5 Insider Tips to Increase Affiliate Sales with Tiqets’ Affiliate Portal
Partnering with an online travel agency (OTA) like Tiqets is one of the best ways for travel bloggers and website owners to turn their passion into profit. With your original content and the OTA’s digital ticketing capability, connecting your travel suggestions to ticket purchases is a low-stakes way to make passive income. But only if you make the right connections.
A big mistake a lot of travel bloggers make is to end their OTA efforts at putting a few partnership links in place. That’s really just the first step to successful affiliate marketing. To increase affiliate sales and make a real profit from your OTA relationship, there are some proactive – but still pretty easy! – steps you can take. Read on for expert affiliate marketing tips from Steven Loncle, Product Owner Affiliate Partners here at Tiqets, on what he’s seen work well for our many partners.
Affiliate marketing tip 1: Recommend museums above all else
Of all the types of attractions Tiqets handles ticketing for, the consistent top-selling category is museums. There are others that fare well – historical buildings, zoos, aquariums, and castles being a few – but museums edge the rest out with a healthy 36% of sales.
With so many people interested in visiting museums, consider how your content might cater to that specific audience. Whether you’re writing about museums or on a museum-adjacent subject, using your affiliate tools to sell museum tickets is a smart tactical move.
This is an easy lift if you’re writing about a region that has a few key museums to feature. But what if your subject matter is quite different – for instance, the best places to watch the Tour de France? In this case, you need to get a little creative. Once you’ve written your post, use Tiqets’ affiliate tools to find museums in the places you’ve already mentioned, then weave in those museum mentions – and links.
Affiliate marketing tip 2: Ask yourself what kind of users tend to read your site
Getting people to click and buy from your travel blog or website is the goal, of course. But not every user is bound to commit to a purchase on the first read of your post. In the affiliate marketing world, we talk about two types of users: those with high intent to buy, and those still in the discovery stage.
The former know what they want by the time they get to the end of your content. They’re ready to make a purchase; you simply need to give them the easy affiliate tool with which to do so. With the Availability Widget enabled on your blog or website, your readers can pre-select the date and time they have in mind to visit a museum or attraction. This happens to be Tiqets top-converting widget, and tends to convert high-intent users who know what they want.
The Availability Widget will automatically detect the most logical language and currency for each website visitor, so you don’t have to set a preference. This creates an intuitive experience for the user, who has fewer hoops to jump through to make a purchase. Naturally, this tip works best if you already have high-intent users who have a good idea what they are looking for, and putting the widget in context is a best practice.
Pro tip: The Availability Widget works best – meaning that it has the highest conversion rate – when positioned toward the top of your page, either in the main column or in a sidebar, above the fold.
For the other type of buyer – the one still in the discovery phase of their travel decision-making – Tiqets’ Discovery Widget often works better, because it lists multiple adventures or experiences, without specific dates and times. For readers who just want to “see what’s out there,” using a Discovery Widget gives them options for what to check out next, while hopefully keeping them on your website until they’re ready to buy.
Affiliate marketing tip 3: Offer your readers passes
Single tickets are fine, but suggest to your readers that they purchase a pass to experience multiple adventures, and you could more than double your commission. Passes work particularly well for international travelers.
To see an example of a pass in action, take a look at the Tiqets Rome Tourist Card, which shows a selection of experiences within one pass:
By offering your readers one pass that will grant them access to the Colosseum, Roman Forum, Palatine Hill, the Vatican Museums, the Sistine Chapel, St. Peter’s Basilica, as well as an audio guide for the Pantheon, and more, you make their planning easier – and your profit greater.
Pro tip: Passes tend to experience the highest conversion rate when implemented on our affiliate partner websites as part of the Tiqets Availability Widget, which allows users to instantly dial in on a date and time.
Affiliate marketing tip 4: Be cool about your content
Links to ticket purchase may be an obvious moneymaker to you, but that doesn’t need to be so obvious to your readers. Adopt an organic approach to your affiliate links so they slide naturally into your content, in context, at the right moments. To increase affiliate sales you should strive for less of a “direct sales” approach, and more of a friendly nudge to your readers to buy tickets.
The way you use affiliate links should help you tell a richer and more comprehensive story. With that in mind, choose your link destinations wisely. You might create a link from a blog post you’ve written to a specific event or a landing page for a particular region, depending on the context (and the audience, read on for that tip).
The payoff for you might be commissions, but the payoff for the reader is even more valuable: They find out about an amazing experience; then they buy tickets to have it themselves.
Affiliate marketing tip 5: Recommend attractions that are proven to be popular on Tiqets
This might sound obvious, but if you want to sell more tickets, sell tickets to attractions people are already buying a lot of tickets to.
One of the best reasons to team up with an affiliate partner like Tiqets is to gain insights into this exact type of data. Because an OTA typically has many other affiliate customers, not to mention sales beyond its affiliate program, the sales data you can get from the OTA is far richer than what you might get by simply analyzing your own customers and sales.
For instance, in the product discovery app within Tiqets' affiliate portal, you can get quick insight into the attractions and experiences people are most often buying tickets to. Use the dropdown list to sort by “most popular on top,” and the attractions will automatically rank in popularity order.
Alternatively, sort “by commission” to hone in on the Tiqets products that will give you the highest commission per sale, which is another way to maximize your affiliate profit.
Pro tip: By clicking the star icon to the left of any product, you “subscribe” to that product, and will receive notification by email if the price changes.
Know your audience. Give them what they’re already looking for. And make it supremely easy for them to buy tickets right from your blog or website.