Welcome back to our Yangshuo News  E-zine. The last weeks we have been working very hard on a revamping of our Yangshuo Travel Guide and we think it looks much better then before.

We also found a very new and very promising website which is very useful for foreigners visiting China. As usual we would love to hear your stories and comments, so feel fee to ad your Yangshuo adventures on

http://www.yangshuo-travel-guide.com/yangshuo-travel-stories.html#You

What do we have in this edition of our newsletter?

• Yangshuo Tours
• New Yangshuo stories
• Advertisement: Timeshare
• Yangshuo/Xingping maps
• Food in Yangshuo
• Advertise on Yangshuo Travel Guide.com
• Build a website like Yangshuo Travel Guide
• Mayan-riviera-family-vacations website
• Puzzles about Yangshuo
• My first time in Yangshuo

PS Let me know what you like and what you don't like. All comments are welcome. Click here to write your comment: http://www.yangshuo-travel-guide.com/ask-me.html

You can read latest updates in my Blog:
http://www.yangshuo-travel-guide.com/yangshuo-travel-guide-blog.html or :

Let others know about this site by bookmarking at your favorite social bookmarking system:

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Yangshuo Tours
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We have still space for the summer holidays, so book your tour NOW:

http://www.yangshuo-travel-guide.com/yangshuo-tour.html

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New Yangshuo stories
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Sofie Ivan, Christae, Peter Ivan. Malthios, Malli and Bert Ivan did a 4 day tour with Jessie, here's their comments:

http://www.yangshuo-travel-guide.com/exploring-yangshuo-with-jessie.html

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Timeshare

Timeshares afford vacationers the opportunity to visit their favorite vacation destination year after year without struggling to find appropriate accommodations. Because they offer pre-paid, week long accommodation, timeshares relieve much of the hassle of seeking out clean, comfortable hotels or motels and securing daily accommodation. Renting day-to-day space at a hotel can often prove quite costly. Owning vacation property in your favorite destination, like Yangshuo and Guilin, offers a great alternative that can be very cost-effective.  Doesn't this sound great? Come on in and read more here:

http://www.yangshuo-travel-guide.com/timeshare.html

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Yangshuo/Xingping Maps
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Never leave the house (at least for a journey) without a map. Some call me a map freak because wherever I go I try to find maps. Some are good, some are not. The ones we have available through our website are very useful for Yangshuo county.

http://www.yangshuo-travel-guide.com/map-of-yangshuo.html

http://www.yangshuo-travel-guide.com/map-of-xingping.html

Maps are so useful, and we westerners have the idea only in the west decent maps can be produced. True, some local maps I saw were quite rubbish but the Chinese provincial maps are extraordinary quality. The set back, in some ways of course, is that they are in Chinese. So I used Chinese and western produced maps next to each other because the Chinese maps were usually much more accurate. However, if you don't have a map, check out store and purchase it from there:

http://www.yangshuo-travel-guide.com/yangshuo-books.html

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Food in Yangshuo
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In the early days when traveling in China was hard and western food was almost impossible to get, Lijiang, Dali and Yangshuo were places where you would find bread, coffee and pizza's (originally baked on pancakes!). Those days are long over. Nowadays you can have any kind of food in Yangshuo. From real Italian pizza's to Mexican food.  But why going to China to eat pizza? You can get pizza or Mexican food almost anywhere!

Cloud 9 is a typical Chinese restaurant with some amazing dishes. Beerfish is a local specialty and so is Kou Rou. There are few other places then Yangshuo where you can have these dishes, so skip the pizza and come to Cloud 9 and try Beerfish or Kou Rou.

In case you want to make it yourself, try:

http://www.yangshuo-travel-guide.com/food-in-yangshuo.html

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Advertise on Yangshuo Travel Guide.com
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Advertising can be expensive. Our Yangshuo website gives you now the option to advertise for a very reasonable price.  You have different choices how to advertise. You can even advertise in this newsletter! We would like to do business with Yangshuo, Guilin, China businesses or related to the travel business in general. Read more here:

http://www.yangshuo-travel-guide.com/advertise.html

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Build a website like Yangshuo Travel Guide
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To be honest with you, I see plenty of websites that potentially look interesting and then you browse further and...then you find hardly any content. Why is that? Do these webmaster think you, the reader is not further interested? How about photos? I have a friend who is very visual orientated. He always says a photo (or video) says more then 1000 words. And of course he is right. So his website is jam-packed with photos alone! But once you have seen the photos, would you go back? Especially if they load slow? If photos is what you need, use Flickr or any other photo page service.

We at Yangshuo Travel Guide believe a good mix of photos and content makes the reader coming back. Photos illustrate the text. But how do you bring people to your site? Wait until Google has the desire to list and index your website? Keep waiting. Unless you tell Google or any other Search Engine, your website exists, they will not (or by accident) come around.

So we started looking how to solve that problem. However, we are not very interested in all kinds of techs. All we want is write and tell stories and have a system that does the rest. Obviously free websites were not an option. So we checked hosting. But whatever we looked, it seemed to be a problem of more tech until we found a system that seemed to take the tech out of our hands.

The system was based on writing content and let them do the tech in the background. We were unsure but we found a results page of other websites build with this system that looked pretty cool:

http://results.sitesell.com/webselling64290.html

But results are nice, I needed some more proof and found it:

http://proof.sitesell.com/webselling64290.html

Now I am not an html writer so I need to work as simple as possible. This system provided and showed quickly results.

Now, more then a year after we started, we have reworked and revamped the Yangshuo Travel Guide and we are working on adding more content based on the concept of this system: CTPM.

CTPM? Yes, it stands for Content - Traffic - Pre-sell - Monetizing

And it works!

We have a whole page about how this process exactly works, feel free to read it:

http://www.yangshuo-travel-guide.com/complete_site_build_it.html

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Mayan riviera family vacations website
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Now we talk about Sitesell build websites, take a look at this one. You may feel tempted to visit because of the quality content and photos. In fact the owner, Mrs. Dianna, shows exactly how the above mentioned CTPM process works well for her too. But hey, this is all about a holiday in Mexico. Maybe a good choice in December when Yangshuo is cold and miserable (though Christmas in Yangshuo can be really good fun:)

http://www.mayan-riviera-family-vacations.com/

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Puzzles about Yangshuo
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For those of you who love jigsaw puzzles, here are a few challenges:

http://www.yangshuo-travel-guide.com/yangshuo-puzzles.html

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My first time in Yangshuo
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For everything there is a first time. My first time in Yangshuo was (if I remember it well) in 1996. At that time, West Street was not even paved. I stayed at the time on the main road in a wooden hotel. At the time you were officially not allowed even to visit Baisha though on a bicycle it was not hard to go there and no one stopped you. There were already plenty of local guides and because there were no maps, those guides were very useful.

I wrote a whole story about my first visit in Yangshuo (including a hilarious night in Guilin):

http://www.yangshuo-travel-guide.com/yangshuo.html

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