affiliate marketing is the single best way to earn money online, primarily because it’s a set it and forget it type company 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 even more 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 easy and while it may take you a while to hit the jackpot, all of the hard work is certainly 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 suitable keyword research, build traffic to certain messages and A/B test your results, but once you have a few messages earning real affiliate income, you can sit back, unwind and view the money roll in.
In this short article I’m going to discuss 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 much more traffic you have, by default, the much 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 techniques 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 much 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, trips and maybe purchase 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 essential to carve out a niche and understand what niches can be profitable.
Our blog has over 200,000 distinct 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 best posts, we were hardly making any money through affiliates.
There are big sites out there with 100,000+ distinct visitors per month making $0 from affiliates, while there are also smaller blogs and sites with only 1,000 distinct visitors per month who are able to make thousands per month. It’s all about what products you recommend and what affiliate messages you write.
Know your readers, write messages and recommend products and services that they’re likely to buy. If you only write about travel in central America, then you ought to have affiliates for central American trip companies, airlines and hotels.
To be sure that you’re writing messages that are in the best position in the buyer’s journey to earn money, think of when you would be many 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 incredible hotels and you’ll be much 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 trips in ____” are much 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 whatsoever 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.
Same goes for world Nomads travel Insurance, Amazon, Expedia and a few other travel / product services.
Many affiliate partners these days are run through affiliate networks. These sites are massive aggregates of different companies. They’re useful because they keep multiple affiliates in one dashboard so you can track sales and conversions from numerous different companies without having to sign into multiple sites 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 much 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 particular 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 ought to work fine.
If you have any doubts, it’s in some cases 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 guarantee it’s correctly included in your links.
For my Bluehost web hosting affiliate link, this tracking code looks like this
The tracking code is different for every affiliate network and company, but typically 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 useful 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 easy 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 site 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 trip or a travel service on your blog, you ought to 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 ought to 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 noted in this short article because it was an easy way to guarantee that any of your visitors to your site 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 required and comes standard for Amazon Affiliates.
EasyAzon
This plugin is a real time-saver. typically if you wanted to add an Amazon affiliate link to one of your posts, you’d have to open a new tab, search for the product on Amazon, copy your affiliate link and then go back to the post editor screen in WordPress to paste in the tracking link URL.
EasyAzon is a WordPress plugin that removes needless extra steps. When you highlight the text in the edit post screen and choose to link it, EasyAzon will search Amazon to see if there’s a relevant product to link to. If so, it gives you numerous options for linking and with the pro version of the plugin ($47) also gives you options for live price updates, purchase now buttons and styled boxes.
SEO smart links Plugin
This is an outstanding plugin for adding affiliate links to your entire site, even for messages that you’ve already published, without having to do them one at a time. For example, if you want the link to your world Nomads affiliate to appear each time you’ve typed words like “travel insurance” or “World Nomads” in a blog post or page on your website, this plugin makes it easy.
Simply install the plugin, then in your WordPress dashboard click “Custom Keywords” under the new SEO smart links plugin and there you’ll be able to add in unlimited keywords and the affiliate links that you want to auto-link them to.
You can also use the plugin for internal links to affiliate packed messages that you’ve written on your site. maybe you’ve written a great post called “Best travel Backpacks” on your site. You can tell the plugin to link the words “Travel Backpacks” across your entire site to that post to try to drive much more traffic, increase SEO for that keyword and get much more sales.
Yoast SEO Plugin
This plugin will help you when we get to the SEO part of affiliate marketing. If you want to drive traffic to your new affiliate posts, then you have to make sure they tick all the boxes for basic on page SEO. This plugin will help you to do this. much more on Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress later in this post.
SEO will really be your essential to earning money through affiliate posts. If you can rank #1 in Google for a important term (like “Where To stay in Rome“) then you can potentially earn thousands of dollars per month on hotel affiliate sales. We’ve gone into much more depth about SEO and keyword research in our Beginner blogger Course, and we’ll soon be coming out with an SEO Master course to help you rank for important terms quickly, and earn consistent money in as little as 60 days.
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Tracking Sales & Conversions
It’s essential that you continuously check your traffic, your links and your affiliate dashboards to know where your sales are coming from. This can help you to understand your readers and what they’re purchasing from which pages on your site, but will also give you the opportunity to ramp up links for certain products or services that are converting well.
Any affiliate, whether it’s direct with the company or through an affiliate network like CJ, will allow you to track your sales within a special dashboard. To access this dashboard, you’ll have to sign into your affiliate account.
In Booking.com for example, you head to this partner Login page (if you have already registered for an affiliate partnership through booking .com), log in and then click Performance. This will bring you to a screen like the one imagined below:
From this dashboard you can find out how numerous sales you’ve made per month, which messages the sales are coming from on your blog, how numerous clicks you’ve had from links on your blog and how much you’ve earned.
Every affiliate and affiliate network has its own