Promoting Audio tours from my website

Promoting and Selling VoiceMap Tours
1

I have created a webpage for linking to my Voicemap audio tour:
https://www.phillyphat.com/self-guided-tours
Has anyone else done something like this, and if so how effective is it. Also, any advice on helping promote a tour would be great. I’m already working with Voicemap to get links on Tripadvisor and created an instagram message yesterday. Oh, already had 1 sale :slight_smile:

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Thanks for asking this question @reidaddis. I’m interested to see what other publishers say, but from my perspective, there are three things to consider:

  1. How are people finding your website and this page, and how is this different to the way they’ll find your tour at VoiceMap?
  2. What is the purpose of the content on the page? Is there enough of it? Does it help with search traffic from Google? Does it sell the tour well, and explain what we’re buying? Does it explain how to use your tour and tell us what steps to take next?
  3. Can people buy tours from you directly or do they need to buy the tour from VoiceMap?

Let me briefly answer these from my perspective:

1.
I see you’ve added “self-guided tours” to the main menu of your website. This helps a lot because it makes your audio tour easy to find from any other page on your website. That means we can look at how people find your site as a whole instead of just the page that mentions it.

You’ll know the answer to how this happens, not me. Do people come through links from other websites, from social media, from Google searches or from something else? They are mostly going to find your tour on VoiceMap’s website because they already know about us and they’re looking for something in a particular city or because they searched Google for a “self-guided tour” or an “audio tour”. We rank very well for both of those search terms and so you’d be best off targeting something else. From a quick look at your search rankings I think you’ll probably do better than us for searches like “philadelphia architecture walking tours” and “philadelphia historic walking tours”.

If each of us – i.e. you and VoiceMap – targets different keywords we can target more keywords. One small change might be to to change “self-guided tours” to “self-guided walking tours”, if that isn’t too long.

2.
You’ve made a good start with the content of the page, and my overall feedback is that you just don’t have enough content. That doesn’t mean you’re better off with an essay, but I think you could do more describe what customers can expect, how this fits in with the rest of your products, and why you’re the best person to have published this tour.

Here are a few specifics:

  • Try something different to the title on VoiceMap for the same reasons I outlined above. Include keywords that we don’t have or aren’t prominent on the tour’s VoiceMap page if you can.
  • I’d like to know more about how this compares to your guided tour Philadelphia’s Gilded Age to Now. Does the audio tour skip anything that I might not want to miss? When does the guided tour run? If I find that out now, and I know I can’t make these times, then it’s easier to make the decision. I think visitors to this page and your website as a whole will benefit from a fair comparison.
  • To know how it compares, I need to know a little more about the content of both tours in the first place. Can you introduce the subject briefly? Feel free to copy and paste content from VoiceMap. We just want to avoid it being identical for more than a few sentences in a row.
  • Can you add some audio from the tour here? Just the first track maybe – or the best track? Talk to us if you need help doing this.
  • I think it makes sense to say a little more about the steps involved in using the tour. You don’t need to get too technical. Just cover the main bits: installing the app, downloading the tour, charging up your battery, going to the starting point with some headphones, planning for a walking tour that will take about 90 minutes. You might also want to say more here about the one place you think makes the best stop off for coffee or a meal, etc.

You’ve suggested people install one of the apps and buy the tour there. I used to recommend this, but since we redesigned our website I think it’s better to tell people to buy at voicemap.me. The payment processing fees for this are also a bit lower so you get better royalties. But with a bit more work, you could also sell the tour directly if you liked, which brings me to 3.

3.
I see that you use Bokun for guided tour bookings. You could sell the audio tour this way too if you liked using voucher codes. These are explained in more detail over at our documentation site. VoiceMap actually makes significantly less this way, but we encourage it because it can reduce the steps from discovering an audio tour to buying and then doing it – and then hopefully trusting us enough to do another.

Annie Sargent handles a lot of this well really well on her website if you’d like to take look.

3

Bonjour from France @reidaddis!

I’ve been selling tours from my own site too. I’ve been producing a podcast about France for a few years, so that’s where most of my traffic is from. I also post to all my social media https://joinusinfrance.com/audiotours/

Sales have been down a lot since the start of the pandemic, but I trust that once it’s safe to travel people will be itching to get out and see the city without too much fraternizing with strangers :slight_smile:

My friend Elyse also has a VoiceMap tour and this is how she sells it on her site. https://toulouseguidedwalks.com/audiotours/

Sending warm wishes from France,

Best,
Annie

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