The travel industry is booming right now and expecting even larger growth in the upcoming years.
This growth is most notable in the online retail side of it; people are now planning their whole trip online, looking for affordable travel plans.
You can take advantage of this and start promoting services and products for those people using affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing allows you to sell travel related products and services while getting an affiliate commission in exchange.
Products and services which can be:
– Cars and Vans rentals
– Hotels reservations
– Plane tickets
All these are in-demand products.
As a travel blogger you can be promoting booking companies through your affiliate link (in your blog posts), something like this:
Even though this technique can earn you profits, it is still not the optimum way, especially if you want to increase your sales conversion rates.
I will list in this article some ways to increase your affiliate sales by implementing more professional and dedicated solutions on your travel blog.
Add a Booking System to Your Travel Blog
You could allow people to search for rental cars, hotels and flights right from within your blog, and provide them with a way to search multiple suppliers to find the best deal.
Having your own search engine is better than directing people to another website where they can do their searches.
You will be able to get more social shares and likes, which makes your travel blog go viral and receive more traffic (and more affiliate sales).
Adding a search engine to your affiliate blog can sound like a technically challenging concept.
In fact it is not at all, and you will find that adding those search engines to your travel blog is very easy.
This diagram can show you how the whole process works from an affiliate perspective:
One thing you need to familiarize yourself with is the term “while label”.
There are few companies that are responsible for collecting booking data on daily basis, and they offer a white label solution to search through these data.
To add your own car rental booking search engine, you need to create a new page on your travel blog and use any of those top white label providers:
Skyscanner
Cartrawler
And you could end up with a booking system on your travel blog like this:
For flights while label solution, these are the best companies to use:
Skyscanner
Dohop
Finding Profitable Travel Affiliate Programs
You could also be earning affiliate revenue from other programs (other than online booking), which could give you an extra stream of income.
The best thing about the travel industry is being a large market with many different services being offered; not only bookings.
Some of these services are:
– Travel Insurance
– Luggage Forward
– Resorts
– And many others
Those are all segments of the travel niche, and if you can target only one of these segments on your travel blog then you could be selling more.
For example, if your travel blog is solely dedicated to luggage issues then you will be able to tackle all the problems in this micro niche.
And any visitor coming to your blog will view you as a complete source of information on this topic; something that helps you convert your affiliate products at higher rates.
Or you can target a couple of micro niches that complement each other; this can also make your travel blog a comprehensive source of information.
To find those travel affiliate programs (in many segments) you can use Google.
Do a simple Google search for “travel site:.com/affiliates”:
The list of affiliate programs returned from this search can give you a wide range of options for increasing your affiliate revenue.
Some of these affiliate programs pay very high commissions.
They are also easy to promote from your travel blog by using your blog posts to add your affiliate links.
You need to visit each affiliate program to get an idea of both the niche and the commission you will receive.
This one affiliate program (villa rentals) for example offers 200 pounds affiliate commission for every confirmed booking you generate:
There is also information on how to join any of those affiliate programs; by reading the affiliate program’s page you will find instructions:
Another type of affiliate marketing programs is called CPA (cost per action).
These CPA programs allow you to make affiliate commissions from things other than making someone book or buy something.
Things like filling out an insurance quota form for example.
Check out OfferVault’s marketplace of CPA offers and browse through those related to your Travel niche:
The Importance of List Building for Travel Blogs
You should start building a list of subscribers from your travel blog; it will increase your affiliate sales on the long run.
The travel niche can be seasonal and more active around summer and spring time.
This is why you need a way to stay in touch with every visitor that comes to your travel blog, so that you can send him new offers every year.
You also get to increase the level of trust between you and your subscribers (all year long) by sending out regular newsletters.
This trust will help you sell many of your affiliate programs by just sending out one promotional email to those subscribers.
To start listing building on your blog, you need to get an autoresponder service, and those are the top providers:
– GetResponse
– Aweber
– MailChimp
All of these companies will provide you with a leads capture form that allows your visitors to subscribe to your list.
You can then add this leads capture form as a side widget on your blog.
Final Words…
Understanding affiliate marketing in will help you sell any kind of travel product much better.
There are so many things to know about affiliate marketing and some of these things can actually help you run a better travel blog.
Affiliate marketing training provided by top internet marketing gurus is a good start if you want to learn about basic and advanced affiliate marketing techniques.
Follow Travel Bloggers Guide!