How to Boost Your Revenue With Travel Affiliate Marketing
You've built a loyal following of travel lovers. You've turned your passion into a business. Now, you’re ready to grow your revenue and help your audience. It's time to explore travel affiliate marketing.
Whether you run a travel business, write a travel blog or you’re making your name as a travel influencer, affiliate marketing can help you boost your earnings and help your audience book the best trip possible.
But if you’re not careful, using your platform as a place to promote other goods and services in the travel industry can come across as suspicious, instead of helpful. So how can you strike the right balance?
There are a lot of travel affiliate programs out there, here's how to pick the right one for your business and the best practices you need to follow to earn more commission without selling out or losing your audience’s interest.
First thing’s first: What is a travel affiliate program?
Before you rush into the world of travel affiliate marketing, learn the basics – like what is a travel affiliate program? Online Travel Agencies (OTAs), like Tiqets, set up affiliate programs to facilitate the promotion of their products and services through affiliate links or widgets. When someone buys these products or services via an affiliate link or widget on your site, you receive a commission on the product or service they purchase.
Best practices for joining a travel affiliate program
Travel affiliate marketing is only worth your time and effort when handled with care. An approach that’s too aggressive can cost you your audience’s trust, while an approach that’s too passive won’t yield results.
Keep these best practices in mind when you join an affiliate program and start promoting your affiliate partners.
1. Promote what’s relevant to your content
Nothing is more frustrating to a user than shameless marketing. Your travel affiliate marketing efforts should fit seamlessly with your content so as not to undermine your efforts. Your audience should feel like you’re sharing something that you’d use yourself, and not just like you’re trying to make money off them. Here’s how to walk that tightrope.
Use the right anchor text for affiliate links
Make sure the text you anchor an affiliate link to is consistent with where you’re taking your reader, and make it clear that clicking on that link will take them to another product or service. For example, if you’d like to direct your audience to buy tickets to a museum in Amsterdam, make sure your anchor text reflects that: “This website offers a great deal on tickets to visit this museum.”
Be intentional with affiliate links
It’s tempting to insert a bounty of affiliate links into your content to give your audience plenty of opportunities to click on and buy from one of your partners. But overdoing it on the links can compromise your authenticity and can make users doubt your motives.
Instead of writing your content and then adding in affiliate links, think about what affiliates you’d like to promote before or while you’re writing your content so that you have a few well-placed, well-thought out links instead of a bunch of loosely related ones.
If you’re using booking widgets, introduce them
A neat way of displaying affiliate products is through embedding booking widgets. Make sure you introduce the product properly and that you place the widget close to the text discussing the product.
Don’t shoehorn a paragraph or widget into your content; your audience will see through the advertisement and they won’t necessarily like it. The link between your content and whatever affiliate product you’re marketing should be solid. Match like topics with like topics so that your recommendations feel more natural and genuine to users.
Do it with Tiqets: With a mission to offer more ways to culture, Tiqets has an extensive inventory which means you have everything from museums and galleries to theme parks and observation decks to recommend to your audience. It’s easy to make sure your affiliate links are relevant to your audience when you have 3,500+ products in 60 cities around the world to choose from!
2. Know what you’re recommending
If you’re going to promote a service or product on your website, know what it is and what it includes. Not only does this make it easier to write about, but it will also help you decide if it’s the right thing to promote in your content.
When it comes to travel affiliate programs run by booking platforms, there are often plenty of options for you to direct your audience to to buy a ticket. The work is in sifting through the platforms to find the one that’s right for your content. Be on the lookout for a well-curated marketplace with high-converting pages, so that your audience can easily find and book what they want.
Once you’ve chosen the product or service to link to, try it for yourself to make the recommendation more believable and personal. If you’re not in a position to do that, do your research so that you can be more confident in your recommendation.
Do it with Tiqets: How do you know you’re recommending the right products? With the Tiqets Affiliate Portal you can check the performance of your affiliate efforts. See which products and affiliate mechanisms do well with your audience and use this to make better, more relevant recommendations to your audience as you go.
3. Promote your offer
Don’t just explain what you’re linking to – give your audience a reason to click on your link. What’s to stop your reader from opening a new tab with your affiliate’s website? Where it’s possible, give your audience a reason to click on your affiliate link or the widget embedded on your site. What reason, you ask? A well-designed banner, a discount only available through your link, an exclusive add-on, or a time-limited special offer only available through your website are all great options.
Do it with Tiqets: With the Tiqets Affiliate Portal, you can create your own affiliate links as well as your own availability and discovery booking widgets. You can also make use of our branding solutions to make an offer really stand out.
4. Be honest about your partnership
To maintain your audience’s trust and your brand’s integrity, it’s important to disclose if you get paid for purchases through links on your website. In some countries this is a legal requirement, so you’ll have to include this information. But even if it isn’t legally required, it’s good practice to volunteer this information.
You don’t have to stamp “paid partnership” in red across every piece of content you publish. A note at the end of an article or in parentheses next to a link will more than suffice.
5. Choose the right travel affiliate program
You want the products and services to which you direct your audience to match your brand and your message. Before embarking on your travel affiliate marketing journey and joining an affiliate program and promoting another company’s products and services, make sure you trust and genuinely endorse the company. If you give good recommendations, you’ll reinforce your audience’s trust.
Do it with Tiqets: With a 9.3 rating on TrustPilot and more than 18,000 reviews since 2015, Tiqets has a strong reputation in the travel industry – both with museums and attractions, and consumers.
Don’t work with Tiqets yet? Our travel affiliate program could be the one for you.
Meet Tiqets’ Travel Affiliate Program
As one of the world's largest museum & attraction ticketing platforms, Tiqets’ affiliate program is geared towards connecting travel companies and travel media with top-quality museums and attractions around the world. From iconic museums like the Louvre to hidden gems like Amsterdam’s cat museum, Tiqets offers more ways to culture for everyone.
With Tiqets’ affiliate marketing tools, you can offer top-selling tickets, drive more revenue, and grow with expert support from our team. All the tools you need can be found in the Tiqets Affiliate Portal, a one-stop-shop for your affiliate marketing needs.
Offer top selling tickets
Tiqets allows you to give your customers last-minute access & special offers to 3,500+ of the most popular museums & attractions. “For us, becoming a Tiqets partner was a game changing decision as it allowed us to successfully monetize our traffic. Our users simply love Tiqets products reflected by the high conversion rates and feedback. The implementation was really straightforward and the team provided timely support every step of the way,” says Mia Blu Missfledt, Founder of Ticket Guide.
Drive more revenue
With flexible ticketing and an industry-leading conversion-rate, Tiqets can also help you drive more revenue. “Tiqets’ partner tools are easy to use and they help discover the right product, track sales of tickets and experiences, and improve our campaigns. Besides offering some of the best commission rates in the industry, their product pages are designed for high conversions, which leads to increased earnings,” says Jammy V Rajan from TheBetterVacation.com.
Get expert support
With personalized guidance and business insights from Tiqets’ dedicated team of industry experts, you can grow your business. “Ticmate have worked with Tiqets for many years, using their platform to sell attractions, tours, sightseeing and event tickets around the world to our international customers. The cooperation has not only been good for us and our clients, but we’ve been impressed by the service level Tiqets provides, how professional they are, and how friendly they are – from management to customer service. Tiqets is one of Ticmate’s most valued and trusted partners,” says Kim Harbers from Ticmate.
Get to the know the Tiqets Affiliate Portal
The Tiqets Affiliate Portal gives you control over how you add affiliate links to your website and gives you the power to monitor how the products perform. With the Affiliates Portal, you can search for products to link to and easily select the way you want to promote those products. Here’s what you can do in the Affiliates Portal:
✓ Activate your account
✓ Check your performance reports
✓ Discover the best product(s) available for you
✓ Create your own affiliate links
✓ Create your own discovery and availability booking widgets
✓ Employ different branded solutions
✓ Check your invoices
✓ And much, much more
Working with travel affiliate programs can either be frustrating or incredibly rewarding. Make sure you’re getting the most out of your affiliate marketing efforts with good business practices and by partnering with the right programs.