Switching to Stay22’s Let Me Allez feature this year has enabled us to skyrocket our accommodation affiliate earnings with very little initial effort. Not wanting to stand still, however, we have realigned our content strategy to take our earnings on the platform to the next level.
It’s still early days, but the results are looking superb right now. Our latest monthly figures for conversions and commission with Stay22 are 10x what we were averaging with our previous top-performing accommodation affiliate.
Here’s a screenshot of our Stay22 dashboard that I took just before the end of October, when we were able to record our first ever month of $1,000+ affiliate commission with an accommodation partner:
This isn’t a one-off, either; we’re on course for another $1,000 month in November.
Accommodation affiliates had never been a significant focus for us, and our previous best month in six years of blogging had been $288.15 with our previous top performer in October 2023. We’ve now exceeded that for five months in a row on Stay22.
So, what happened?
Getting started on Stay22: minimal effort, overnight improvements
For us, fully embracing Stay22’s suite of features would mean a switch from working directly with a major online travel agent’s affiliate platform that we had been using for years.
We were reluctant to make the move, but all it took was a little peer pressure!
By which I mean, we heard some incredible stories from blogging friends about their results with Stay22’s Let Me Allez (LMA), an AI-powered feature that optimizes how website visitors are redirected towards accommodation booking platforms.
We signed up at the beginning of March 2024 and saw a significant improvement in our results very quickly. In our first quarter using Stay22’s LMA, we made 61 conversions and earned $459.35 in booked commission, compared to 23 conversions and $195.01 commission in the same period of 2023 with our previous top performer. That’s an increase of 165% and 135% respectively, and this was only the beginning.
Here is the full picture of how our earned commission and conversions have taken off with Stay22 compared to our previous top-performing accommodation affiliate, looking at the last two years:
In August–October 2024, the most recently completed quarter, we hit 201 conversions and $2,767.46 booked commission on Stay22, compared to 51 conversions and $480.27 in the same period in 2023 with our previous top performer.
Now we are talking about commission growth higher than 400%!
It’s never possible to pinpoint exact reasons for changes in results like this. But two factors I think have been crucial are:
- Tailored experience. One of the great benefits of Stay22’s LMA tool is that it optimizes accommodation recommendations to users based on their characteristics. For example, it will redirect users to a personalized booking agent considering factors like geographic location and language. And as Stay22’s tools have learned and improved over time, our performance has grown as well.
- Tailored content. When something works, it makes sense to channel more resources into it. So, after seeing our immediate uptick in results on Stay22, we decided to review our content strategy and make some subtle adjustments, aiming to guide readers towards accommodation recommendations, and targeting those who are ready to book.
3 content tactics that have boosted our conversions
When we first created www.careergappers.com in 2018, we focused our niche on career break travel. We’d had our own transformative experience when taking a one-year sabbatical to backpack around the world, and we wanted to inspire and help others to do the same.
Travel career breaks come in many shapes and sizes, but backpacking adventures like ours of around 6–12 months are one of the most common formats. It’s hard to do this cheaply, and – like us – many “career gappers” will prioritise their big spending on experiences over logistics like accommodation and transport.
In our own case, we spent more on two bucket-list hiking adventures than we did on five months’ worth of accommodation while we were in South America.
So, in our first few blogging years (notwithstanding a pandemic interlude), we focused our affiliate strategy on big-ticket experiences. From the beginning, accommodation was a bit of an afterthought in our content strategy.
This changed somewhat after the pandemic as we pivoted and broadened our niche to focus on how people with full-time careers and permanent homes can blend work and travel. We have built new content streams on workations and business trips.
But, while we’ve done some brand partnerships with hotels, our affiliate strategy has still revolved foremostly around tours and activities.
The surge we experienced with Stay22 in spring this year prompted a rethink.
1. Prioritising accommodation in user journeys
The strategy tweaks we have made this year are nothing new or groundbreaking. In some instances we have revisited tactics that we’d experimented with a little before but hadn’t resourced properly or prioritised.
The first adjustment we have made is simply to build accommodation guides into existing user journeys.
Like many bloggers, we built our content strategy primarily on SEO. In the past, when we tried to target “where to stay in X” type keywords, we rarely found that they ranked well – so we focused more effort on things like itineraries and review posts.
Over the years we’ve built content funnels on several destinations, some with dozens of blog posts. So, we decided to go back to these and re-optimise them for accommodation, and to make sure that we are still reaching people when they’re at the point of booking.
We created neighbourhood and accommodation guides for destinations where we already had well established content clusters. While we didn’t expect much direct search traffic to these, we aimed to harness the attention of visitors already on a journey through our site by priorising them in our internal linking strategy.
We also integrated our new guides into old email funnels to bring visitors back to our site at a more optimal time for purchasing.
On top of this, we also created better signposting to accommodation recommendations in our old itinerary posts, for example by adding box-outs at the top.
The new guides we have created and the old posts we have re-optimised have provided the majority of our conversions with Stay22 in the last 2–3 months.
2. Reacting to visitor trends
For the bulk of my six years of travel blogging, my content strategy approach has been a lot more proactive than reactive. I think this may be a hangover from my days as a magazine and publication editor. I love to plan ahead.
While I am also a bit of a data nerd and enjoy delving into analytics, I’d mainly been using this to shape the type of content we produce above anything else. Oh look, our winter destination guides are doing well, so let’s make more of those.
A different approach I have found to be successful this year is to create content reactively to visitor trends. Every now and then, we get a sudden surge or spike to a particular piece of content. And when that happens, it’s an opportunity to channel visitors towards accommodation bookings.
Stay22’s AI features do a lot of this work for us. But we can also give our visitors a further nudge in the right direction.
Here’s an example. In July/August this year, we saw sudden, rapid traffic growth to two posts about a particular city. These posts – which were general travel guides – had come from nowhere to being in the top five on our site for page views.
When I noticed this, I dropped the content plan I had for that week. Instead, I created two new accommodation guides for the same city, signposting to them prominently from the two high-traffic posts. I also went back to the original posts and re-optimised them for accommodation recommendations.
When we had that record month in October, 26% of our conversions and 36% of our booked commission came from our repositioned content on this city.
3. Hyper-targeted accommodation guides
I mentioned above how difficult it is to rank in search engines for general accommodation guides. While keywords like “where to stay in X” tend to have high search volume, the competition is always very tough.
When I attended a session hosted by Stay22 at the Traverse conference in Georgia earlier this year, one idea that caught my attention was to be more specific when targeting accommodation content.
So, I decided to try it. And it has worked!
This involves targeting more niche keywords, like “hotels in X with sea views”. While keywords like these have much lower volume, they’re easier to rank for, and you are often capturing readers who are ready to make a booking (whereas general accommodation guide readers may still be in the stage of scoping out the best areas, for example).
There is also an obvious connection between this approach and our recent focus on workations. What do people on a remote working trip look for in their accommodation? Good wifi and a space to work.
So, for example, I created a new blog post recommending hotels with wifi at a destination where we had already done a workations campaign – Barcelona.
While the trickle of traffic we get to this post is fairly small, the conversion rate is high, and so is the average commission.
What next?
Now, we are stepping up our partnership with Stay22. We’ve decided to move some of our tour and activity affiliate marketing to their platform. Exciting times!
We’re also planning to invest further in accommodation content in 2025, while diversifying our traffic sources to be less dependent on SEO.
Meanwhile, I continue to be amazed at how Stay22’s AI tools can generate conversions from content that has seemingly nothing to do with accommodation. Who would’ve thought that an old guide to the best real ale pubs in my home city could lead to hotel bookings? That’s the magic of Let Me Allez.
