Search Engine Submission
When you launch your website you will want to submit your home page url to the major search engines. I highly recommend that you manually submit your home page url to both Google, Yahoo and Bing as they are the #1, #2, #3 search engines.
I always use Submit Express as well which is a free service.
2nd Tier Search Engines include:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is the process of making your web pages and the content on the pages valuable enough for the search engines to index. The idea is that the more relevant your web pages are to consumers the higher up in the search results your business will list. Whatever online travel business software you use to run your web site you want to make sure that the web pages you create in your software system are automatically optimized for the search engines. When you launch a new website it normally takes 3-4 months before you can start to see your website appearing in the top search results for your travel products.
I've been using Linkdex lately with one of my clients and it helps with search engine optimization. Rather than try to learn how to do this yourself I suggest you hire an outsourcer on elance or odesk to do the work for you.
Rack Cards, Brochures distributed at State Tourism Information Centers
I've written extensively about how to market your travel business by distributing rack cards at tourism information centers. This is a fairly inexpensive to moderately expensive advertising route to promote your business and drive traffic back to your website and Blog.
Please see the Resource Library for my article on Rack Card strategies.
- Create rack card campaigns for tourist seasons.
Online Advertising Cost Per Action/Acquisition (CPA)
Cost per action or acquisition is a moderately expensive strategy to acquire email addresses, new clients and sales. CPA advertising is a form of advertising where you only pay when you get something in return. For example if someone clicks on an advertisement and goes to your website and enters their email address into one of your forms, you only pay the advertiser when you receive an email address. Another version is when you make a sale at your website that was referred by an advertiser or an advertisers website. You only pay the advertiser if a sale has been made at your website. The former opportunity exists heavily online in what they call co-regs or co-registration companies. These are websites that host your information and email form and get people to opt-in to your form that then automatically sends you the persons email address. If you have seen the free survey websites or the websites that offer you gifts in return for filling out personal information about yourself, well these are what thy call co-registration or co-reg websites. Costs generally range from $0.25 per email lead on the low end to $3.00 on the high end for a more highly qualified contact.
Caution: You can build your email list very quickly in using these types of companies but be careful as this industry is ripe with scammers and there is a tendency to receive really low quality email and contact leads. That said the Co-Reg industry is expanding and I believe there is much opportunity here but you just have to do your research and due diligence to find the right partner.
Co-registration or Co-regs:
//www.coregmedia.com/coregistration.php
CPA and Affiliate Marketers
There are only a few true CPA companies and CPA networks that are active in the travel industry and I am not sure why there are not more. I have listed a few below.
//www.travelaffiliates.org/index.html
//www.affiliateranker.com/directory/Travel/
//www.associateprograms.com/directory/sport-andrecreation/travel/
The Piggy Back Advertising Strategy
This little strategy is one of the best strategies to use where you can leverage potential travel and tourism partners websites and or websites that are not indirectly competitive with your site. You advertise on travel websites checkout pages, confirmation pages and email confirmation pages. If you have an affiliate program all you have to do is provide the website with a banner ad, text and an affiliate link and any business that they drive to your website they will get credit for.
Watch the Piggy Back Advertising Strategy Video to learn more.