Become a Home Based Travel Agent

30 Tips to Drive Traffic to Your Website
By: Tom Ogg

I talk with many agents that ask how they can develop more traffic to their websites, so I thought I would throw out a few ideas on ways that will work to create a steady flow of new potential clients. This list is intended to spark ideas that will work for you and each idea will need to be developed further by you before you implement it. Here are 26 ways to develop more traffic both online and offline.

Online Promotions

1. Learn as much as you can about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and practice it every time you publish a page on the Internet.

2. Run a PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising campaign with Google, Yahoo or another PPC vehicle.

3. Launch a sweepstakes that offers anyone who subscribes to your travel e-newsletter within a certain time frame the chance to win a free gift.

4. Send out a weekly e-mail newsletter that offers tips and news related to your travel niche with links back to specific pages within your site.

5. Offer free travel articles to other travel websites. The other site gets free articles to increase their content and you get a link back to your site and the prestige of being an expert within your niche. There are several sites that specialize in making travel articles available to publishers on the Internet. Sites such as ezinearticles.com, TravelArticleLibrary.com, TravelArticlesExpress.com and articles.getacoder.com are just some examples.

6. Submit cruise and port reviews for cruises you have taken and ports that you have visited to www.eCruiseReviews.com and www.ePortReviews.com and be sure to include your URL, as well as your email address. Readers will contact you for more information.

7. Send a well-planned, customer-focused e-mail promotion to a targeted list of your clients. Spend time on your e-mail's look and content: You want to offer value to customers and not have it appear to be spam.

8. Create your own link exchange by asking sites complementary to yours (but that don't compete) to put your link on their pages and you'll do likewise.

9. Start an affiliate program and develop hundreds of sites that all link their traffic to yours and get visitors from sites with related content.

10. Take every specialty designation course offered to travel agents and include your URL as the primary contact for your referrals from their site. You can find an extensive list of these courses at www.HomeBasedTravelAgent.com.

11. Get active in online social networks, discussion groups and chats and always include your URL in your signature. (Don't do any soliciting though. Most groups frown on such behavior and will think you're spamming the group.)

12. Use an auto-responder with your e-mail that includes your URL.

13. Motivate your visitors to spread the word about your site, include an "e-mail a friend" link on every page of your site.

14. Try creating an online survey to get visitor’s opinions on what information they would like to see added to your site.

15. Include your own community building venues on your site such as bulletin boards or social media.

16. Launch a “Name This Port” or “Name This Place” monthly contest. Publish a picture of a port or destination and have your visitors try to identify where it is. Award them with a baseball cap, tee shirt (or some other advertising specialty) with you logo and URL on it.

17. Use travel video that you have taken to upload short keyword snippets to YouTube.com and include your URL in the video.

18. Create and offer an e-book on your niche that folks can download for free after they register for your newsletter and build it so that it can only be read online (Adobe Acrobat offers this feature) Include links throughout the book referencing pages within your website.

19. Use other selling venues like online classified advertising or online auction sites to increase exposure to your site and products.

Offline Promotions

20.  Always put your URL on your stationery, business cards and in e-mail signatures and wherever potential visitors are likely to see it.

21. Consider putting your embroidered logo and URL on your shirts, baseball caps and other clothing items so that you become walking billboard for your site. I always wear my eCruiseReviews.com baseball cap while I am on cruises and it Consistently drives traffic after the cruise to my review site.

22. Include your URL on advertising specialty items that you give away, such as coffee mugs, T-shirts, key chains and so on.

23. Use 4-color “contact” stickers in brochures that you make available to clients and be sure that your URL is prominently displayed on the each brochure cover.

24. Don't forget to put your web address in your Yellow Pages advertisement. That's one place people see it every day.

25. Enter into a P.R. campaign by issuing press releases you send out to the media and always include your website info in your contact information

26. Consider using your vehicle as advertising media by making it a billboard for your site. At the very least, include a sign on each side and rear of your automobile.

27. Make your URL your business name. As an example, eCruiseReviews.com pretty much says it all.

28. List your URL business name with Google’s local business listings.

29. Open a CafePress.com storefront using your logo and URL to design products within your niche. When folks purchase the item, they become a walking advertisement for you.

30. Write travel articles for your local newspapers and include your URL in your contact information. Use an article writing service such as ArticleGhostWriter.com, Articlebot.com and Instantarticlewizardpro.com.