As I run a fairly large blog in the internet marketing niche, I tend to get a lot of questions about what people should promote online. Today I’ll discuss a potential affiliate program you guys can try related to earning money by directing people to a website which they’ll find very useful.
Most of you reading this post will have travelled on an airline and booked a hotel at one point in your life. With online searching being so easy, many of us tend to look online for the best deals. Now, imagine if you could make a commission on referring other people to good hotel deals – saving them money and making you money.
Hotels Combined is one such website which is used by over 80,000,000 people every year. With 200,000 hotels in its database, it’s worth a bookmark just so that you can save yourself some money. However, it also has a travel affiliate program which you should definitely look at.
The way its affiliate program works is that you get paid for every lead you send to the website. I asked the owner for a rough idea of why – here’s what he said:
There is a common misconception that you stand to earn more by selecting a hotel affiliate program that pays on a CPA (per booking) commission model, rather than by choosing HotelsCombined’s CPL (per lead) commission model. I hope to explain here that the overall earning potential is approximately the same, and each method has other pros and cons to consider.
Let’s take an example where you direct 100 clicks to a hotel affiliate program.
Under a CPA program, you may make 1 or 2 hotel bookings out of those 100 clicks, each with a value of around $20. This yields an average revenue of around $30 over the 100 clicks. But since the exact value of each booking tends to vary greatly, and since it is very easy for one of those bookings to cancel, your actual earnings per day can be as erratic as a gambler’s winnings. Also, the commission is only credited to your account once the end-user actually stays at the hotel, which may be as much as 6 months after the original booking was made.
Under the HotelsCombined Affiliate Program, your 100 clicks may convert into around 60 leads, with an average value of around $0.50 each. These leads may still only convert into 1 or 2 hotel bookings, but now your $30 average revenue is much more stable. If a few clicks don’t convert into leads, your overall average remains relatively untouched, and booking cancellations never affect your accumulated earnings. Also, your commissions get paid into
your account as soon as they occur, so there’s no wait to find out how much your traffic earns you.
So at face value it appears that both types of commission model pay an average of around $30 per 100 clicks (in this example), but HotelsCombined offers more stable cash flow on shorter payment terms. Speak to your accountant about your Risk Profile before making a decision between these two models.
Personally, I’d rather get paid per lead for something like this as like the above mentions, you don’t know when people are going to book their hotel for. Also, many people sign up for the website but book after weeks, if not months – you get paid for the lead nevertheless.
I played around with the site looking at it from the eyes of a user that would be interested in booking hotels – I tend to travel a lot, so a website like this definitely helps. Here’s my search for hotels in Hong Kong:
The search found over 240 hotels and above you can see some of them (sorted by Price). For me, this has everything – price, pictures, reviews, a high quality search function so I can specify exactly what I need.
Here are some of the benefits of the affiliate program:
- Payment monthly through Paypal, cheque or bank transfer
- 12 month cookie so you get paid for repeat visits
- Variety of hotels for your visitors – over 200,000
- Multiple affiliate tools – banners, search boxes, private branding
- Real time online reporting
My favourite is the Paypal payment option – I hate waiting around for cheques or dealing with bank transfers.
Basically, you have a website which people that you send to it will find useful – which means it’s easier to make money. If I sent friends to this website, they’d thank me for it – I’ll definitely be using this to book hotels in the future.
Now, how do you promote this and make money with this website?
Niche website. Think about setting up a niche website (use Google Keyword Tool to find keywords) for country specific hotels. For example, “Mexico cheap hotels”. On your niche website you could review the top five hotels in Mexico (or the best value for money ones), redirect your visitors to the website and earn a commission on each booking they make.
Offline flyers. If you hired someone to hand out flyers where people that travel a lot tend to be – around office buildings or airports, for example, you could buy a domain, redirect it to your affiliate link and advertise this domain on flyers.
Pay per click. You can generally get very cheap clicks on travel / tourism websites using Adwords in content model as that niche tends to pay poorly (for whatever reason). So spend a day on Google looking for travel websites using Adsense, buy clicks at $0.1 and send them to your cloaked affiliate link.
You could also try Adwords search for various keywords but you’d have to go more niche as that could get expensive. Lastly, you could also look at buying banners on travel websites, or any that would get a lot of buying US traffic (Facebook, for example) as most people tend to need a hotel at some point in their life.
Good luck with referring people to HotelsCombined, and at the very least you’ve found a high quality website you yourself can use. I’m in contact with the affiliate manager and will ask him to check out this post every so often, so if you have questions feel free to leave them below!
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June 4th, 2010 at 3:58 pm
8 trillion niche is definitely appealing for any new affiliate marketer. However, you must take into account that you will face the biggest competition as well. It will be extremely hard to get great spot in Google front page, which means that it will be difficult to get large free traffic. Besides, if you look on Hotel Combine price level, you will need to do very good pre-sell in order to get a sale.
I would recoment to join some MLM travel companies like WorldVenturs, as this way you will earn more money.
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June 4th, 2010 at 5:51 pm
I don’t have experience with this program, but it can get good revenue on targeted site.
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June 8th, 2010 at 2:35 am
I have a travel site targeting tourist spots in the Philippines. Maybe I can take advantage of this program. Thanks for sharing.
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June 8th, 2010 at 7:42 am
it seems interesting and this piece helps a lot.
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June 9th, 2010 at 10:56 am
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June 10th, 2010 at 8:57 pm
I love this. I use the Orbitz affiliate program on my travel blogs, but I really like this idea. I wonder if it would be over-kill to use both?
Anne Marie´s last blog ..Online Marketing Course: Finding Content For Your Blog That You Don’t Have To Write
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June 11th, 2010 at 12:50 pm
It’s always interesting to hear about various affiliate programs, even if they’re not related to your niche. Using what I call “related interests”, you can suggest different things to your users to cash in. For example, I’ve got a blog that is about suntan lotion and its effects on skin, but I consider that the affiliate program you describe in this blog post could be an excellent way to cash in with my type of traffic.
I’ll look into HotelsCombined for sure!
Thanks!
Pierre-Yves@Référencement Super X´s last blog ..L’autorité… avec un grand « G »
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June 11th, 2010 at 6:58 pm
Travel affiliation programs are awesome when it comes to the affiliate cut. Basically travel, tourism, airlines etc are low margin businesses as they shell out majority of their money for campaigns and promotions which ends up with affiliates like us
Ajith Edassery@Make Money Online´s last blog ..MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate Plugin Review & $30 Discount Coupon
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June 13th, 2010 at 3:29 am
Im not actually into many affiliate programs
For the most part, I stay out of the “bigger” type things. I like to stick with small things such as electronics. However this program gives me some ideas I might pursue.
Planning on doing some niche research when I get the chance, to see if my ideas are worth-while.
Free Club Penguin´s last blog ..Free Club Penguin Membership
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June 15th, 2010 at 12:02 pm
Some genuine post on shorter periods would do some change here.
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June 21st, 2010 at 4:44 am
Thanks for this travel info! I was looking for Travel affiliate and found your site. Cool!
Edward´s last blog ..Watch Grown Ups Online for Free
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June 25th, 2010 at 1:17 am
Good info to know as I contemplate building out a few travel related domain names. Used by over 80 million people a year?! That’s alot of traffic!
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June 25th, 2010 at 6:52 pm
Just crossed my mind, is there affiliate program with hotels4u or some other site within Tomas Cook group?
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June 29th, 2010 at 7:25 am
I’m looking for a good travel affiliate program. Anyone having good or bad experiences with a certain program? looking to sell cruise and hotels on my new travel website
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June 29th, 2010 at 8:25 am
Yes, travel niche is very profitable only if you like to travel allot, writing about places you’ve never been is so fake.
SO, I’ll advice people to chose this niche only if they are into it.
Asif´s last blog ..When Should You Start Guest Posting
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June 29th, 2010 at 1:45 pm
jason,
am not much of a traveler.but i like the fact that i can use the 3 ideas for monetization in other niches…
mk akan´s last blog ..Blog Post ideas-Question and Answers-and Blog Collaborations
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June 29th, 2010 at 9:04 pm
Well you don’t need to travel yourself to run travel niche site, although it would be very helpful to present first hand experiences.
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July 4th, 2010 at 11:13 am
This looks like a really good affiliate program, thanks for sharing it. The travel niche is always a good one to get into. People are always looking to travel.
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July 5th, 2010 at 11:22 am
Thanks for yet another first-rate article. I am always searching for super WordPress tips to recommend to my own readers. Thank you for making this article. It’s exactly what I was searching for. Truly terrific post.
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July 6th, 2010 at 5:41 am
People don’t know how to make money through online ..this is a good information you giving to the people..thanks
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July 6th, 2010 at 3:02 pm
I used to use HotelsCombined program but did not like the CPC revenue model – a few pence here and there was no good and revenues were low. I switched to sletoh.com, a much smaller site with only 75,000 hotels in Europe compared to HC’s worldwide 250,000+ but they pay CPA and I only needed European hotels. I earn more so I am happy
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July 7th, 2010 at 10:07 am
I participate in Hotels Combined affiliate program and I am very happy, honestly it really make a stable passive income for me and their private label program works great for me on sub-domain. As soon as I SEO pages properly and added the code on every page of my website it started working like a charm.
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July 7th, 2010 at 12:47 pm
@Andy
It’s good to know first hand facts about this program. Thanks
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July 8th, 2010 at 9:22 pm
I have heard about this program from a few people now, I am really interested in checking it out. It is good to see how popular it is becoming.
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July 12th, 2010 at 2:10 am
thanks for sharing this affiliate program, I will check it out, I mainly stick with clickbank though
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July 14th, 2010 at 3:22 pm
I’m always on the lookout for travel affiliate programs, other than the ones you find in ShareaSale or Commission Junction. This one looks promising plus add to the fact they pay by Paypal, now that’s a major plus for me.
Lisa Loves 50cc Mopeds For Sale´s last blog ..50CC Mopeds For Sale
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July 19th, 2010 at 3:03 pm
So am I right in thinking that anyone can join or is this a registered with the IRS only program?
In general though this is a huge step forward. Thanks.
Dillinger@Dominica Hotels´s last blog ..Best view in Dominica
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July 20th, 2010 at 8:08 am
This is the great, I will try this one.
Joe@Bakersfield Divorce´s last blog ..Uncontested Divorce – An In-Depth Perspective
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July 20th, 2010 at 11:32 pm
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July 25th, 2010 at 2:51 pm
Sounds like a great idea to try out! I am always looking for possible ideas for building niche sites.
SEOninja´s last blog ..The Greatest Resource In The World – People!
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July 27th, 2010 at 1:51 am
This is an amazing affiliate program. Could easily churn out a lot of dollars for publishers. Great work dude
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July 27th, 2010 at 6:29 am
Thanks for this. I’d been thinking about adding affiliate links to my hotel reviews for a while now, but wasn’t sure of which program to go with. I’d looked at Expedia and Hostel World’s programs, but they both looked a bit harder to setup. I registered with Hotels Combined in just a few minutes, and about an hour later I’d got the links setup on my site – now I’ll need to wait and see if it was a good use of time!
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July 28th, 2010 at 12:59 am
Thanks I will be adding Hotels combined to my site, I find quick and easy. I also like the fact that the search can be in my local currency.
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August 1st, 2010 at 10:05 pm
Intesting article should help a lot of people including myself out
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August 9th, 2010 at 1:30 pm
It’s really great income resource, but if, and only if you take care of the “holiday selling” site right. It’s really annoying sometime when you have traffic and rival site sell.
John@Funny signs´s last blog ..Ne-Yo – Beautiful Monster
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August 11th, 2010 at 12:23 pm
it seems interesting and this piece helps a lot.
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August 12th, 2010 at 8:07 am
Being involve in affiliate marketing is not that easy. Affiliate network marketing of travel is a growing trade and this is an excellent time to get involved if you are interested in making some cash. The fact that you could also end up travelling to many places yourself is an extra bonus.
France@Virginia DUI Lawyer´s last blog ..Hello world!
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August 14th, 2010 at 9:43 am
Thanks for sharing this information. I’ve been scrolling through and reading your various posts. You give lots of excellent information.
Cheryl
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August 15th, 2010 at 6:33 pm
I am new to affiliate marketing. Heard a lot of things about it. I also do understand, money comes only with hardwork. I will be following your RSS feeds.
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August 16th, 2010 at 3:50 pm
There is forever a oppourtunity to accumulate cash through affiliate programs but searching for the important product that matches our niche is the most complex part. I went through a few of your blog posts and found it quite helpful. I sincerely think, your site has benifited me enough to assess the concept behind affiliate marketing. I have subscribed your blog and am following your RSS.
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August 31st, 2010 at 4:10 pm
As of now…I love affiliate programs. This seems like a really awesome opportunity and it seems interesting. I will think about it. Thank you.
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