Email marketing
I am a large proponent of email marketing. One of the first things you want to do is open an email marketing account with one of the many online email providers. MailChimp has a free service that lets you store up to 2,000 email addresses and enables you to send a total of 12,000 per month for free. This is probably the best route to get started with email marketing without spending any money. Other companies I like are Constant Contact and aWeber (which is the company I use for my consulting email lists).
Email Marketing Strategies
Email marketing is the most efficient and high return on investment you'll get in any marketing or advertising you do online. My best advice to you is to map out a plan ahead of time in how you'll use email marketing as a strategy to acquire your first 100 booking/reservations.
If you follow Groupon, Living Social and the new private sale, flash sale travel websites like Jetsetter, and Living Social Escapes you'll see how they use email marketing as the delivery vehicle of the travel product offer. You can replicate their model and send out 1 email every week to your list highlighting your travel product. Be creative and find ways to excite your email list about your business your travel products and for that matter you yourself.
Facebook Fan Page
Creating a Facebook Fan page for your travel business is free to very inexpensive. You want to collect email addresses at your Facebook fan page or enable prospects to become fans of your new travel business. You can use FanPageEngine to help you build your fan page and build your subscribers and fans. When you choose a fan page in the beginning think about choosing the "Writer" tab vs. a company tab as the layout and format of the writer vtab is better and less commercial looking.
Facebook Fan Strategies
As much as you can try to limit the commercialization look and feel of the fan page. Facebooker's are getting smart and when they see sales they turn and burn. I know this is difficult but this is a fact.
Favorite Fan Pages: - in the upper left corner you can add your Favorite fan pages. List all your competitors here. Why you do this is because people that visit your competitors Fan pages, will see thatyour fan page is a fan and this will help drive your competitors traffic to your web site. It's like piggy backing onto of your competitors traffic.
Post Video and Not Text
1x a week post a video about your travel business or your travel products. Have some fun here and make it entertaining if you can. Make videos 30 seconds-to-45 seconds long, keep it short. Your videos will get like 10x the viewing than your text posts get. Videos are more fun, people consume them and share them.
Video Tagging
Tag your videos with 50 of your Facebook fans. You are allowed to tag up to 50 fans in each video you upload. When you tag a fan in your videos it automatically gets posted to their wall, which then gets posted to all of their friends walls, so you can create like 50,000 impressions for your video in like 5 minutes. This technique is one of the most powerful techniques I've seen in Facebook.
Blog
One of the easiest ways to gain free website traffic to your travel business website is through a Blog. Get yourself a Wordpress blog. I believe that Google loves these the most and you can gain really great search engine rankings for your Blog.
Blog Strategies
A simple strategy to get started is too simply write one really long Blog post. Make your Blog an "Auto-Stamped" Blog so that when people come to the Blog post it displays today's date and it looks like your real long Blog post was written today. Talk about your travel products in the Blog Post and have links that go directly from the Blog to your travel businesses web site.
A second strategy is to link your Facebook Fan page to your Blog. People love reading and soft selling so send Facebook fans to your Blog first and then from there they can find their way to your website.
Facebook Fan Page Contests, Sweepstakes
A really inexpensive way to build your email list is by having a contest or sweepstakes. If you can drive people to your Facebook fan page you ask people to enter a contest or sweepstakes. You'll need a prize or giveaway so utilize your resources here and see if there is anything you have access to that is of value that you can use. The following Facebook Fan Page Apps can help you automate your contest and sweepstakes. I've listed a few here: