Hello and welcome to Boost Travel Affiliate Revenue Using SEO. 

I’m Sharon Gourlay, and I’m working with Travelpayouts to bring you this super informative course about how to use affiliate marketing with the power of SEO to increase your revenue. 

So in this lesson, we’re talking about quick tips and tricks to help your articles convert to affiliate commissions. Okay? Because so far, you know, we’ve talked a lot about this affiliate marketing sweet spot, we’ve covered you know, reader intent and how important that is and how you can use SEO to attract people with the intent where they already want to buy or book something. 

We’ve talked about how to write and structure your content so that you give those readers everything they need, you know. We consider the buying cycle we’ve talked about, you know, the research and comparison phases. And how we might do that in our articles. But we haven’t talked so much about the affiliate part of the sweet spot yet, and that is what we’re talking about now. 

So, we want to find affiliate partners that hit that sweet spot, okay. We’re not putting random links into our articles, okay. It’s important that they match closely and Travelpayouts is a really good network to go find lots of super relevant travel affiliates that can work well, okay?

And when you’re wondering which ones to use, you know, the ones that your audience already knows and like are usually the best choices, you know. Like if you’re picking between hotel booking sites in particular, where you’ve got lots of choices, which one does your audience use? That’s the one they’re probably going to book on. Putting a link to that is the best way to get them to convert.

But how do we put the affiliate links on the pages so that we get more clicks? Well, first of all, I would say fundamentally, is that we’re always using affiliate links to add value. Okay, the way this whole strategy works is by serving our audience, okay. We’ve talked about that since the beginning, but it’s just fundamental. We’re gonna be answering their questions, giving them the information they need to solve their problems with a handy affiliate link. They can click and buy, and they can, you know, be finished with their buying cycle. So always use affiliate links to add value. 

I would say here the wording is everything. When I had a massive change in my affiliate revenue, I pretty much went from earning nothing to earning you know money every day just by changing my wording. 

I used to just put links on hotel names for example, and when I changed it to say something more like check out the latest prices and more details – people click on it, they do what you tell them to do. Okay? If you want them to click on a link, you’ve got to tell them to click on it, you know. Remember, it’s in their best interest. It’s not being sleazy, or spammy. 

You really should experiment with how you present your links too and have them in lots of different ways. Now I’ve talked about a comparison chart already and how useful that is in the buying cycle and just to give really good content to your users, so they can compare their choices and make a decision. But it’s also actually just great, because it’s great for them, right? It’s great for you as well. Whenever I’ve tested it, I found that the links in my comparison chart make three to four times more money than any other link in an article, okay? 

It also makes a difference even how high in the article I have it, the higher in the article, the more people click and book, okay. So really super powerful, really, really helpful and that’s why it works, right? It’s helpful. 

You can also think about what you can add to already successful articles to add value and market affiliate links, you know. Like, I had an article doing really well a while ago about things to do in Hobart with kids. So I added an accommodation section. 

Now, this will never convert the best when you do this because people arrived at my article searching for things to do in Hobart with kids, right? They didn’t have the intent to book accommodation. So it doesn’t convert like an article would solely written on family accommodation in Hobart where I’m attracting all those people wanting to book it. But you know you get enough people to an article. Some of those people were looking for things to do in Hobart with kids will convert, they will click on those links. So when your articles are already successful, going a little bit sideways like this can work really well. 

I also want to consider just any other way you can add a link. You know, you could add widgets to your sites, you can get people searching themselves for their accommodation. All these things can work when you have the right audience.

So, let’s go through how we might do affiliate links in a real-life article. So, the problem is I need somewhere to stay in Perhentian Islands, a beautiful spot in Malaysia. Okay, here’s my guide, here’s my solution. I got a whole guide to where to stay. So we’re just going to switch now and take a look at this guide, and I’m going to show you how I’ve added affiliate links to it. This is a very thorough guide to where to stay in the Perhentian Islands, with lots of affiliate links. 

So you can get an idea of the structure and the contents. You know, it covers all the types of things we talked about in the last lesson that we’re going to just skip down to where I get more full-on about the accommodation part because that’s where all the affiliate links are. So I talked about that, of course, I get to this comparison chart. So we’ve got the different hotels a bit of information and, of course, those affiliate links. So this is the most clicked on part of the article. 

They go, you know, straight to Agoda, and I am using Travelpayouts links for that. And the same for these buttons. They are exactly the same, just with a bit of formatting. And then I go through the individual reviews, so I do put a link on the title of the review. But yeah, they are not clicked on very much, but that’s okay.

I also have links on the images. And then I have this “Click here for the latest price”. So after the comparison chart, people like things, so yeah that’s basically what I do as my general format, I have that comparison chart. I have the title. I have the image. And I have this “click here for the latest prices” and I basically just repeat that for all of them. 

You can always try other things too. Like you can have banner ads in there, I personally have not found they convert well, but you never know. Maybe you’ll be able to make that work, different sites have different audiences that react differently. You can have a widget you know, defaulting to searching for Bahamian islands. That way, you know, there are lots of different ways you can do it. This is the general format that I find works really well.