How a Travel Blogger Can Earn on Car Rental Affiliate Programs

Andrey Novoselov Andrey Novoselov
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Our colleagues at Localrent decided to share practical tips on how any travel blogger can earn money from car rental affiliate programs. From our own experience and the experience of partners, Localrent has put together some simple steps to success. These instructions can be used for any travel offers you, as a blogger, are trying to promote on your blog.

How a travel blogger can earn on car rental affiliate programs

Three Steps to Success With Any Car Rental Offer From an Affiliate Network

  1. Acquire personal experience. If you book a car for a trip, share your experience in a blog post that contains only your personal experience. Doing so will boost the advertiser’s credibility.
  2. Acquire external knowledge. Don’t be afraid to learn from others. Look at how the people who really know their stuff are leading their businesses — see what the successful affiliate marketers highlight on their blogs. You can also hire specialized experts to teach you all the nuances of traffic reporting and measuring, as well as other affiliate marketing intricacies.
  3. Tell about your experience in detail and attach screenshots of how to properly use the service you are advertising.
  4. Promote your post in searches. Make search engines love your article. Get into the top ten search results in response to a keyword query such as “car rental in [city name].” Yes, this is real, and it is search traffic—by both high-frequency and low-frequency keywords—that will make you profit. A website or blog will never generate a good income from the internal traffic that comes from other sections of the same site. The target customers are only people who bring real income.
  5. Develop yourself in the niche and gain a positive reputation. A one-page landing as a campaign is the most popular digital marketing option nowadays; however, in affiliate marketing, there is huge competition, and the movements have become more in-depth over time. Success here may require multiple assets building and funneling your blog to make it clear that you are an integral partner with a serious, complex approach to leading your affiliate business for the sake of ultimate success (unless you are focusing on the budget car rental affiliate program).

8 Popular Car Rental Affiliate Offers

Economybookings

This site is a platform for comparing and finding the most fitting car rental service. It prices its services very reasonably and covers over 150 countries all over the world, working with 850 dedicated companies to provide you with sufficient choices. It has been working in the market since 2008 and was established initially as a small car rental business.

Tools:

  • Links;
  • Banners.

Affiliate reward: 60% of Advertiser’s revenue from each booking. Join this affiliate program via Travelpayouts!

Autoeurope

The same as EconomyBookings, you can join the AutoEurope affiliate program through Travelpayouts.

AutoEurope is an integral player in the market with a strong focus on European customers. Available 24/7 and covering over 20,000 pickup locations, this option is a good candidate for the title of the best car rental affiliate program. It even coaches its new partners on the subjects of online sales and traffic reports.

Tools:

  • Links;
  • Banners;
  • Search form.
Search form

This leading European company offers high commissions: 5,6% commission on Europe destinations and 2.4% commission on destinations in the rest of the world. Sign up here to try it out personally and find out. Such a huge player in the market might be the best choice for you.

Localrent

Enthusiastically started in 2011, Localrent provides a wide range of rental capabilities supported by dedicated high-performance software. It pays a lot of attention to forming and constantly developing its databases and statistics to give customers efficient service. It covers 34 rental companies in total.

Tools:

  • Widget;
  • Links;
  • Banners.

You’ll get 50% of the advertiser’s revenue from each order, what is around 8% commission for each customer submission from your site if you decide to become a part of this affiliate program. You can also join the affiliate program through Travelpayouts.

Discover Cars

Discover Cars

Discover Cars is a search engine for car rentals for over 8,000 locations in 150 countries around the world, including Greece, France, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, UK and more. The company provides a wide range of vehicles for every taste and budget (from vans to luxury cars) from both well-known international brands such as Thrifty, National, Sixt, Europcar and credible local providers.

You can easily find the car you like, by specifying the desired car class, transmission, fuel type and other parameters. The company provides a special insurance cover worth $3,000 for incidents on the road.

Discover Cars affiliate program offers 24% revenue share on bookings with full coverage and 56% revenue share on general car rentals. On average, affiliates receive $18 commission on every booking.

The program is available in English, Russian, Danish, German, Latvian, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Swedish, Finnish, Turkish.

Learn more about how to earn with Discover Cars in this article.

Rentalcars.com

A large player in the market of car rental affiliate programs, Rentalscars.com offers a wide range of car rental options. The price heavily depends on the chosen option and may vary due to the extensive choices for service of type. The website works with renowned international companies in the niche. Europcar, Alamo, Thrifty, and Hertz are among them. It’s also a part of Booking.com.

With its affiliated car rental program, Rentalcars.com focuses on fitting your particular business needs. With coverage of around 47,000 locations in 163 countries and Rentalcars.com’s most serious business attitude, you can make a pretty penny with this affiliate offer.

Rentalcars.com

Currently, Rentalcars.com is switched off on Travelpayouts. You can use EconomyBookings, AutoEurope, or Localrent to become a Rentalcars.com affiliate or use its home affiliate program.

Vipcars

This company provides numerous opportunities to manage its affiliate program, including a separate customer booking page and other service and support features. It offers a 24/7 coverage for over 20,000 locations worldwide and a profitable car rental partnership.

The main tool is a dedicated API.

All that you need to employ this offer is to fill out this form, after which your submission will be reviewed. You will then be provided with a separate API to embed in the HTML code of your website. VIPCars pays you 50% of the net income per booking.

Easy Car

This car rental white label is defined by a separate Easy Car Club program—the car owner is offered the option to rent out their car and receive a commission without any additional partner fees whatsoever.

Just list your vehicle on Easy Car Club, download the app, and start earning up to £3,000 a year. The commissions are based on total revenue, and a 5% rental car affiliate commission is suggested by the website.

Holiday Autos

Holiday Autos provides rentals for over 170 countries, including the US, the UK, France, Italy, and Spain. Its affiliate offer is simple: you drive traffic to their website, and it pays you a commission through different types of available affiliates, such as content or voucher sites or cashback. You might as well sign up for this car rental affiliate white label for free and try it out yourself.

Tools:

  • Banners (leaderboards, skyscraper, full banners, )
  • Dynamic iFrame booking engine

Holiday Autos offers the ability to earn about $19 for each successful affiliate booking.

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18 Golden Rules of a Highly-Converting Article — Using a Car Rental Offer as an Example

  1. Longread. Articles with more than 8 thousand characters generate the greatest credibility among readers. There are longreads with more than 30 thousand characters, and people also read them. Studies show that people are not afraid to read long articles. That is, the more useful information the user finds in the article, the more he trusts the author, and therefore, the recommendation on where to order for a car. Trust is the engine of sales. So do not skimp on information. At the same time, you will gather maximum semantics.
  2. Objectivity. Share your experience of searching for cars to hire: international brokers, websites of local companies, and groups on social networking sites. Readers should clearly understand that you have already researched the market for them, and should see the reasons why booking from that advertiser is the best option. Write both pros and cons of each search method.
  3. Honesty. Nobody is perfect. Try to touch also on the disadvantages of the offer. For example, that there is no discount as unlike when dealing directly with a rental company or that there is no franchise insurance as unlike with international brokers. By so doing, the reader will believe in your objectivity.And do not try to pretend to be a booking site, installing a booking widget on the page that contains the article. The reader understands that you are a blogger and not a travel agency, and he is not going to buy the service from you. He only wants advice. A referral link would be the best affiliate tool for a blogger. Most readers are unaware of affiliate links or they don’t pay attention to them. By clicking on the link pointing to a specialized car rental website, they have already been heated up by your article and are ready to buy. It is through referral links in blogs that you get the highest conversion rate.
  4. Different types of content. Produce a screencast featuring the booking procedure on the advertiser’s website. Or shoot a video of how you receive a rented car. You can shoot a small movie about traveling by car.
  5. Add a map with the best car travel route. Don’t forget about personal photos showing the car and you, or the car on the backdrop of tourist attractions.
  6. Add links to trusted sites such as Wikipedia or sites of shops, restaurants, hotels and public places along the route of your trip.
  7. Multimedia content generates profit on three fronts:
    • Video can be separately placed on social networking sites to collect traffic from there to the blog. Moderators do not straight away delete YouTube or TripAdvisor links to popular travel forums. Use your video as a doorway leading to your blog.
    • Video usually carries away the reader and gives more visual information. People think in images, not in words. And the more images you give, the more pleasant the reader would be reading your post.
    • All this pumps out behavioral factors that would make search engines love your site.
  8. Comments on article. Readers’ comments indicate that at least one of them has already taken the advice. Showing your positive experience proves that the information is reliable. Do you remember the annoying notifications from Booking.com that reads as follows: “A user from Spain booked a room from this hotel 5 minutes ago”? It works! And for a blogger, comments on posts play exactly the same role as those notifications.
  9. If the comments feature not only questions, but also feedback about the service, then that’s just great. Do not ignore such a simple but effective tool. Motivate people to leave comments and feedback.
  10. Group of articles. One article will not be enough. Share car routes to sights or help readers understand the intricacies of car insurance and all the risks involved.
  11. Search engines should understand that this is not another random article, but a section of your site. If you pay so much attention to this topic, then you deserve the attention of readers and good positions in search results. In addition, the thematic semantics of such articles will attract more target audience to you.
  12. As Localrent’s experience shows, with such a group of articles, noncommercial inquiries about car routes and sights are first pulled, and then commercial inquiries to the main article are connected. The main thing is to correctly identify the link between the main article and the secondary ones. This can be done through relinking (with each secondary article, there should be a couple of links to the main article) and through nesting, hierarchy of articles.
  13. Menu item and relinking. Of course, one would like to place in the menu only the most important sections of one’s blog and the best articles. Car rental, as a rule, does not apply here. But it is through the menu of your site that search engines and the readers themselves understand the structure and theme of your site. Add an article about car renting in the site menu for at least six months, until you achieve good positions in search results.
  14. Add a link to the article about car rental in all previous posts related to the car hire region or topic. Make this material part of your site and not an advertising heading that you will be ashamed of and want to hide deeper in the site.
  15. Seeding. Let’s assume you wrote a huge article and spent many days preparing it, but no one noticed it. Yes, no one would see it until you show it.
  16. It’s bloggers that create unique and quality content, which is now of such great importance on the web. Therefore, you can in all modesty talk about your experience.
  17. Create links to your article about car hire on third-party sites:
    • Social networking websites. Place posts in thematic groups, in your groups, in your profile, leave a link to your article and in the comments to other people’s posts.
    • Video hosting. Place your videos and put a link to the article in the description of such videos. Place a link on the video itself and as a text hyperlink.
    • Consumer review websites. They just wait for your feedback. Tell how you rented the car and traveled. Rewrite individual chapters of your own article and publish them. Put a link to the article in the body of the feedback, in the signature and in your profile.
    • Forums. Moderators could sometimes be heavy-handed, but in some forums, you can still slip through.
    • FAQ sites. Search for suitable questions and provide answers to them using links pointing to the article.
  18. This includes the usual SEO mechanisms. You need relevant links to your car rental article. Take at least 5 links.
  19. Stay simple. Last but not least, make your features in the conversational format so that the readers can easily read and enjoy it without feeling ignorant on the subject or otherwise. It’s as simple as that, but also extensively efficient if you keep this tip in mind at all times. Try composing the text as if you are speaking no writing. Reading the finished features aloud may help decide if they’re uncomplicated and conversational enough.

How to Make Money on Car Rentals

It’s quite possible to earn an average of $2,000-6,000 a year on car rentals. Doing so requires the following from you:

  • Rent a car
  • Assign three to five days preparing for the post
  • Spend four days on seeding
  • Wait four to seven months until search engines assess your material–during this period, continue to create links to the article
  • Generate passive income from global or local car rental affiliate programs

There are several more ways to make money from a travel blog. You can learn them from the video below:

Using Instagram to drive traffic to your travel blog… is it worth it?