Being a travel blogger means you have to juggle many tasks. From creating social media content to publishing articles, looking for collaboration opportunities and sending out emails to your subscribers, you need to set priorities and constantly test what works and what doesn’t.
A key step to becoming a successful travel blogger is finding what brings you the highest return on investment. Not everything you do will yield good results, and your job is to identify the aspects of your business that are worth your time.
Affiliate programs, like Stay22 are some of the best ways to make money early on in your blogging career, because they can generate income every time someone makes a purchase through your website.
Stay22 allows bloggers to embed clickable links in their content and make commissions on hotel reservations while they are asleep. But there’s a catch. To make money, you need to know how to place your affiliate links strategically and target the right keywords in your content.
In this article, we go over how to make the most of Stay22 by optimizing your content for affiliate keywords, and balance your priorities, so you can make your travel blog a thriving business.
Balancing your priorities as a travel blogger is not easy. Besides your website, you have many other platforms to build your audience and generate revenue. Many new bloggers try to be everywhere at the same time, which is difficult, especially when you are just starting out and have to do everything by yourself.
Instead of trying to be present on all platforms, focus on 2-3, so you don’t spread yourself too thin and have time to build up your audience.
Remember that your blog is a core of your business, so spend most of your time on it. While social media like Instagram, TikTok or Facebook are great for building your brand awareness, they offer little value when it comes to boosting your website traffic. Most of them are meant to keep users from leaving, and you don’t have a lot of leeway when it comes to diverting your traffic to your website.
Most social media platforms are subject to algorithm changes, which means your engagement rate could disappear overnight because of an algorithm update. In recent years, Instagram has rolled out several updates which caused growth stagnation and poor engagement rates for bloggers in many niches, including travel.
That’s why you should never put your eggs in the same basket, aka social media.
The key difference between your website and your social media is that you simply don’t own the latter, whereas you have complete control over your blog. That being said, your website is subject to Google algorithm updates, which rank websites on the quality of their content to ensure that their content is helpful to users.
In September 2023, Google rolled out the Helpful Content Update (HCU), which negatively impacted many travel bloggers.
The algorithm was supposed to weed out spammy content that provided little to no value to readers, but some have argued that it achieved just the opposite, with many bloggers losing a huge chunk of their traffic, and revenue, while their content adhered to the best SEO practices.
Meanwhile, social forums like Reddit, and TripAdvisor, have seen a big bump in traffic. If you have done any keyword research over the last year, you probably saw that they often rank at the top of the search engine, well above reputable blogs and websites with high-quality, informative articles.
As a result, many have questioned Google’s practices and resorted to alternative traffic and revenue sources. Stay22 has become a top source of revenue for many travel bloggers, including myself, as it offers an easy way to embed user-friendly clickable links throughout your content.
Google has recently lost a big antitrust lawsuit, stating that it has used illegal practices to monopolize the search engine space and push out competitors like Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo.
The company said that it plans to appeal the decision; but some believe the court ruling could signal a shift in Google’s dominance over other search engines.
If your website could fall out of grace with Google, and your social media engagement rates drop overnight because of the algorithm shift, how do you build a reliable business in the travel industry?
The answer is income diversification.
Many travel bloggers rely on their ad networks for revenue, which is a solid strategy, considering how lucrative networks like Mediavine and AdThirive can be. But the truth is it’s only one of many ways to make money in the travel industry.
You can (and should) generate good income with affiliate programs, even if your traffic is still too low to apply for leading networks where publishers earn thousands of dollars in monthly revenue.
Affiliate programs allow you to make a percentage of sale, every time someone makes a hotel reservation, books a car or buys hiking gear through your website. And the best part - there’s no cap on your earnings, meaning that you can make a full-time income from affiliate sales alone.
Stay22 is my favorite affiliate program, which helped me to maintain my blogging income, after Google update in 2023, which caused me to lose thousands of monthly sessions.
I run two websites, the Discovery Nut, an adventure travel blog and Explore Baja California, a niche blog, and my affiliate income has been the most stable part of my revenue, after my traffic took a dip last fall.
Stay22 is very easy to install on your website, and once you embed the code, you can start earning affiliate income from your posts. The program also offers a variety of features that allow you to embed links in your articles and make them pop.
I switched to Stay 22 in March 2023, after using Booking.com for a few years. All you need to do to start using Stay 22 is embed a code in your website and copy and paste links in your content.
Stay 22 works with several affiliate programs like Hotels.com, Expedia, VRBO, Booking.com, and TripAdvisor. It also offers a 30 percent commission - much higher than many popular affiliate programs for travel bloggers.
Generating money with affiliate programs takes time, effort and constant tweaking. It’s a continuous process, where you have to do the work to figure out what works and make frequent changes and adjustments.
If you want to make money with affiliate marketing, you need to place your affiliate links strategically throughout your content, making them easy to find and encouraging your readers to click on them.
Besides knowing where to place your links, you need to write a good copy that’s clear, concise and engaging - your readers should be informed and entertained by your content.
For best results, write articles that promote only products listed on affiliate platforms. For example, if you want to maximize your earnings with Stay22, consider writing articles like 10 best hotels in X destination, or where to stay in X destination.
These types of articles have a direct buyer intent, as users are likely to search for this specific query. If readers come across your post, you have a high chance of making a sale, because your article addresses their needs.
The key here is to have a good balance between affiliate (aka promotional) articles and informational articles (regular blog posts about things to do, activities and restaurants in a specific location). If you have more promotional than informational articles on your websites, your readers might see you as less trustworthy, because all you do is try to sell things.
A good strategy is to embed affiliate links throughout your informational posts in a way that helps your readers learn new information and plan their trip at the same time.
You can recommend a hotel that you like in a specific city, or a guided tour for a place that’s not possible to visit on your own. When you weave your suggestions seamlessly into your story, readers are more likely to trust you and buy from you. And when you build that trust, your one-time readers could also come back to your website or become your email subscribers.
To maximize affiliate earnings, you need to optimize your content for search engines (aka implement best SEO practices) and address your reader’s questions.
Once you find what works for your travel blogging business and create a strong, consistent revenue, it’s time to scale your business. If you make enough money from Stay22, hire a writer to produce more affiliate articles, so you can fast-track your growth and focus on other aspects of your business.
Producing content takes time and effort, and having someone do it for you could free up the time that you could use to focus on other aspects of your business. While a freelancer takes care of your affiliate posts with the keywords you provide, you can build an online course on how to make a stable income with affiliate posts and expand your business even more. As your business keeps growing, you can hire more staff and help more aspiring travel bloggers to make money. It’s a win-win for everyone.
I hope this article provided you with helpful tips on how you can build and scale your travel blog. Affiliate marketing is only a part of a successful blogging business, and you should always explore new opportunities to make extra money. Whether you want to focus on affiliate marketing, explore social media collaborations or build your own course, remember that income diversification is a key to a successful blog.