How to Market Your New Travel Website Online

If you think building your new travel website was the hard part of starting your website, you're sadly mistaken. Building the travel website was the easy part, trying to get web traffic is the hard part. You can't simply through a webpage up and expect people to magically appear and start booking flights. You need to let the world wide web know you're online.

Spend some time doing some hard copy marketing for your new travel website. Send out post cards announcing your new website. Print your website address on your business card. Once you have exhausted your options for print marketing, it's time to move on to marketing your new travel website online.

There is a plethora of ways to promote your website for free online. These methods will help you gain traffic, page views, and hopefully repeat visitors, the heart and sole of any good travel website.

The more time you spend marketing your travel website online the better. This is where your website visitors will really come from. Sure, you can get hits and visitors from pay-pay- per-click and ads, but the majority of your travel website visitors will come from good search engine optimization and a great marketing campaign.

Marketing Your Travel Website - RSS and News Feeds

As more and more people start gathering their news online, more websites are offering RSS feeds for their website. This way, visitors can stay up-to-date with the news from the website without having to sign up for a newsletter.

As good of a marketing tool as news letters can be, not everyone likes them. Many web visitors just don't feel like adding another newsletter to their email box.

RSS feeds require very basic html skills to setup and can be an invaluable tool. If you are unsure how to setup a RSS feed for your site, you can first try asking your webmaster to setup one up. It is an exceedingly simple task that they may even do for free. Once it is setup, all you have to do is periodically update it with new travel content from your website.

Once you have created an RSS feed your visitors will be able to kept up to speed on your travel websites latest travel deals, articles, and more.

You can create individual RSS feeds for various areas of your travel website. You could have one RSS feed for travel deals, business travel, family vacations, etc. The ideas are limitless.

Marketing Your Travel Website - Networking Sites

With popularity of MySpace came a slue of new networking sites such as Beboo, Friendster, and more. Some of these website were around long before the MySpace giant, but got little attention before it.

Now, these networking sites are a great way to build up a database of your target market. These website are great for your travel website because you can build up a friends list of other people who have shown an interest in traveling.

Once you have a large list of friends who are interested in travel, you can start marketing your website through your profile page. You can use your profile page to share information about your website, make blog posts, send out emails, and share travel deals.

While these networking sites can be a great way to promote your travel website, you don't want to go overboard. Your "friends" will easy see though your spam marketing and drop you like a bad habit. Use these websites as a way to build up personal relationships with visitors. The hits to your website will come in due time. You would be surprised out how much interest you can draw up just by commenting on peoples profiles, pictures, and blog entries.

Marketing Your Travel Website - Forums

Message boards and forums are also a great way to build up interest in your new travel website. They require little to no work to setup, but can provide much of the same effects of networking sites.

Becoming a regular in travel related forums will help generate interest in your travel website. Once people come to recognize you in the forums as a regular, you may even get branded a travel expert. Spend some time making helpful suggestions to post and not just one liners so that you can add your link.