Hello and welcome to Boost Travel Affiliate Revenue Using SEO. I’m Sharon Gourlay, and I’m partnering with Travelpayouts to bring you this super informative course about how you can boost your travel affiliate revenue using SEO. 

Now this lesson is called Understanding Reader Intent and Why It Matters and that’s exactly what we’re gonna be discussing. Reader intent is really an important aspect of affiliate marketing, I would say fundamental. So make sure you listen up and really try and understand what I’m going to be talking about in this lesson. 

So what is reader intent? Now, it’s basically why people land on your travel content. Now, do they want to hear a good story? Do they have a problem and they want a solution? You know, why is it that they’re there on your site? So it’s really understanding the goal or intention your readers have when they’re on your site. 

Now, why is this important? Why should you even care? That’s basically because if you can understand why people are on your site, you can serve them best. And the secret to affiliate marketing really is to serve people well, serve your audience well. 

You know, successful sites care about their readers, and they give them what they’re looking for. This leads to better engagement, they’re gonna like your brand more, that will do everything more when they land on your site, if it serves your reader, right? Not if it serves you, your blog should be about your readers. And this is especially important in affiliate marketing. In fact, I would say it’s fundamental, because the biggest reason why your affiliate links won’t convert is if you don’t have the right readers there and you’re not serving them. OK? If you just put affiliate links everywhere and in no way does it serve your readers, they are not going to work. 

Now, the easiest way to have success with affiliate marketing is to have readers come to your site that already want to buy or book something. Okay? So if you can really sort of reverse this and instead of thinking about what reader intent people have when they land on your sites, think about what reader intent do you need to have if you want to make money from affiliate marketing. Ok? 

This is the first step in having a successful affiliate marketing strategy: understand why people come to your site and what they want to gain. Think about what type of reader intent you want on your site, so that people want to book a hotel, they want to book a tour, they want to buy a suitcase, you know, whatever it is that you’re recommending. 

Now, I like to sort of describe this whole process, sort of the basics of what you need to do to get your travel affiliate marketing working as the affiliate marketing sweet spot. And it’s considering three different areas, right? So you have your content, so obviously the content on your site so we can get these at an individual posts level. 

You have affiliates, so your posts you can have affiliate links to and you have the reader intent of the people coming to your content. And where affiliate marketing works is when all these things overlap. So it’s that affiliate marketing sweet spot in the middle there, X marks the spot. It’s when you have the people coming to your content, ok and the content matches exactly what they want for your content. So they have a problem to solve. You give them the content to help solve that problem and it has that affiliate link, which also finishes them off with solving their problem. When those things overlap, that is the affiliate marketing sweet spot. So success in affiliate marketing is just really considering those areas and hitting that sweet spot. 

So make sure you really think this through and understand that you know, listen to this lesson again if you need to. Really understand how those things work together because that is how you get affiliate marketing success. 

So just to go over what we learned in this lesson. You know, we talked about reader intent, you know, why readers come to your site, why that’s important and how that can play a part in affiliate marketing with making sure you hit that sweet spot. You know right there in the middle having those people who have that problem that you can solve with your content and an affiliate link. 

Next lesson we’re going to dive deeper into the types of content that can do that. So we can help you hit that sweet spot.