How to Increase Traffic to your Travel Site (15 Easy Ways)

Getting traffic to a travel website can be pretty easy if you know where to go. When I first started working in digital marketing for travel websites, I had absolutely no idea. It took me years of learning, errors, and testing to know what I do now.

I used all kinds of methods that were a waste of my time.

The only way I used to get traffic, was from Google, Email, and Facebook – back when SEO was pretty easy and Facebook pages still had some reach. 😛

Every time I thought I had a platform waxed, it changed… And I was always worried that some or other Google beast was going to be a dickhead.

Over the years I’ve had to look through every nook and cranny on the internet to get traffic to my travel sites and clients, and I’m glad I did.

Now if I want to bring a couple of thousand visitors to a website, all it takes is a link or share in the right place. There are few things as satisfying as seeing a huge influx of visitors coming to your site because of something you did.

There is a winning formula for acquiring this traffic, as every platform has its strengths, weaknesses, and use… Every platform performs differently, but I’ve narrowed it down to the top places that you can get traffic for your travel website. 

The most important takeaway from this article is that you need to build a community and a network of people who support and follow your online escapades.

The best way to do this is to get involved in travel Facebook groups and build a following on some of the platforms mentioned below…

15 Places to Increase Traffic to your Website

1. Reddit
2. Facebook
3. Twitter
4. Flipboard
5. Stumbleupon
6. Pinterest
7. Quora
8. YouTube
9. Guest posting
10. Forums
11. Influencers
12. Instagram
13. Medium
14. LinkedIn
15. SEO

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Places to get Free Traffic to your Website

The first place I turn to for some travel traffic is….

Reddit

Reddit is the front page of the internet so it makes sense to be the first place to try and get some traffic. 😀

Often someone will pick it up and share it somewhere else, like Facebook, Twitter, or even LinkedIn.

If it’s a REALLY amazing piece of content, you could even get noticed by a journalist.

Here are a collection of subreddits where you can post your content.

Facebook

Sharing on your Facebook page is a must, but how many of you share it on your profile? I bet not that much.

Your friends and family are some of your biggest supporters, so when I write something that might resonate with my direct friends, so I share it on my Facebook profile… It has also slowly amassed a decent amount of travel and marketing related professionals so I know some people will probably enjoy any travel or marketing-related content that I share.

Facebook Groups

Facebook groups for me are a goldmine, especially if you’ve optimized your feed. There are thousands of groups for you to share your content; some of them being really effective, some of them not.

Pro Tip: don’t share your content straight off, share your blog links in comments, so much more effective and not as spammy.

Twitter

It’s important that you grow your Twitter account, but don’t expect to get massive amounts of traffic from Twitter. It’s one of those platforms that you have to push and try pretty hard, but you can get some really decent traffic from it if you use the right hashtags, have a great tweet, or just plain get lucky.

To increase those odds of getting lucky, and because Twitter is somewhat sporadic and unpredictable, it’s a good idea to put it in a scheduler to tweet it every month or 2.

Flipboard

Flipboard is a platform that shows blogs or articles as a magazine where you turn the pages. It’s fairly underutilized but a good way to get people to your website.

I’ve never been really good at getting thousands of people to my website from it, but my friend Jo does. She’s received massive amounts of traffic from Flipboard that has benefited her site in many ways. 🙂

Stumbleupon

I like Stumbleupon because if you create something that is really awesome it can bring traffic for a looooong time! The lifetime of a share or link is so much longer than the traffic sources mentioned above.

Pinterest

Pinterest is one of the BEST platforms for generating traffic. Some travel websites and bloggers get more than 50% of their traffic from Pinterest. That’s more than most of the channels combined – except my favorite Google <3.

By joining some group boards and pinning all your content on Pinterest, it can bring pretty long time rewards. It takes a while (3 months) to kick in so be patient and watch the traffic simply increase and increase.

Here is a guide to optimizing and increasing Pinterest traffic to your travel blog.

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Quora

Quora is a platform for helping people find answers to questions.

If you have a great blog post or are knowledgeable on certain topics then this is a great place to try and help people find answers and also drop some links to your blog or get them to come to your website. I’m fairly active on Quora, but I haven’t found it an amazing place to get traffic.

YouTube

With almost 5 billion videos being watched on YouTube every single day, it’s a great way to try and get some traffic or grow your audience if you can get a tiny slice of the pie.

What’s nice about the video is that it can be repurposed and be integrated into different sites, you aren’t limited to Youtube, as most people put them on Facebook too.

Guest posting

Guest posting is mainly used for SEO nowadays because it’s a great way to get some links to your website, but sometimes it can bring in some really nice trickles of traffic if used correctly.

Perhaps the biggest benefit of guest posting is interacting with other bloggers and website owners. You can make friends and share successes all while increasing the authority of your blog through links.

Forums

There are hundreds and hundreds of micro-niches with people talking about birding, 4x4ing or fishing. If you can offer value to readers on these forums, you can funnel them to your blog.

Don’t be spammy though, no one likes spammers.

Influencers

Influencers are people who are the authorities in their respective industries. These were maybe people who were in newspapers, magazines, or on the TV, but nowadays anyone can become an influencer.

Yes, even you.

So if you got some $$$ you can pay your way to the top and ask a few influencers to share your blog or topics.

Instagram

Instagram is not the best for getting tons of traffic to your blog, but hey you probably have an Instagram account anyway, so you might as well put it to good use and throw a link in there.

It’s not exactly my forte as I’m a fairly private person, and after getting my Insta accounts banned through automation, I moved on from it. It was a HUGE mistake as it would have been a nice way to get brands to pay me some $$$ or get some free stuff.

Medium

Medium is a great place to share your content if you have something of value to share. It’s not exactly catered to travel, but they implemented a new feature where you can syndicate your content to it and give your fans and followers on Medium.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is not the greatest place to share your content, due to the fact that it’s mainly for business-related information and I don’t think anyone would appreciate a post about backpacking; however, they would appreciate something about taking a career break or a sabbatical.

SEO

I left the best for last, SEO is how I’ve mainly got my traffic, I realized that it brings in about 59% of the traffic for most websites… It’s my favorite way to get traffic to my website, but don’t be fooled, it is probably the most difficult.

It is super easy to share a 300-word article and post it in all the places I’ve used above, but you are never going to get to the top of Google with 300 words short content.

Better is the enemy of best!

SEO deserves a whole post dedicated to itself, so I wrote, arguably the best post, about travel SEO that would take your blog up a notch or ten – literally. 😛

The biggest takeaway from this post is that there are TONS of places to get traffic. There is really no excuse to not get 100 people to each and every blog post from the very first day and a helluva lot more as you build your community.

Looking to develop a content strategy that drives traffic and generates income? Click here to view our Content Marketing Strategy packages