Course Overview

This course is built specifically for small town and rural tourism businesses in Canada—including accommodations, attractions, DMOs, tour operators, restaurants, and experience providers. Participants will learn how to use CHAT GPT for Small Businesses as a practical tool for content creation, marketing, customer communication, and search visibility—without needing technical or marketing expertise.

The course emphasizes real-world tourism applications, helping learners become confident content creators, emerging influencers, and smarter users of Search Engines in an AI-driven travel economy.

Course Takeaway

By the end of this course, participants will understand how to use CHAT GPT for Small Businesses as a powerful, practical tool—helping small town tourism operators become stronger content creators, more confident influencers, and more visible across modern Search Engines without losing their local voice.

Course Summary

Engagement is not about being everywhere or responding to everything. It is about knowing when a like matters, where a share actually helps, and how a comment can build real visibility and trust. This course strips away the myths around social media engagement and replaces them with clear, practical guidance designed for small businesses, tourism operators, and solo marketers.

Participants will learn how engagement really works across major platforms, how algorithms reward specific actions, and how to engage strategically in minutes a day, not hours. The result is better reach, stronger relationships, and less burnout.

Who This Course Is For

• Small business owners and operators
• Tourism businesses and DMOs
• Solo marketers and consultants
• Rural and regional organizations
• Anyone tired of “engage with everything” advice

No prior marketing experience required.

Course Outcomes

By the end of this course, learners will be able to:

• Understand how likes, shares, and comments affect visibility
• Identify which engagement actions actually matter by platform
• Engage with purpose instead of habit
• Build relationships without constant posting
• Create a simple, sustainable engagement routine

In a world full of endless posts, ads, and notifications, small business owners and solo operators need a smarter approach to social media. “Social Media Without the Noise” teaches you how to focus on what truly matters: the platforms your audience uses, the content that drives results, and strategies that save time while building trust.

This course offers a sustainable, stress-free approach, helping you post less, post better, and grow your business online without burning out. By the end, you’ll have a clear, practical plan to use social media effectively—without feeling overwhelmed by the noise.

DIY Branding for Small Budgets is a practical course designed for startups and micro-businesses that need to look credible without hiring an agency.

Branding doesn’t have to be expensive, complicated, or creative for creativity’s sake. In this course, you’ll learn how to build a clear, consistent brand using simple tools, smart decisions, and repeatable systems. The focus is on clarity over cleverness — because trust is built through consistency, not flashy design.

You’ll learn the core elements of branding that actually matter: defining a brand voice that sounds like you, choosing visuals that feel intentional, and applying your brand consistently across websites, social media, email, and everyday marketing materials. You’ll also learn which DIY design tools work well for small budgets — and how to use them without your brand looking homemade.

By the end of the course, you’ll have a simple brand foundation you can confidently apply yourself, saving time, money, and frustration. This course is ideal for business owners who want their brand to look professional, recognizable, and trustworthy — without overthinking it or outsourcing it.

The new world of AI searches GEO, AEO and SEO. Let’s look at how AI is affecting search engines and their results. But first, we need to look at the progression of search engines like Google over the years.

1. First it was all about organic results.
2. Then, to generate more revenues, they implemented sponsor ads which pushed organic results down the page
3. Now, they have added AI overviews to the top of the results.

With intense competition from AI, search engines are focusing on AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization). Let’s learn how we can take advantage of this new technology for marketing your business, your influencer brand, and/or your nonprofit.

Hashtags are no longer just social media decoration — they are digital signposts that help customers find, follow, and engage with your business. When used strategically, a branded hashtag can turn everyday posts into searchable conversations, amplify word-of-mouth marketing, and build a community around what you do.

In this course, you’ll learn why creating your own hashtag is a smart business move, not a trendy afterthought. We’ll break down how hashtags improve discoverability, support brand recognition, and encourage user-generated content that works for you long after a post is published.

Whether you’re a small business, destination, organization, or personal brand, this course will give you the clarity and confidence to create a hashtag that’s memorable, relevant, and effective — and show you how to use it consistently to grow visibility, engagement, and trust.

We have all done it. We published a story and then we have an afterthought or another idea. It is such a great idea you want to add it your story but you just published it. No worries you can edit it again. This course shares with you a few ways to access your content to add your additions.

What about when you start reading your story and something is just not sitting right with you? Hate it when that happens or do we. Maybe the information is a bit off, or you spotted a spelling error or you found a sentence which just does not fit properly. This is a good thing. Even we miss edits when proofing your stories and so your second set of eyes are always welcome. This lesson shares with you how you can access the editing tool.

The first thing to do when you are joining the Travel Talk Community as an Adventure Seeker, or as an Experience Community or as a small business is to create a personal travel profile.

• This is home base for everything you create;
• This is the page visitors will see when your content is shared on social media;
• This is your editing page for any of your content and business listings;
• This page provides access to all content tools.

Treat Your Profile Like A Website.

Your profile will be viewed hundreds of times a day and growing. Thousands of times a month. It is your go to page for everything about you. And once content is added it takes on the personality of you.

Once you start adding photo galleries, events, podcasts, videos and stories… your personal travel profile will start taking shape and reshaping as you continue to add content and participate in marketing your brand, your favourite hobbies, your small town and/or your small business, non profit or club.

This course outlines the steps and techniques to successfully add a park, trail, historic site, heritage building, lake, river, beach, etc to the parks and trails sections of a community and region on the Experience Community and EH Canada Travel Network.

Following the steps and guidelines will assist in your park or trail to position well on search engines and, therefore direct more travellers to your profile, and your website and social media buttons.

Below are 2 lessons including screen shots and an instructional video. Please leave a review and comment when completed the course.

Learn how to post a video to your personal travel profile and have it publish on the Travel Talk Community and throughout the website. Follow the techniques and tips, so your video performs on search engines and social media. Below are the easy steps to posting online on the eh Canada Travel website and for sharing on social media effectively.

There are many ways to share photo galleries, videos, events and stories throughout the eh Canada Travel network. Acting as a group, and viewed as one, we have an opportunity to vastly improve engagement rates. And engagement with your content is an important factor determining how well your content and Travel Profile do on the internet, search engines and social media. Use our systems, tools and techniques and engagement rates will improve.

“You can buy attention (advertising). You can beg for attention from the media (PR). You can bug people one at a time to get attention (sales). Or you can earn attention by creating something interesting and valuable and then publishing it online for free.”

by David Meerman Scott, author and business growth strategist

In this course tourism businesses, Canada Adventure Seekers and community bloggers learn the various methods used to share their published content so more can see it – so to achieve higher engagement rates which promote and position their content at a higher level on the internet.

Learn how to set up your personal profile with email and system alerts so you can by notified when other interact or engage with your content.

To answer that question, one should do a lot of research to see which platform their travellers are most using and why? Once that is answered then one needs to find out what do they like to see on those platforms? When do they log on to use those platforms? How many times a day? There are so many questions because each social media platform is different in some way or another?

One thing is for certain, do not try to do them all, because that just leads to doing none of them right. Do your research and then learn about your target market and their needs. Learn to post. And more importantly what to do after you post.

There are hundreds of social media platforms today – Facebook, Whats App, QQ, We Chat, Tumblr, Snap Chat, Instagram, Twitter, Tik Tok, You Tube, Viber, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Reddit, FourSquare, Badoo, My Space, Flickr, and hundreds more. Select wisely!

One of the quickest ways to add content to your personal travel profile and other live feeds throughout the Canada website and its community, provincial and territorial sections is by adding a “Media Blast”. A “Media Blast” is very similar to adding a post to a personal social media page.

Quality posts which follow the techniques below have a good opportunity of being featured and receiving additional marketing by being published on the eh Canada and/or community social media pages, groups and other marketing platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Redditt and more.

How to increase Facebook likes and followers is a frequent question asked by many who are building their tourism business online.

Below we have created a lesson which reviews some of the tested and proven techniques, used by us and others, to assist tourism ventures, small businesses, and non profits in increasing your likes and followers on Facebook.

Many of the following techniques can be applied to other types of social media platforms.

Here is short video and checklist on how to create an effective photo gallery using our proven authentic content tools and techniques. Creating photo galleries on our system will resonate with travellers on our Travel Talk Community, our award winning national adventure travel website, and on our social media channels. as well as image searches on search engines like Google, Bing and Firefox.

When using our techniques and tools one can create effective photo galleries.

One of the most neglected techniques of content marketing by content marketers are preparing their content for image searches. Considering the high numbers which use image searches online, it is very surprising.

Here we want every bit of your content to compliment each other. In doing so photos should also be prepared for search engines just as much as any other content.

In this course there is a checklist for creating good quality photo content using our tools and systems.

The tone of your writing voice and how you phrase sentences and format paragraphs and their titles has a lot to do with how search engines publish your content. The writing style to use is called a “Passive Voice”. And to many this writing technique goes against traditional writing styles.

In other words, when using a passive writing style the subject of the sentence is acted on by the verb. The most important thing or person in the sentence becomes the subject of the sentence. Below we have outlined why writing in a “Passive Voice” is one of the essential tools to learn.

Writing for online is a very different world than writing for a newspaper, or writing a book or term paper. How you write your content means the world to search engines. And at this point in time, when it comes to their algorithms, writing with transition words is the key.

At first it feels awkward and maybe even uncomfortable. However, for your content to be successful one must learn to embrace transition words in their writing style. We have compiled a list of transition words to assist you in implementing them into your content.

Content Marketing when storytelling and blogging is the most effective type of online marketing using our systems. Information pages, blogs and stories can have a search engine shelf life of 2-3 years on the first page of Google, Bing and Firefox when properly formatted, written and applying our techniques. However, be reminded there are many factors which impact the longevity of content including the back-end code. No worries. Our systems got you covered there as well.

Marketing content is a skill. Every little step taken when creating your content affects how it will perform on search engines and on our platforms. Experts indicate there are over 200+ factors taken into consideration when search engines are positioning your content. We share with you a checklist addressing the many techniques for success. Try to check off as many as possible is the secret to success.

Linking to high quality pages which relates to your topic are like asking a friend or family member for advice. Why do you ask them for advice? Because they are trustworthy, reliable, and have some sort of history in the topic of discussion.

Think of inbound and outbound links as votes of quality and authentic information. Quality relatable links provides your story credibility. The more votes the better the ranking on search engines.

Bottom Line

Inbound and outbound links improve your search engine rankings. The links you add to your story can assist search engines in determining the authenticity, and quality of your pages. High-quality pages usually will link to other high-quality pages. The algorithms of search engines will look at your story and information page in very high regards helping you rank higher.

Hashtags are generally misused and misunderstood. And yet, hashtags are such a powerful tool for reaching new audiences and for building a brand on social media.

Therefore, many influencers agree, when hashtags are properly researched and applied to a social media post, they are a very effective and an efficient tool for increasing your visibility on social media.

This course is an introduction on how to get started, as well as, a detailed accounting of how to use the features, and tools on the eh Canada Travel and Experience Community platforms. The course provides an introduction to the various components of the award-winning program and a series of detailed step-by-step instructions and tips on how to use the many content marketing and social media tools that comes with membership.

The course includes:

• How do I log in?
• What is the Canada Travel Talk Community?
• How do I build my Travel Profile?
• What tools for content marketing are on my Travel Profile?
• How do I post to the scrolling live Travel Talk Community feed (Media Blast)?
• How do I create an Adventure Story (Blog)?
• How do I create a Photo Gallery?
• How do I create an Event?