated. The terms and conditions of this agreement may be modified by us at any time. If any modification to the terms and conditions of this Agreement are unacceptable to you, your only choice is to terminate your Affiliate account. Your continuing participation in the Program will constitute your acceptance of any change.
7. Indemnification
Affiliate shall indemnify and hold harmless Tourism Currents and its joint operators, affiliate and subsidiary companies, officers, directors, employees, licensees, successors and assigns, including those licensed or authorized by Tourism Currents to transmit and distribute materials, from any and all liabilities, damages, fines, judgments, claims, costs, losses, and expenses (including reasonable legal fees and costs) arising out of or related to any and all claims sustained in connection with this Agreement due to the negligence, misrepresentation, failure to disclose, or intentional misconduct of Affiliate.
8. Governing Law, Jurisdiction, and Attorney Fees
This Agreement shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the United States and the State of Texas. Any dispute arising under or related in any way to this Agreement shall be adjudicated exclusively in the state courts located in Dallas County, Texas. In the event of litigation to enforce any provision of this Agreement, the prevailing party will be entitled to recover from the other party its costs and fees, including reasonable legal fees.
9. Electronic Signatures Effective
The Agreement is an electronic contract that sets out the legally binding terms of your participation in the Tourism Currents affiliate program. You indicate your acceptance of this Agreement and all of the terms and conditions contained or referenced in this Agreement by completing the E-junkie and/or Tourism Currents application process. This action creates an electronic signature that has the same legal force and effect as a handwritten signature.
