Make Money Travel Blogging

Last week I sent out some great affiliate advice, and a WordPress master trick, to the Art of Solo Travel affiliates. And now I’ll share it with you.

The thing is, every affiliate link you get looks scary. I mean, it doesn’t look like your site, or a normal link. It has question marks and strange combinations of numbers and letters — this puts people off clicking the link, because it takes away from their confidence.

At the end of the day, a click-through from your visitor drops a cookie and if they’re interested in buying, more clicks means more commissions.

So here’s what you do:

1. Go into your WordPress plugins page and click “Add New”.

2. Search for “Redirection” and install the Redirection plugin by John Godley.

3. After you’ve activated it, you’ll find a new option, “Redirection” in your Tools menu.

4. “Add a new Redirection” where the Source is http://yourdomain.com/link/solotravel and the Target is your affiliate link from e-junkie.

5. Test this by visiting http://yourdomain.com/link/solotravel in your browser. You should see it quickly redirect through e-junkie and land on the http://artofsolotravel.com/ page.

This technique allows you to work wonders with your affiliate programmes. You’ll see increased click-throughs on these links and, if you’ve pre-sold the visitor just a little bit, you’ll see an increase in your affiliate sales.

Of course, this doesn’t just work for Art of Solo Travel; you can use it whenever you’re linking to a tricky URL or create your own shortcut links for pages like Facebook, etc.

One of the best parts about this technique is that if you’re changing your affiliate programme, as happens from time to time, you don’t need to change hundreds or thousands of links throughout your site: just change the redirection Target and your new affiliate partner will be linked from all of those existing links.

I like using the /link/ part of the URL so people don’t get shocked by landing on a different site. When you make it look like another part of your site (e.g. http://yoursite.com/solotravel) people are expecting to land on one of your pages. Giving them a surprise can break confidence too.

When we started doing this, we found an immediate uptick in our affiliate commissions – and I think you might too.

Let us know about your affiliate issues and successes in the comments.

Two resources, Affiliate Marketing for Beginners and Why your website sucks have me thinking about what travel blog visitors are like. And what they like. And what they would like. And what I’d like from them.

As we prepare for a massive change in structure on the Indie Travel Podcast website, I’m thinking a lot about organisation: finding places to add value for readers, making information easy to find, and increasing the chance for us to make money. In that order.

These two resources have me thinking about the ideal visitor. Why your website sucks asks you to identify one person that would be a perfect match to your product (the example is a holiday spot) and how you’d communicate with them.

Who is the ideal visitor to your website? Who are you writing to?

Affiliate Marketing for Beginners makes me wonder what would motivate those visitors to click an affiliate link. It’s got me holding in mind that it’s not my job to sell the product … That’s the job of the landing page, whether it’s an ebook or a flight aggregator. It’s just my job to send interested traffic.

I would posit that most travel blog readers are not travelling soon. Our readers love us: our stories, our voice, our destinations, but they might never visit the places we’re talking about. They might never take a one-year career break or even take that week-long trip to the Cinque Terre. They might just want to read stories.

Here’s the thing: If travel blog readers are in the research part of the buying cycle, there’s not much point doing hard sales. There’s little to gain from pushing a product down our reader’s throats. Rather, by giving ideas and inspiration that keep them coming back, they’ll be more likely to take your advice and recommendations. And, of course, you’ll have a healthy dose of affiliate programs behind the products you’d naturally recommend.

But you can’t recommend products to people you don’t know. Will a backpacker bus, self-drive rental or a luxury coach tour best serve my reader? If I don’t know my ideal reader, how can I make ideal recommendations?

If you create no community, no passion, no voice you don’t have much chance of recommending great solutions which fit people’s needs. And you don’t make money travel blogging.

Chime in below. Do you have the perfect affiliate offer but no passionate audience? Are your readers passionate, but always browsing and never buying? Is there nothing you’d feel comfortable recommending to your blog readers?

This week we have a question about money. Specifically, how much money to charge for advertising.

There’s a lot of “magic” involved in figuring out what a space is worth, but I encourage you to think of it highly. Banner advertising, in particular, has a nasty reputation for screwing downwards in value year after year … even when your traffic growing. Rather than accept the lower value, I’d prefer to work with advertisers for mutual benefits, rather than agencies trying to increase their profit margins by passing down smaller percentages of their budgets.

In short: price on value, not numbers, don’t bill for under US$200/year if you can at all avoid it, and let advertisers who want to pay you $5 or $10 a month pass by.

Do you have a question about travel blogging? Ask here.

One of the big experiments for July, and the one that’s shown the most early promise, was reconsidering my stand on Amazon’s affiliate programme following discussion on How to make money with a travel blog.

With 4-6% affiliate commissions possible if you sell less than 31 items a month … it didn’t seem like much. If you only make $1 a sale, you have to make a lot of sales to grab $100. On the other hand, 2 sales with a $50 commission (like some other programmes) would be an easier win!

I greatly increased the amount of backlinks we had going to Amazon: both text links and widgets. The idea was more traffic = more sales. We also published a review of 100 Places in Italy Every Woman Should Go with a simple Amazon widget, and tweeted the link several times on #traveltuesday — a virtual event on Twitter.

By the middle of July we had clocked up 10 sales; the same number of items as our total for June. The earnings, however, were smaller: US$8.31 against $11.60.

Looking through our sales results since we started the programme ($150 earned in around 3 years), I noticed two things:

1. People buy things are aren’t related to our site (like, Sexual Pleasure: Reaching New Heights of Sexual Arousal and Intimacy (Positively Sexual))
2. You get bigger commissions selling electronics and luggage than you do from selling books. My largest commissions came from:

• a carry-on suitcase
• a pair of shoes
• A netbook
• Portable hard drives
• An electric razor

Chris Guillebeau and Problogger

It was in early July when I got an email from Chris Guillebeau, part of the Empire Builder’s Kit series. Chris is also quite skeptical when it comes to Amazon’s low affiliate percentage, but uses Problogger’s Darren Rowse as an example of someone who does it well.

Chris said I could paraphrase his lessons here.
Reader Reviews Matter. Reviews written by readers had better conversion rates than reviews written by Darren.

Relevancy Matters. This is obvious: the tighter the audience’s connection with the product, the more people will click and buy.

It’s All About the Holidays. People buy lots of stuff between the start of November and end of December. Be ready for it, and promote during this time.

Sell Items that Aren’t for Sale… yet. Look for pre-order offers for upcoming products your audience will be excited about. You can still earn a commission when they buy.

If You’re Blogging, Build Amazon Links into Legacy Content. Use links throughout your archives to engage with people browsing or coming to your site via search engine traffic.

Use text links liberally when promoting affiliate offers. For sales, banner Ads perform poorly when compared with text links. It’s just true.

(If you liked the ideas behind these tips, go join the Emperors in training with Chris on the Empire Builder’s Kit)

Talking to others…

I keep forgetting to get people’s permission to use their names, but I have been asking around. Travel bloggers I’ve spoken to who claim to “do quite well” with Amazon all had two things in common:

• Traffic of 10,000 people a month or more
• A prominent post on cameras, laptops or backpacks

No-one I spoke to is making good money selling guidebooks or DVDs through Amazon.

My conclusion:

To make more money from Amazon:

• Build more links, especially in your archives
• Talk about high-ticket items
• Focus on the crazy Christmas season

Update: I was contacted by an ex-staff member of Amazon and told the “lift” begins in September. Therefore, it’s important to have your “holiday” reminders start up in October.

Our final earnings from Amazon in July? US$22.92 minus a $3.47 refund from last month, totalling $19.45. We might be going somewhere with this.

I’d love to hear your experiences and ideas in the comments.

About one month ago I wrote about a new experiment with in-picture advertising and Image Space Media.

They’re offering a simple-to-install script that overlays advertising on all pictures on your blog. Image Space Media also offer a nice, easy-to-use control panel so you can elect the photos that won’t display ads (your logo, for example).

Although I’m happy with the way the in-picture ads display and we’ve had OK feedback, here’s the most important stat:

Only 13 clicks and US$1.46 from almost 10,000 impressions. I think these ads aren’t engaging our audience. The next question? Can we improve it? If not, do we leave it until we hit payout at $25?

One question start-up bloggers often want to have answered is: how do you get free stuff from your blog? How do you find sponsors to send you on trips? How do you get things for giveaways?

I have to admit, it’s not something I do often; travelling all the time doesn’t exactly lend itself to having review items sent to you: we say no to more than 50% of the things we’re offered! That said, here’s how to find good people to work with on your travel blog:

If there’s one thing that can save you hours of hard-coding it’s a well-planned and well-managed adserver.

You can use an adserver to quickly change out advertising, rotate ad space (so you can experiment with them) and remove advertisers that have stopped paying for that space or affiliate programmes that are not performing well.

In this video I answer a reader question, “Which adserver do I use?”

You can subscribe to my travel blogging and travel video channels on youtube. Please do.

Useful links include:

• Ozh Who Sees Ads WordPress Plugin.
• I got Link Daemon as a bonus with the Silo Plugin – not sure if it’s still available.
• The WordPress redirection plugin.

Do you have any experience or advice with adservers? Do you use them or manually change your site html for new ads?

One of the most important things about monetizing your travel blog is experimentation. It doesn’t matter what your experimenting with, but experiment! Measure, change, measure again and take your best bet!

Experiment one: Amazon

Following everyone’s massive defense of Amazon in How to make money with a travel blog, I’ve decided to start building more links to that and see what happens.

Just to judge, in June I earned US$11.50 from 10 sales. That may pay some people’s hosting, but it doesn’t cover ours!

Experiment two: Tripadvisor’s affiliate programme

Today, Friday 2nd, I just signed up for Tripadvisor’s affiliate programme. I’m using a widget on one homepage (50% rotation against an ebook ad) and will spend an hour or two today adding affiliate links through popular and recent location-based posts.

Experiment three: Which landing page?

Speaking of the 50% rotation, the other 250×300 ad on the Indie Travel Podcast homepage is for our new ebook, Art of Solo Travel. For the past month, I’ve been passing that to an internal sales page. Now, I’m pointing it to artofsolotravel.com — it will be interesting to see:
a) How much traffic it sends.
b) How that converts vs. the internal sales page.

Experiment four: Better tags in iTunes

We get a lot of traffic through iTunes. Well, we get tens of thousands of audio and video downloads. I’m going to start using more intelligent tagging of those posts: rather than using generic “travel” tags, I’m going to use our keyword tools and smart SEO there — just like we’d use on our blog posts. If I have time to finish some videos, I’ll use similar techniques in Youtube.

I’ve been reading How to Live Anywhere by Karol Gadja. The affiliate notes have me very excited about the next major affiliate push we do.

That’s my main areas of play for July. What are you experimenting with?

Undoubtably affiliate marketing is one of the most scalable ways to make money with your travel blog. There’s only so many banner ads you can fit on your site, but there’s almost limitless potential for text links leading to CPA (or cost-per-action) deals.

Companies like Commission Junction, Doubletrader and Google’s affiliate marketplace all have big, trusted travel companies that are willing to pay you a tiny percentage of their booking fees. Then there’s products that will be useful for your readers, like language learning software (high margins, tend to pay well), guide books (low margins, tend to pay poorly), and electronic guides (medium to high margins, tend to pay well).

How do you get in on this?

I have to admit it’s an area I’ve played in, but I’m just starting to get serious about. Last month, my combined sites made around US$225, this month is looking like more. Corbett Barr from Free Persuits, on the other hand, is clearing more than $3,000 a month.

I want to learn from him.

Luckily, he’s put together the first draft of a membership course called Affiliate Marketing for Beginners, which launches tomorrow, June 22, 9am PDT, but only for 24 hours.

As it’s the first version, he’s discounting it for people who are willing to give him feedback; I think it’ll be a good time to get in and learn what you can.

Today I loaded up something new for our biggest site Indie Travel Podcast. It’s in-picture advertising, which is another way to make money travel blogging. Considering many of us use big pictures to showcase our destinations and illustrate our stories that’s a lot of space that might earn some income.

In March I was contacted by two separate companies offering this form of advertising. Both had their pros and cons, and I researched some other options too.

After a bit of research and a few phone calls, I decided to go with Image Space Media, who seem to have the highest payouts at present. I really like the work that another (currently private beta) company is doing, but they don’t have any real monetisation at present.

After I got my confirmation email (which took some time to come through, as it got caught in spam, I requested a new one, then it got caught in spam too), I was in!

At first, I only see one problem with this implementation:

How is this going to work out? I don’t know. If you serve up loads of pictures every day, why don’t you join up, give it a go and report back here what you think. (Note, they are only serving PSAs (Public Service Ads) while their spider crawls and analyses the site.)

Another question: go have a play with this on Indie Travel Podcast (e.g. Prague travel guide, Philippines photo essay) … Do the ads get in the way of your experience? Does this have negative impact on the reader?

In-picture advertising installation – update one

The spider has completed it’s romp through the thousands of pages of Indie Travel Podcast and, judging from my experiments, is serving good, targeted advertising. It’s not laser-sharp, but it’s good. I can actually go in and suggest keywords for individual images to help their system match offers with my content. I’m going to give it a week and find out which are the most-commonly server image ads then add keywords to those.

In response to my support question regarding image ads on the header logo and other undesirable places, Brian wrote:

The one problem you talk about can absolutely be fixed. When you log in you can actual go to the ‘Image Manager’ where you can look at all the images with ads on your site and you are able to turn off ads on individual images. So, just log in and turn off the ads on your header and whatever images you may want.

Sure enough:

In-picture advertising review - Image manager

That’s fixed 99% of our problems, however there are some ads that appear over images which are not appearing in my image manager, such as the Facebook box on the homepage. I’ve sent a followup email regarding that…

Back to my original question: Join up, give it a go and report back here what you think.