When you click on Publish, your tour goes out immediately and becomes available through the VoiceMap apps and voicemap.me.

If you chose a compelling title, striking cover image, and made sure your first three locations and featured location captivate users who preview the tour, you'll likely start making sales soon. The difference between our best-selling and worst-selling tours isn't always the quality of the content. That often comes down to what you do next.

Why the first 90 days matter

We've been looking at what separates tours that grow from tours that stall. Of 243 tours published on VoiceMap in 2023, those that earned $50 or more in their first 90 days went on to generate nine times more revenue over the following two years. We call these takeoff tours, and the gap doesn't close: both groups grew at roughly the same rate each year, which means the advantage actually widens over time.

The $50 threshold isn't arbitrary. It's the point at which a tour has demonstrated enough demand to benefit from the work VoiceMap does to ensure tours get discovered and purchased. Reviews start coming in, visibility increases, and more sales follow.

On our end, we work to make sure your tours are discoverable: optimising profiles and tour pages for search engines and AI-generated responses, managing listings on online travel agencies like Viator, Musement, and Project Expedition, and running VoiceMap's own social media and digital marketing. But we can't create the initial momentum alone. The good news is that most publishers already have more to bring than they realise.

Start with ratings and reviews

The first essential step is getting ratings and reviews for your tour. When potential listeners see that others have enjoyed the experience, it helps overcome any hesitations they might have about purchasing your tour.

You get ten free voucher credits when you create a tour and an additional ten once the tour is published to help distribute your tour. Use these free vouchers to give friends and family access to your tour and ask them to review it. You can also share vouchers with existing audiences through social media, mailing lists, or podcasts.

Create voucher codes at voicemap.me/dashboard/vouchers. For detailed guidance, see our documentation on how to create voucher codes.

Promote through your own networks

Even if you rely on VoiceMap for discovery, you'll need to convince people to spend money as well as precious leisure time on your tour. This is where your existing network becomes invaluable.

The instinct is to reach for your social media follower count, but your audience is rarely limited to that number. Podcast listeners, newsletter subscribers, blog readers, LinkedIn connections, and the people you meet at professional events all count. So do the members of any niche communities you belong to, whether that's a local history group, a walking club, or a specialist forum. The more useful question isn't how many followers you have — it's where the people who are already interested in your subject spend their time.

Two publishers illustrate this well. Willem Fromm, creator of the History of Cologne podcast, already had a dedicated international audience when he published his first tour, who were ready and waiting for it. His two English tours now have almost 200 ratings, averaging 4.5 stars. Katrina Milne, a Scottish tour guide with an established travel business, did the same. Her three English tours have almost 500 ratings, also averaging 4.5 stars. Both of them tapped into their existing audience instead of starting a new marketing channel from scratch.

Use your website, social media channels, personal connections, colleagues, and existing networks to promote your tour. To make sharing easier, create short URLs and QR codes that you can use across different channels and situations.

Short URL

Start by creating a short URL for your tour using your tour's distribution tab in Mapmaker. The format is voicemap.me/yourtext, which makes it easy to use in your social media bio, email signature, captions, or a direct message.

QR codes

QR codes link the physical and digital, and are particularly useful for print promotion: a sticker near the start of your route, a flyer in a local café, a postcard in a tourist information office. For tours that aren't free, the QR code links to either your publisher profile or your featured location, so that choice carries real weight. Choose the stop with your most engaging audio and the strongest sound design.

Learn how to access and download QR codes here.

Promote through social media

Social media is one of the most powerful promotional tools — users who discover your tour through social platforms are often more likely to purchase than those from other channels. Social media makes your tour feel personal and trustworthy, providing valuable social proof that's especially important with a product people are buying for the first time.

A few things that help. Put your short link in your bio so you can point to it in captions and on screen. Use 3–5 relevant hashtags, mixing broad terms with more niche ones. Post at a consistent cadence — once or twice a week and keeping to it will serve you better than posting daily for a fortnight and then going quiet. And when you post, tag us: on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok we're @myvoicemap, and on YouTube we're @VoiceMapMe. When publishers tag us, we can share and amplify the content.

We provide detailed recommendations and examples for promoting on your own platforms and guidelines for sending us videos to promote your tour on VoiceMap's accounts.

Create print materials

Print materials help you reach potential customers who are already exploring your tour area, catching them at the perfect moment when they're actively looking for things to do.

We can create A4 posters or DL flyers using your tour description information. These materials work well in tourist information centres, hotel lobbies, cafés, museums, and other businesses along your route. View our poster and flyer templates and contact us to request custom materials for your tour. A publisher toolkit with downloadable and customisable designs for posters, flyers, stickers, and social media templates is also in development.

Optimise your website

Your website gives you complete control over how your tour is presented and discovered, and search engines can drive consistent, long-term traffic without ongoing effort.

If you have your own website, make your tour easy to discover through Google search. We've optimised your tour page for search, but links to your tour from other websites are crucial for rankings. Follow our effective linking strategies guide to improve your search visibility.

Expand through reseller networks

Reseller networks help you reach travellers who might never have discovered VoiceMap otherwise, expanding your potential audience beyond your own promotional efforts.

List your tour with resellers like Viator and TripAdvisor to reach wider audiences. We can handle this process for you. Learn more about selling through our reseller networks.

Set up affiliate partnerships

Affiliate partners can promote your tour to their audiences in exchange for a commission, creating additional promotional channels without upfront costs to you.

We're always looking for great affiliate partners. Share suggestions for potential affiliates in your city by emailing [email protected], and we'll reach out to them.

You can read more about our affiliate programme in our Publishers' Forum.

Join the publisher community

Connect with other publishers through our Publishers' Forum. It's an excellent place to share ideas, ask for advice, and learn about new features from fellow creators who understand the unique challenges and opportunities of audio tour publishing.