Affiliate marketing is the single best way to earn money online, mainly because it’s a set it and forget it type business model. Spend time creating great content that recommends something that your readers are interested in, use an affiliate tracking link, build up that article’s traffic through SEO and social promotion and boom, start earning money without any further time investment on your end.
It doesn’t cost your readers anything extra to book through your links, but the commission you earn will help keep your site up and running.
When we started dabbling in affiliate marketing a few years ago, we really didn’t know much about it, but over time we’ve learned how to rank for search terms, choose products that sell and earn up to $10,000 / month in our sleep.
Surprisingly, the steps to being a great affiliate marketer are pretty simple and while it may take you a while to hit the jackpot, all of the hard work is definitely worth it. We know quite a few people (including ourselves) who are making thousands of dollars per month from one post, and others who have affiliate income of over $100,000 per month.
It takes some time to understand your readers and your audience, do appropriate keyword research, build traffic to certain posts and A/B test your results, but once you have a few posts earning real affiliate income, you can sit back, relax and watch the money roll in.
In this article I’m going to explain what makes a good affiliate strategy, share with you the best affiliate networks for travel bloggers and even get you started on keyword research for your first affiliate post so that you can hopefully earn some money from affiliate marketing in the next few months.
Do You Need Traffic To Make Affiliate Sales?
The short answer to this question is yes.
The more traffic you have, by default, the more sales you’re likely to make. But please don’t make the mistake of thinking that if you only have 1,000 page views per month, you can’t earn any affiliate income. In this post I’m going to show you proven SEO strategies that will drive the right traffic to your affiliate posts.
It’s all about knowing your audience and their interests and understanding the customer journey so that you can write articles that are more likely to convert your readers into customers / purchasers.
If you’re a travel blogger, then for sure you know that your readers are interested in travel so they’ll likely book flights, hotels, travel insurance, tours and maybe buy some Amazon travel products through links on your site.
It’s great to have this narrowed down, but you need to narrow this down even further, which is why it’s so important to carve out a niche and understand what niches can be profitable.
Our blog has over 200,000 unique visitors per month (at the time of writing), which helps us to get some affiliate sales, but before we figured out who our readers were and how to get targeted traffic to the right posts, we were hardly making any money through affiliates.
There are big sites out there with 100,000+ unique visitors per month making $0 from affiliates, while there are also smaller blogs and websites with only 1,000 unique visitors per month who are able to make thousands per month. It’s all about what products you recommend and what affiliate posts you write.
Know your readers, write posts and recommend products and services that they’re likely to buy. If you only write about travel in Central America, then you should have affiliates for Central American tour companies, airlines and hotels.
To be sure that you’re writing posts that are in the right position in the buyer’s journey to earn money, think of when you would be most likely to buy. When you’re searching the web for “travelling to Thailand” for example, you are probably just reading a bit about the history and things to do in Thailand. In this case, you’re not likely booking your hotels or purchasing travel insurance. But if you search “Where to stay in Bangkok”, you’ll find a list of amazing hotels and you’ll be much more likely to click a link and book a hotel.
Think of terms that people are searching when they’re ready to book. Things like “the best travel insurance for travel”, “where to stay in _____”, “best hotels in _____” and “best tours in ____” are more likely to convert readers into buyers and thus earn you that much appreciated affiliate commission.
Where Do You Find Affiliates?
There are loads of different affiliate networks out there, as well as a few companies that have their own direct affiliate networks. A good place to start is to look at all of the services you use currently for travel, and then run some Google searches to find out if they have affiliate programs.
For example, maybe you book all of your rooms on Booking.com. A quick Google Search like “Booking .com affiliate program” would bring up their own affiliate dashboard where you can sign up and join.
Many affiliate partners these days are run through affiliate networks. These websites are massive aggregates of different companies. They’re handy because they keep multiple affiliates in one dashboard so you can track sales and conversions from many different companies without having to sign into multiple websites and dashboards.
The best affiliate networks for travel products and services include:
- CJ.com
- Awin
- Share-a-sale
- World Nomads Travel Insurance
- Amazon
- Booking.com
- Hostel World
- Agoda
- Hotels Combined
- Airbnb
- Get Your Guide
To join these networks and begin earning affiliate sales through them, simply click on the links above, sign-up, search their affiliate database and request to join affiliate programs that match your niche.
How To Add Affiliate Links
Once you’ve chosen a few affiliates that you think will be a good fit for your blog (the more the better), you can start implementing them onto your site.
The way affiliate links work is that they have a special bit of code in the URL that tells the company or affiliate network that the sale came from you. So if you sign up for the Amazon affiliate network for example, your affiliate link for a specific product page might look like:
The link will likely be a lot longer, but that bit where it says &tag=goonthro-20 shows that it’s using my Goats On The Road affiliate link. So long as the URL in the affiliate link that you’re using includes some kind of tracking for your account, it should work fine.
If you have any doubts, it’s sometimes worthwhile to contact the support for the affiliate network and ask them to confirm that the link is tracking properly. Each affiliate dashboard will tell you what your tracking code is so that you can ensure it’s properly included in your links.
For my Bluehost web hosting affiliate link, this tracking code looks like this https://www.bluehost.com/track/
The tracking code is different for every affiliate network and company, but generally speaking, if you’re adding a link and it doesn’t have some kind of tracking code in it for your account, it’s probably not tracking properly.
Amazon has a great affiliate program because after you create an account and sign in, while you’re browsing Amazon, there’s a handy bar at the top of the screen which will allow you to pull your affiliate link from any product page on the site with a few simple clicks.
Similarly, Awin has a great plugin for Google Chrome and other browsers that allows you to easily turn any URL of an affiliate page into your own tracking link.
Other affiliates aren’t so easy.
With Booking.com for example, you have to sign-in to their affiliate dashboard, then in another tab, find a property you want to link to, copy the URL of the property on the Booking.com website and then go back to the dashboard, paste in that link and get a tracking link for your account. Or you can memorize your “booking AID” and replace it in the URL for any page on their site.
It can be a cumbersome process sometimes, but it’s worth it if you want to earn money through affiliates.
Every single time that you talk about a product, a hotel room, a rental car, a flight booking engine, a tour or a travel service on your blog, you should try to be linking out to an affiliate so that you can earn money from it. If you’re not an affiliate yet, run some Google searches to see if there’s an affiliate program, join it, and use an affiliate tracking link.
If you already have dozens of articles written that you think you can add these types of links to, you should go back on them and manually add links to them, and / or, use the SEO Smart Links plugin to add site-wide affiliate links to your blog (more on that below).
WordPress Plugins For Affiliates
GeniusLink
I originally had this plug-in listed in this article because it was an easy way to ensure that any of your visitors to your website were directed to the proper Amazon store (US, Japan, Canada etc.) upon clicking your affiliate links, however, due to recent changes by Amazon (July 2017) this is no longer necessary and comes standard for Amazon Affiliates.
To find out more and the rest of this article, please visit www.goatsontheroad.com
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