Travel Affiliate» Affiliate Marketing for the Travel Industry

Blue Chip Vacations Affiliate Incentive

Rob — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:53:55 +0000

I’m in affiliate heaven at the moment… Here’s another interesting incentive for travel affiliates to get stuck into. This one is from the Blue Chip Vacations affiliate programme which you can find at Affiliate Window. By the way, any views on the strength of the UK holiday market in 2010 ?, from what I have seen so far the air inclusive beach holidays are having a bit of a comeback.

Now over to BCV with news of this cool incentive to win a holiday in Newquay

Up for grabs this month:

• A 3 night stay for you and 5 guests
• A cruise around Fistral Bay in a Zapcat
• Access to the VIP area on Fistral Beach
• Lunch on race days at Fistral Blu

With a once in a lifetime holiday experience on offer, there has never been a better time to start driving your Blue Chip Vacations sales! The legendary Zapcats Grand Prix comes to Newquay this April, and one lucky affiliate will be a VIP attendee! We’re offering a money-can’t-buy prize, including a luxury 3 night break for you and up to 5 guests, a chance to mingle in the VIP area and meet the racers, and we’re even throwing in a chance to be driven around Fistral Bay, cutting through the waves on a Zapcat! Plus, enjoy a meal at the charming Fistral Blu as you watch the action unfold on race day. This is a fantastic experience, a great spectacle on what promises to be a fantastic weekend away!

To qualify, simply make a sale for a Newquay property before 09.04.10. The competition will take the form of a prize draw, with one sale equating to a ticket in the draw- so the more sales you make, the better your chance of winning! We’ll be releasing a fresh set of creatives to help you publicise the event, and a similar competition for our customers will run in conjunction with this to help raise awareness. A dedicated landing page for this offer has also been created to aid your promotions, which can be found on our Blue Chip Newquay website.

More on this one at the BCV affiliates blog.

Post from Rob Barham's: Affiliate Marketing for the Travel Industry blog.

Blue Chip Vacations Affiliate Incentive

Jet2 Affiliate Incentive

Rob — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:32:13 +0000

Nice Opportunity here from the Jet2 affiliate scheme at Affiliate Future…..

Jet2holidays.com are pleased to announce the launch of their fantastic affiliate incentive, to win a place on their 5* trip to Paphos, Cyprus.

The Prize – Win a holiday to a luxurious 5* resort in Paphos, Cyprus

5 lucky winners will be whisked away for a fabulous week’s holiday to Paphos, Cyprus staying at the luxurious 5* Asima Suites Hotel on a half board basis. Winners will also be invited to take part in a ½ day excursion to view some of the other hotels in the Constantinou Bros luxury hotel chain in Cyprus.

How to Win

We understand that every affiliate site is different and to give everyone a fair chance of winning, we are launching 5 different incentives, to suit all needs. Promotion period runs from 18th February until 11th of April.

1 – Most Sales delivered – This ones simple if you have delivered the highest amount of sales you win!

2 – Every sale into a hat, giving anyone a chance to win

3 – Best improved affiliate during the time period (based on conversion)

4 – Best use of Jet2holidays.com resource to create a site promotion

5 – Affiliate Lottery – Affiliate who delivers 50th sale in the time period

Post from Rob Barham's: Affiliate Marketing for the Travel Industry blog.

Jet2 Affiliate Incentive

Affiliate Incentive from DFDS

Rob — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 20:03:03 +0000

Nice incentive here from DFDS Seaways.

There are eleven prizes up for grabs for affiliates that generate sales and / or add content for DFDS Seaways whose affiliate programme is available on both Buy.at & Tradedoubler. Here’s the prizes :

Bang & Olufsen BeoSound5 (worth £4500) – 1 Prize Draw entry per Sale during promotion period

5 x 12 Month Spotify Subscriptions (worth £120 each) – 1 Prize Draw entry per new piece of DFDS Seaways related content added to site(s)*

5 x 12 Month Spotify Subscriptions (worth £120 each) – 1 Prize Draw entry per sale, if you did not make a sale in 2009 or you join our affiliate program during the promotion period.

The sales period for the comp finishes on 28th Feb.

I like this incentive because firstly because the top prize is excellent and also because there is a chance for everyone to have a go.

Post from Rob Barham's: Affiliate Marketing for the Travel Industry blog.

Affiliate Incentive from DFDS

Opodo Affiliate Programme

Rob — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 10:21:22 +0000

Just a quick one to say that the Opodo affiliate programme is closing on Tradedoubler and will be popping up on Affiliate Window instead. Nice WIN for AWIN who are building up a nice collection of travel merchants including BA, LowCostHolidays, Blue Chip Vacations and Hoseasons.

Last date for changing the links is 1st March. Nice to have a bit of notice for a change !

Post from Rob Barham's: Affiliate Marketing for the Travel Industry blog.

Opodo Affiliate Programme

Wordpress Tweaks

Rob — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:32:20 +0000

I have found myself helping more and more people with their first wordpress sites recently so as I am doing a new site myself right now, I’m just going to note down some of the steps I go through when taking a boxfresh install of wordpress and making into a holiday selling machine!

Hope this helps someone, if you are wordpress ninja let me know anything I have missed!

Delete (”trash!”) the first post “Hello World” which also takes care of the first comment.
Either trash the default about page or add something to replace the default text.
Change permalinks – under the settings menu. – be aware of any requirements that some plugins or datafeeds might have for permalink structure.
Upload and activate your chosen wordpress theme under the appearance menu.
Start installing some of these recommended wordpress plugins.
Look at the privacy menu under “settings”. Decide whether you want to hide your site from search engines until it is ready.
Delete the default links from the links section.
Set-up Askimet to ensure you will get less spam.
Under settings / writing, increase the size of the post box to 15 or more, and oh, while your there add these extra ping services under Update Services :

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://bblog.com/ping.php

Hope this helps. I will try and add to the post as I go through the latest site I am working on.

Post from Rob Barham's: Affiliate Marketing for the Travel Industry blog.

Wordpress Tweaks

Removing affiliates from affiliate programmes

Rob — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:33:50 +0000

Removing Inactive & Low Volume affiliates

Not really sure the wisdom of this ?… (see below email I have copied), maybe someone that manages affiliate programmes can enlighten me. I can see that it might make some statistics look good but otherwise can’t see the worth in the time it must take to sort this out… Especially when you consider this is the only email I have ever had from the merchant since joining. What I’m thinking is, there are many reasons why an affiliate hasn’t promoted a merchant significantly – most commonly that they simply haven’t got round to it I guess. This doesn’t mean, however that they never will do, so why waste the time having people re-applying etc. Wouldn’t it be a better use of time and resource to ask affiliates why they are not currently promoting and if there is anything they need to help them promote the merchant better ?

PS – 2 days notice to remove links is also a bit annoying.

Dear Affiliate,

The XXXX Affiliate team have analysed the performance of publishers during XXXX’s 2009 Financial Year (Oct 08- Sep 09) with an eye to clear the database of affiliates who were not generating many impressions or unique visitors.

We have noticed that your site is one of those that has not met these criteria. We will therefore be de-activating your account by 27th January 2010.

If you are still interested in being part of the XXXX Affiliate program, please re-apply to join the programme at any time.

Also, if your performance has boosted since October 2009 please let us know as soon as possible so we can ensure that you are able to continue on the programme.

Post from Rob Barham's: Affiliate Marketing for the Travel Industry blog.

Removing affiliates from affiliate programmes

NOW Is the season to be jolly

Rob — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 21:59:58 +0000

Well, Christmas isn’t normally that kind to travel affiliates, who contrary to most other types of affiliates see a drop in traffic and conversions in December. January 2010 has been great though…

High Basket Values – It’s normally families booking and often for school holidays so it’s not unusual to see £2000 bookings coming through.
Increased Traffic – Simply the searches go through the roof compared with the preceding months. I love it.
Good Conversions – Normally travel sites don’t convert that well. Customers search and search but in January most sites have strong call to action and time limited offers so conversion improves.

As far as I can tell from my little patch, 2010 is shaping up to be a great year for the (beach) travel industry, unless they go and do some crazy capacity increases, but I reckon that will also be under control and helped by the big four becoming the big two. My guess is that :

The snow helped. It was pretty cold there for a while, which can really drive bookings.
Low interest rates helped. Even if we don’t exactly have consumer confidence back 100%, the low interest rates probably helped people whack a fortnight in Cyprus on their Mastercard.
People are more happy than ever to convert online (and call centres can end up with calls queueing), Moreover, certain holiday companies are better than ever at converting their traffic online with less people reverting to the phone.

Post from Rob Barham's: Affiliate Marketing for the Travel Industry blog.

NOW Is the season to be jolly

My Blogs are getting spammed by travel companies

Rob — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 21:58:45 +0000

Below are four sites that have been spamming my travel websites recently. I expect the holiday companies concerned don’t know about this directly but have hired an SEO agency to do this “work”. The comments left have all been vaguely on topic but not directly related to my original posts so I suspect this in automated process they have set up. On many of my sites I have now disabled comments which is a shame as it is a good way to get direct feedback from real customers but I just found it was too much work to moderate and the percentage of spam was high.

1) ocean-florida.co.uk – On page 1 of Google for the term they have in the anchor text in the links they are leaving in the blog comment so maybe this sh*t does work… Also what’s with the link to a poker site in the footer ?. I reckon they could improve their SEO by getting rid of that !

2) packyourbags.com – Have only made it to page two for the term “Cheap holidays to Turkey” that they were spamming me with but are on page one for “Cheap holidays to Greece” which is another one they have been trying to get their links down for.

3) beatthebrochure.com – Connected to the Florida website and also features the same poker site in the footer. Again this site ranks for the Tenerife Holiday term they have been spamming my sites with.

4) goldtrail.co.uk – Bit of a strange one here, the link they have been trying to get down is cheapaccommodationsinturkey (yes, all one word). It hasn’t worked particularly well for them but if you do search Google for it you can see all the places they have managed to get their comment and link published.

Post from Rob Barham's: Affiliate Marketing for the Travel Industry blog.

My Blogs are getting spammed by travel companies

Now I can Retire

Rob — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 12:12:17 +0000

Great News in my inbox just now . . . .
Happy New year,

This mail is to remind you of your registered package.Content: Bank Draft of
$800,000 USD and some
end of year gift items. Officially registered by your colleague who is
currently undergoing Survey project with Nigeria National
petroleum Corporation.
For your information the VAT and COD have been paid. The only payment you to
make is for Customs Clearance Form charge of £210 GBP.
Please Contact FedEx Delivery Department Mr. Richard Raynor for shipment
details and requirement.
Email: fedex.service_@live.com Tel: +2348071208793.
It is mandatory to reconfirm your Postal address and telephone numbers for
urgent Service.
Full Name:
Address:
City:
State / Province:
Phone:
Country:
Always at your service.
Yours Faithfully,
Mrs. Nucleo joaima
©Federal Express Corporation
All rights reserved. © 1995-2010 FedEx.

Post from Rob Barham's: Affiliate Marketing for the Travel Industry blog.

Now I can Retire

No related posts.

Who paid my mortgage this year

Rob — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 22:54:55 +0000

HAPPY NEW YEAR !

As promised when I did the snapshot of a months affiliate earnings by network here is the % breakdown for my sites for the full year 2009.

Non Network – 42% – A whole mix of things ( including some non travel stuff ). Bit of an eye opener it is such a high percentage. The downside with affiliate schemes that are run in house and not via a network is that you have to reach the payment freshold before you can start to cash out, also can mean more messing about with invoices but the upside can be that you earn more when the network isn’t taking a cut!

Commission Junction – 18% – Mostly thanks to TUI Travel Companies but a range of stuff including skyscanner which is small amounts each day but all adds up!.

Affiliate Future – 14% – Mostly thanks to the Sunshine affiliate scheme which is off to a blinder already for 2010.

Euroads – 11% – Mostly thanks to Cimber Sterling. This will probably be less important next year as they have cut their UK capacity a lot.

Affiliate Window – 6% – Diverse earnings. Nothing stands out.

Tradedoubler – 6% – Mostly thanks to First Choice which is now at CJ.

Adsense – 2% – Don’t do much of this as have tested versus earnings via affiliate schemes.

Amazon – 1% – Don’t do much of this but I wish travel sites could convert like this one !

Post from Rob Barham's: Affiliate Marketing for the Travel Industry blog.

Who paid my mortgage this year

Which Affiliate Networks Pay My Mortgage?