1° Analyze your customers

Firstly You'll need to target a specific niche. This could be based on a specific activity (that is Trekking in Nepal) or on a specific location (that is Adventure Travels in Italy). Learning your target market will let You save time and provide the right service.

I recommend: Before start build a website You'll need to understand what your clients want and the trend of your target market.

To understand your clients You'll need to know:

• Their preferred Activities
• Their preferred Destination
• How do They use to choose a travel package
• How do They use the web to find info
• Where They use to find info

To understand Your market you'll need to know:

• Is the market growing? Is it static? Or is it decreasing?
• How many clients each month search on the net about my services

After reading some sources You'll be able to trace a behavioral and demographic profile of Your customer type.

Take as example the date from a recent survey:

According to http://www.adventuretravel.biz Women travelling solo comprise most of adventure travelers worldwide; People that choose to practice outdoor adventure activities have an average age 45-60 years: Have a high-level of instruction (College, Hold professionals, Specialty)

They prefer no package tours or Fancy resorts but unusual activities based on local experiences.

The most practiced adventure activities are:

• Hiking
• Bicycling
• Animal watching
• Ecotourism
• Cultural Tours

Useful tool to use:

• Keyword research tool like Wordtracker or Google Adwords give a good opportunity to estimate demand and understand common customers behaviors
• Google Trends is a good way to see the trend of a specific keyword
• Quintura is a great tool to help you find related market and try to attract your customer from a different point of view
• News aggregators like addictomatic are a helpful tool to see what's hot in your industry
• Copyblogger has a real-time guide about how to use keyword research to plan your business

2° Analyze the competition

The end of the phase 1 ends with a list of 10-20 keywords you'd like to use in your website. The phase 2 is to verify the competition you'll find when your website will be on-line.

I recommend: Try to type your keywords in Google and verify for the first five website you'll find:

• How many years are they on-line?
• What's their advertising effort?
• How many links do They have?
• For what keywords do they rank for?

This could be a long process so here some tools that could help you:

• Seo for Firefox (Firefox is a common web browser similar to internet explorer you can download here) is a tool that gives you real-time results directly in the search results
• Link Diagnosis is a tool that will give You the opportunity to see what are the links that point to your competitors website. More links from authority and travel related sources mean more power and ranking in the top places of Google results.
• Compete is a good service that gives you the opportunity to see which keywords send commercial traffic to your competitors.

3° Learn seo, blogging and marketing

Now You have a good knowledge of what's your target market and what's your competition. The next step is to learn the basic principles of Marketing and how to optimize your website.

I recommend: 

• Work Guide to learn what's seo
• Here You can learn the basic principle of Marketing
• Link Bait is the art to develop contents that attract links naturally. This could a great article about your destinations, share travel tips, worst hotels where sleep, a Google map with pictures and attractions, be the first to share a news, and so on...
• Here a simple article to learn the basic principles behind viral marketing
• Shoemoney gives good tips to understand what's blogging

You can also learn and follow some adventure travel blogs to read what they write, how people react to their posts and what ideas spread better.

Here some example of good adventure blogs:

• http://www.tripadventure.org/blog/
• http://theadventureblog.blogspot.com/
• http://belizevacation.blogspot.com/
• http://www.adventurelogue.com/

4° Plan and organize your time and resources

The next step consist on building a time plan (generally on 3 months).

I recommend: Plan To:

• Contents to write for your website
• A good design, logo and pay off (show your message and unique purpose). Read this book to learn how to organize your website.
• Find a dozen of link sources to link to your site
• Join communities like forums, blogs and social bookmarking sites

Don't be in a hurry and consider that your website will need a good authority and 2-3 months to start seeing your first traffic form search engines.

Include in the plan tracking results. You can use a good analytics software like Google analytics.

You can track your daily traffics, where traffic come from, what's your best contents and see how visitors see your site to improve it.

5° Website Promotion

The most common ways to start create buzz and on-line traffic is to focus on Public Relations and Bloggers.

I recommend: These 2 means have much power because can give the opportunity to get Google rankings indirectly (More buzz = more links = better rankings).

How to find the best bloggers on-line:

The best way is to use directly the search engine focused on blogs:

• Google Blog Search
• Ice Rocket
• Blog Lines
• Technorati
• Blog Pulse
• WordPress

Just type in your preferred keyword and search for the best blogs in the results.

You can also browse by top community influential’s in social bookmarking sites like Digg, Del.icio.us or Newsvine.

The most know on-line press releases services are Prweb.com and Businesswire.com.

Be careful. Not all stories spreads well. You’ll need to learn how to write a good Press Release. Journalist are seeking for new stories and not fluffy advertising driven articles.

The best way is to track what are the most popular stories that are syndicated by bloggers, newsreaders or magazines.

Good examples are:

• http://www.atmagazine.co.uk/
• http://adventure.nationalgeographic.com/
• http://www.highonadventure.com/
• http://www.outpostmagazine.com/