I have tried this method with different products, and still use it for various niches as part of my campaign, especially on beginning, as it is really good one to test the water and get some cash before you start to rank, and it is give ability to receive study targeted traffic for very tough terms without facing SEO competition.
Main idea is to make money out of product review blog and receive targeted traffic without facing SEO competition using free tools with mostly no investment. I have never implement it before with hotel reviews, but I cannot see reason why it should not work, you can read full method here, or bellow you can read a short version. I will personally try it as well with hotel reviews and share my journey, tips, success with you, I plan to combine this method with other traffic sources and SEO.
Make Money With Hotel Affiliate Program – Method in Short
- Build review site for high demand products, in our case popular hotels reviews.
- Using google search tools find freshly posted blog posts, press releases, forum threads, social posts around targeted keywords, live valuable comment with link to your site, get targeted traffic, monetize with hotel affiliate program. This way you direct visitors to your site who is already interesting to buy product you target.
Make Money With Hotel Affiliate Program – Step by Step Guide
Pick domain for hotel review site
Ideally it is short, catchy and easy to remember name, sometimes you will not be able to live full URL with comment due to moderation and site rules, but you can mention your domain name without extension. When you find good name check if there is no product or company with same name, you want be first in SE when your website name is googled.
If you target single distention, country, special treatment hotels you can include it in your domain name. It can be pain and take some time before you find good domain. You can go with brand new domain, make research and if you can find expired domain with good metrics, back links, and clean history which feeds your niche, it will be better choice.
I will not go into details about how to build website itself, if you are here, you probably know how to setup basic WordPress blog and buy domain and hosting, if no you can find many tutorials on official website or on YouTube.
Picking Theme for hotel review site
You can go with any product review theme or find good travel template which feed your needs, do not forget you are building hotel review site, main monetization source will be travel affiliate programs, check if you can have good ad placement within chosen template, by the way with travel payouts hotel affiliate program, you can customize appearance and size of widgets to perfectly feed site via visual redactor.
Picking right hotels for hotel affiliate program
For this method you need to find popular hotels with good amount of monthly searches, and with good amount of monthly bookings.
- Visit major hotel booking sites, list hotels by popularity, most booked, recently booked etc. Collect most booked hotels, filter by countries and language to find hotels within your targeted audience.
- Scrape hotel list from booking.com or collect manually. Watch How to Scrape Hotel List from Booking.com using python and Selenium WebDriver.
- Add list to Google Ads Keyword planner to check search volume, save file and sort hotels by search volume, delete terms with low monthly searches.
- Check SEO competition for remain list and divide them into two groups easy to rank and high searched hotels, you can SEO easy to rank hotels and use alternative traffic sources for the hotels with high competition.
Use Google Search find recent posts about niche you target, comment with link.
You can use google search to generate good amount of real targeted traffic to your site. Just search for your keyword in google, in our case most like it will be hotel name, put it in quotes, and click on “search tools” button right under google search bar, within the search tools change “Any Time” to last 24 hours and choose to “sort by date” this way you will get recently posted results.
Put your keyword in quote – start with most searched hotels
Change “Any Time” to last 24 hours and choose to “sort by date”
Visit links one by one read post and live well written valuable comment and live link where possible to hotel review on your site or mention at list your site name. As you will get only recent activities in many cases you will be one of first commentators, in most of forums and blogs you comment will stay on top, right after blog post all the time.
You can search for posts from specific site, within travel niche you can scrape big travel forums for targeted keywords.
Just search in google site:tripadvisor.com/facebook.com/forumname.com “You keyword”
Try to comment on as many sites you can, spend some time writing comment, don’t just post your site link around, write something on topic and suggest to read review or informational post on your site on the end.
Setup Google Alert notification – You can setup google alerts with targeted keywords, this way you will receive notifications every time something new posted and indexed by google, best thing you can do is to be first one to comment, in most of forums and blogs you comment will stay on top all the time.
- Don’t just spam around, add something valuable into your comment, and engage people to click on your link.
- Target first most searched hotels (keywords).
Put some thought into each reply you make, and try to customize it to directly relate to the post you are responding to. This not only helps you get a better response, but it allows you to fly under the radar of website owners and moderators.
Example of comment: We had good vacation with my family at “hotel name” Very friendly and efficient staff at check in. Comfortable and spacious bedroom but bath very high to step in and out of to have a shower would have preferred a shower only room. Breakfast choice good, but overall hotel looks a bit different from what is advertised, I suggest to read this review (link to hotel review on your site), it is close to true and pictures very good shows atmosphere.
For popular hotels you will find a lot of google results, they all will be different type new blog posts, forum posts, press releases, question and answer sites, hotel reviews, videos. Sure not all sites you visit will give ability to post direct link to your reviews, you can try to live your site name.
Remember, the more products you review, the more traffic you can generate. When you get rolling this directly translates into more sales and profit for your business.
Additional Traffic Resources to Push Travel Affiliate Program
Social Networks
You can receive ton of traffic from social networks by sharing nature, romantic, funny pictures and videos, you can get a lot of attention and targeted visitors to your site, wild nature, worm beaches, beautiful places, extreme sport videos and girls in bikini always get a lot of likes, shares, reposts.
Find related groups, posts and share link to any informational article on your site, it is way better than to link direct to review, you can write and share article about your vacation on popular “travel experience sharing blog” and link from there to review on your site, link from popular travel site rarely will be blocked.
To automate posting in social networks you can use tool called buzzbundle, it is very handy tool give ability to manage all social networks account under same tool, comment, posting, read news etc. around several social networks. What is really good function is brand mentions, every time someone will talk about keywords you target you will receive notification and you can join conversation right from software. You can Download free buzzbundle version and test it.
Instagram/Pinterest/flick/other photo sharing sites
People travel to see something new, beautiful and wild, you can get study income of traffic by posting images from your targeted destination and hotel, famous tourist attractions, sunsets. People subscribe to travel group’s very easy, follow people within your niche, and comment under related posts.
Travel Social Networks
Another way to receive super targeted traffic and to make mostly instant sells is to register, share, be active and answer people questions on travel related social networks and community, I know people who run them travel business by using only third party sites and applications to find clients, Let’s look closer to some of them and see how they can benefit us.
Video Upload Sites
Grab hotel images, destination images, more better (look for pics without watermark), download copyright free music (you can use YouTube music), using your favorite video editing software create videos from images, upload to YouTube, optimize for keywords.
You can grab someone else videos and upload them to different accounts, you can film yourself giving advices to travelers or simply order from Fiverr. I don’t want to go into a lot of details about YouTube competition research and video ranking on this post, but don’t forget about basics (optimize titles and description and tags for your keyword, add slowly some high retention views, some comments and likes, post your video around some forums and blogs and add some quality backlinks, share via social) and you will start to receive views naturally. You can check famous travel bloggers channels to get an idea. Upload your videos to other video sharing sites.
Search Engine Traffic
Plenty of people have made money without SEO traffic with this method, if you choose this route you can use any articles for review, you can even copy reviews from other sites. You can generate traffic by continuously posting comments on freshly created posts and through social networks, as explained above.
By investing a little bit more time or money for unique and well written content and images and proper onsite optimization, you will avoid copyright issues and create good fundament for SEO. Your hotel reviews shouldn’t sound standard, you can use sense of humor, deeper knowledge, and write reviews from first person as you have been there personally.
Don’t forget to write informational and advice style articles around hotel keywords, something like: Top 10 family resort + your targeted destination (ytd), Best resorts for family vacation, luxury hotels + ytd, Hotels with best beaches etc., use keyword planner to find most searched terms.
Search engine traffic is high converting and after you rank top it is constantly bringing targeted visitors to your site without spending much money. As we target hotel reviews some keywords will be really hard to bit, as you will compete with big hotel reviews and booking sites, if you face keywords like this try to find long tail version of it, out of list you will find hotel keywords quite easy to outrank, even if you rank 4-5 after big sites, you will still receive good amount of traffic as many people will skip them looking for genuine information.
Beauty of this method that you building links from day one without noticing it, by living comments, forum posts, social shares with link to your site, with some additional SEO you can rank for good keywords.
This method is perfect to build long term stable way of income, you can see results withing first weeks and with constant work you have different streams of targeted traffic. If you apply this method to travel niche you have endless hotels and destinations to target.
So register at Travelpayouts.com if you are not with us yet. The registration is free and fast. We provide a lot of tools to monetize travel traffic and the best support you’ve ever met. There are other programs, you can compare and choose the best:
