Tourism backlinks: how to get places to publish you
Visitor boards and local magazines link to bloggers who save them work. Here is what to offer, what to skip and when a paid placement fills the gap.
Four things an editor will actually say yes to
A destination site has no shortage of content. It lacks time, local detail and photos.
A tested route
A walk you did last month, with distances, a map and the café that closes on Mondays beats a listicle.
Original photos with a licence
Offer a few frames for their use, with credit and a link. Make the licence terms plain in one sentence.
An off-season angle
Boards want shoulder-season visitors. A November guide to a summer resort is welcome.
A reader question answered
Pick one question real travellers ask and answer it better than the board's own page.
The pitch, in the order an editor reads it
Subject line first. Name the place and the gap, such as "Winter route for your Tromsø page", never "Collaboration opportunity".
In the body, give one sentence on who you are, one on what you propose and one with the link to the finished guide. Attach nothing. Editors at tourism sites receive hundreds of mails a week, and a clean three-line note from an address on your own domain stands out, which also answers the odd question of why bloggers use free webmail for submissions at all.
Follow up once, after ten days. Then stop.
Earned, hosted or paid: what each route costs
| Route | Cost | Speed | Control |
|---|---|---|---|
| Earned mention from a visitor board | Your time | Weeks to months | Low |
| Guest article on a local magazine | Your time and a draft | Weeks | Medium |
| Paid placement from the marketplace | From $1 to about $500 | Usually about 24 hours after payment | High |
What regional editors tell us they are tired of
Mass mails. Photos with no licence. Guides that copy their own wording back at them.
Most tourism sites run on small teams, often shared with the events office, and a link request from a stranger lands in the same inbox as a festival schedule. Keep your note short, name a page on their site you would improve or complement, and show that you read it. A mention in the right Slack group or a polite comment on their social post sometimes opens a door faster than email, and a visit to the office in person, when you are in town anyway, opens more doors still. Be kind.
Be patient. Seasons are slow.
A practical order of attack for one destination
Start local. Then widen. Begin with the nearest small sources: the town's visitor page, a regional food magazine, a hotel blog that already covers walks. Move on to a national outlet only once a regional one has linked you, because editors check who else has. In parallel, add one or two paid placements from the marketplace so that a new guide has something pointing at it while the earned mail is still in someone's drafts. The glossary helps decode the donor rows.
Say so on your own page and mark paid links with rel="sponsored", as Google has asked since September 2019. See the restaurant and hotel checklist.
When a paid placement is the sensible fallback
Some places never answer. Fine. Browse the marketplace for sites in the same region or niche, check Domain Rating and traffic on the row, and add one or two to the basket. Pair them with the pitches above rather than replacing them, and see the hundred-dollar plan for how to split a small budget.