How small travel companies can work with bloggers to promote their brands?

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While at the World Travel Market in London recently, a question I heard from several small travel companies was “How can I engage with Travel Bloggers to promote my business?”. You may be an established niche company that wants to engage with new customers through Social Media, or you may be a new start-up that’s decided to go the online route – but most likely you’ll be operating on a shoestring budget and not have much money for marketing and PR. This article aims give you some ideas on how you might engage with Travel Bloggers to promote your small travel business.

First some things to avoid

• Most bloggers work extremely hard on their sites and get very little financial return from them, and they don’t want to feel they are being taken for a ride by those who see them as a source of ‘free’ promotion.
• Don’t send impersonal press releases to a random list of bloggers, your efforts are better spent on targeted individual approaches.
• Don’t send offers of ‘free’ content which are thinly disguised link building campaigns – most bloggers realise that links from their site have a value and they are sensitive about publishing articles that reduce the trust of their audience.
• Don’t expect bloggers to write about your travel service unless they have experienced it for themselves – it’s better to make the invitation to ask them to try it out at no cost.

Warning: The ideas that follow may not cost a huge amount of money, but you will still need to be prepared to invest a fair amount of time to make them work;

 Engagement through Social Media 

If you want to engage with travel bloggers, you need to meet them in their own playgrounds such as Twitter, Facebook and Google + . The first step is to open an account on one or all of these platforms for your business (if you don’t already have one) and start to use them to engage with travel bloggers. Make time in your schedule to regularly post a mixture of links to your own blog or website e.g. special offers, re-tweets or links to articles written by travel bloggers and links to general news items, always sticking to material that will interest your target customer. Follow or Like the travel bloggers whose articles you enjoy and start to engage them in conversation through comments on their articles.
The purpose of this activity is to not only engage with your target customer but also build relationships with travel bloggers who will then promote your business directly or indirectly in the future. You can use your time most effectively in Social media by using free tools such as Tweet Deck or HootSuite to schedule your Tweets and Facebook posts and Google Reader to monitor the blog posts of Travel Bloggers you are following. You can also be active on Forums such as Travel Blog Exchange  to answer questions that establish you as an expert in your sector, or to answer location based questions about your region such as Gogobot or Lonely Planet Thorntree.