Hello and welcome to Boost Travel Affiliate Revenue Using SEO. 

My name is Sharon Gourlay and I’m partnering with Travelpayouts to bring you this super informative course about how you can use Travelpayouts, affiliate marketing, and SEO combined to increase your revenue for your travel content. 

Now, this first lesson is Introduction to Travel Affiliate Marketing and that’s what we’re gonna be covering. We’re going to talk about what travel affiliate marketing is, why it’s important, and briefly go over what you’re going to learn in this course. So let’s start!

So why is affiliate marketing perfect for travel content? Well, I personally think affiliate marketing is the best way to monetize your travel content. Now, that’s because people often consume travel content because they want to travel right? They want to plan a trip, they want to go on a trip, all those types of things. 

Now, when you’re planning a trip, there is a lot you need to book and a lot you need help with. Booking your flights, trains, buses, whatever they may be, car hire, you know, hotels, tours. The list can feel a bit endless when you first start planning a trip. 

So affiliate marketing can go really well with travel content because people are looking to book all of these things, right? When you’re helping them with your content, it makes sense to have links to like your favorite hotels in a destination, for example. That person reading your content, click on and go book, so they get a really good option. That is where affiliate marketing can be perfect for travel content, because of course you could just make these links affiliate links, and then not only that the person still gets to book whatever it is they want to book, but you also make some revenue from it. This can then find you to make more great travel content, have an even better site, more people to it, etc, etc. And it can work really well to use affiliate marketing on your travel content. 

But it’s not as simple as adding links, you know? I like to say there is a reason it’s called affiliate marketing and not affiliate linking, right? Unfortunately, we can’t just add a whole load of affiliate links and expect a whole lot of success. So that’s where we’re going to be talking about it today. We’re going to help you learn the skill of affiliate marketing.

But you do really need to understand your readers. I would say it’s fundamental to being successful in affiliate marketing: what they want and how you can serve them, you know when they land on your site, what is it that they’re hoping to achieve? And what can you do to help get them there, especially in regards to affiliate marketing? 

So in this course, you’re going to learn how to understand your readers and give them content that will help them and make affiliate commissions through Travelpayouts. You’ll secondly learn how to use SEO to find these readers that you can serve because it’s all well and good, you know, to have the best travel content in the world, and have great affiliate links. But if no one comes to your content, you know, none of it is gonna matter. And I really think SEO works so well with affiliate marketing, they are like perfect partners. So we’re gonna go really in-depth on how to use SEO to get those readers to your content that want to book through your affiliate links because that’s when you really will have success with travel affiliate marketing. 

So we are also going to talk about how to ensure once we get those people to our sites with SEO that they will convert to affiliate commissions. Okay? So there’s a few different steps in there and we’re going to cover them all. 

And then you know what comes next? Because you can follow this course content, you can do a really great job and you will see results, right? But the way to really improve is to really track what you’re doing, you know, and try to improve all the time. So we’re going to talk about what you can do to make sure you keep improving over time. 

Now it doesn’t cover a beginner introduction to affiliate marketing and SEO. I’m assuming you already understand what these things are. I’m going to talk more in-depth about exactly how you can use them together. 

But before I finish up this lesson, I do just want to quickly introduce myself so you know who I am and why I’m worth listening to. So my name is Sharon Gourlay. I live in Melbourne, Australia and I’ve created many sites to earn four to five figures a month using the strategies in today’s training, including several in travel. So I mean individual sites and I have a lot of sites.

I started in this industry as a family travel blogger. I ran a really big family travel blog that I sold back in 2018 and that got up to half a million page views a month and it did great with affiliate marketing. 

So I promise you everything I’m talking about today works and I know it works because I’ve done it in the past. I do it every day now. We’re building new sites, I’m a bit addicted. And on this screen, you can see three of my current travel sites. I even have more than that. But you can go take a look at them if you want to see how I am doing affiliate marketing on those.

I also run a site called digitalnomadwannabe.com which is where I teach people how to do SEO and affiliate marketing and the types of things I’m talking about today. And that’s because I used to be a high school teacher actually and I really do love teaching people. So for me, this is my favorite type of activity. I get to talk about SEO and affiliate marketing, which I love and I get to teach you how to do it too so that you can have the same success. 

So let’s get started. Let’s dive it in. Let’s learn how to boost your travel affiliate revenue using SEO.