Travel here. Travel there. With so many locations worldwide, how does one even begin to choose where to take a vacation?

You may watch a movie and decide that is where you would like to go. Or you may read a book.

The vacation bug hits all of us on a monthly basis. Our vacation fund slowly grows, our calendar begins to fill up with potential dates for the vacation, and our anticipation grows in unison. But where does the planning begin and end?

The Internet.

I remember back when I planned vacations in college, I visited the three major hotel reservation websites. Or atleast what I thought to be the major three websites. I began to realize that they all had the same exact pricing. At first this was a coincidence, but then I began to realize that they always had the same rates. This was later confirmed when I first opened up this website five years ago. I signed up for an affiliate program to allow myself to offer hotel reservations. Low and behold, my pricing was identical to those three as well. I started to realize that the reason all of these websites could offer the “lowest” rate is because they all did infact have the lowest rate.

So, I began my quest to archive the Internet’s plethora of traveling resources and bring the most valuable to my website.

I paid $10,000 dollars to have a website integrated with a database feed from an affiliate network, and I was off to the races. My approach was simple, I will provide a reservation system that is user friendly AND search engine friendly. Back when I first started this site, nobody knew anything about search engine optimization.

It was a quick success. I was able to rank for deep linking terms within the first two months. Terms such as, “bear lodge accomodations in chicago illinois” became my bread and butter. The volume for that particular keyword was small, but when you have visits for keywords such as that for 1,000 different keywords, it begins to add up. Unfortunately the website became boring to me. It was simply a gathering of 5,000 hotels from all around the world. In all reality, there was no true value there. I was just another kid on the block, and unfortunately, no longer the new kid so all of the buzz created when I launched the site had faded.

Fast forward to five years later and I was able to reclaim my passion for traveling. This time around I have the experience and capability to build and archive one of the greatest traveling resources on the Internet.

My goal with the website TravelingNetwork.com is to build a traveling resource with over 1,000,000 database records by the end of 2009. Currently I have aproximately 70,000 hotels worldwide, and 30,000 are within the united states. I also have over 50,000 points of interest. These include restaurants, entertainment, shopping & retail, night life, bar & grills, and general interest locations.

With this blog I intend to put these resources into context and outline some functionality of the website that will help organize this massive amount of content into a usable format. I also plan to use this blog to channel my knowledge to my readers about which travel websites have a service that is valuable and which ones to ignore.

In the end, my mission is to help my readers find a vacation that fits their desires. I will do this by creating more vacation options for my readers while teaching them to optimize their vacation research.

There is no reason why every vacation can’t be a dream vacation.

By subscribing to my blog, you will pay less, and do more. Say it for me, “Pay less, and do more.”

If that is your motto, pay less, and do more, than you have come to the right place.

-Mr. Travel