Transcription
So, if you’ve probably heard about Expedia and the affiliate program they have, Expedia is one of the better websites out there, including Booking and Airbnb. So today, we're going to look at the keywords and some of the content that’s already out there and people who are already making money this way.
So, if we now take a look at my screen, you will see that Expedia is a place where you can just book your hotel stays, flights, cars, packages; it’s your usual travel site. And yeah, this just crosses off our niche list, which is, of course, going to be travel. You will find the affiliate marketing section here, so just click on it, and then you will be redirected to this place, which is the affiliate program with Expedia. As you can see, this works with Hotels.com as well. So this is going to be mainly about hotels, but I’ll tell you and show you how people are structuring their strategies. But first of all, let me show you this: you will earn up to 4% commission for every qualifying booking that is made through your site link or widget.
The reason that it says “up to 4%” is, well, it’s just going to depend on the location where your hotel stays happen, right? And 4% is a really good thing, considering that these hotels are really, really expensive—the ones that we’re going to target, anyways. So how do you join this program? First of all, you join this by clicking on this link, which is here: “Join Now.” And then all you’re going to do, just like any other affiliate marketing, you just have to share your link, and then you will get that commission. Once more, I’ll show you how other people are doing it, so you can see if you can just follow in these footsteps and earn yourself some money as well.
Now, the good thing about this one is that they will give you a lot of tools, and these are for free, right? You have all of the analytics, you have widgets, you have banners that you can use for free, so you don’t have to spend any money out there. You can just use their resources. And as I’ve told you, just click on “Join Now,” and then all you’re going to do is to fill in this information about yourself, which is your basic information, such as email address, first name, last name, and a password.
Now, as I’ve told you, we’re going to talk about keywords, and keywords are really, really important. The first one that I’ll show you now is “things to do in a certain city,” for example, like this: “things to do in Barcelona.” If you type this in, you will find many, many people out there ranking for this keyword. Now, these people are writing blogs. Have a look at this one: “The 51 best attractions and places to visit.” This is also one good keyword: “places to visit and things to do.” Now, if I scroll a bit down, you will see this: this is “recommended Barcelona’s best Airbnbs” and “recommended the best hotels in Barcelona.” So if I click on “the best hotels in Barcelona,” it’s going to lead me to another blog post of theirs where they have affiliate links. So what they do here, they just give you some general information that nowadays you can just write in ChatGPT, and down there they’ve put their affiliate links. These people work with Airbnb, but it works the same way if you want to use Expedia. This website, Timeout.com, as you can see, they’ve got 28 million visits each month, and they rank pretty good, as you can see: “The 30 best things to do in Barcelona.” They do that as well. So I think you get the point now. You have to rank on these keywords, but of course, you don’t have to write blogs only if you like to write, or if you know someone, or if you want to hire someone to write that for you, you can do that. Of course, you can use other social media platforms as well. You can use YouTube, you can use TikTok, you can use Instagram. On this Instagram page, I found this one, it’s called Travel and Leisure, and you can see they’ve got many followers, but they don’t create the content themselves; they take the content from someone else usually, and they just credit them for doing so. This one is the same, as you can see, and of course, they’ve got these affiliate links in the bios. But if you take a look here, you can see that they just take the videos from other people and then they just credit them. Now you can create the videos as well. If you just type in “things to do in Barcelona” in the YouTube search bar, you will find a lot of people who are ranking for this keyword, such as this person, for example: Camden David. As you can see, 65k views is a lot. This one, for example, they have a lot of subscribers, and they have half a million views. Yeah, they do have almost 300,000, but this person shows us that you don’t have to have a lot of subscribers, you know; you can just go and start with this one, one, and then eventually one of your videos will pop up. If I just click here on “most popular,” it says “19 tips I wish I knew before visiting Istanbul.” This is a good keyword as well: “tips and tricks” always work well, and you can see that this person has focused on that. And of course, if you watch any one of these videos, you can see that this—he’s just using the stock footage behind that; he’s not going to any of these places out there, right? There’s one more channel, which is called Travel by Three Girls, and they’re just doing affiliate marketing with Booking.com, and they just put the pictures. Now it is that easy: you just have to create some kind of content and put it out there, and you will get views, all right? So they just put pictures; they’ve got almost 10,000 subs, and also this opens up the opportunity for you to get the money from YouTube as well, because as you can see, Travel by Three Girls, they get nearly $500 from YouTube as well, and then on top of it, whoever clicks on their link and a hotel stay or something, they get the money from that as well.
A lot of people ask me, yeah, you can use TikTok as well, as you can see. You can rank for “best hotels.” Hotels are really, really good keywords out there because people are just searching for it. And for example, you can make short videos; you can use AI technology today. You know, you don’t have to like go to NYC and play out a camera and make content, right? Have a look at this: if I just type in “ChatGPT best hotels in Barcelona,” it’s going to give me the list. All I have to do now is to find a little bit more information about these hotels, but as you can see, ChatGPT nowadays gives you the links. So if I, for example, want to know more about this Hotel Arts Barcelona, I can just click on these links. This is from TripAdvisor, of course, but you can see what kind of a hotel it is; you can see the pictures. And on this one, Travel Plus, you can see that it’s a whole blog post, and everyone is doing so. Everyone of these blog posts, they just want to make money, as you can see; this is an affiliate link. Just think about it: all these blogs, they don’t care if I’m going to have a good time in Barcelona, right? They just want to make money as well, and everybody is doing that. Each one of these YouTube channels, they just make content in order to make some profit for themselves. Now, the best content creators out there give some value as well, so that is what I suggest you do as well.
If this is interesting to you, and of course you can run multiple affiliate programs on any one of these platforms, but you have to give some value to people; you know, they will respect you more. And how to do that? Well, just do the research, right? Do the things that other people are lazy to do. Because, for example, if I wanted to, I don’t know, go to Berlin, well, sometimes I don’t have enough time to do the research myself; I just want to watch a video or read a blog post. You can choose whatever you want to go, so I’ll just go and take the gist of that information from one video or something. And if I see a good YouTuber or blog post that provided me with value, well, I respect that, and it’s a good thing that that person is getting paid for it. But as I’ve told you, it has to be—well, you just have to work on it, right? You can’t just go and do everything with ChatGPT, let’s say, and just copy and paste. You got to do a little bit of research and provide some value to people, right? You will be profitable that way. It’s not going to be like $100,000 in your first six months, but it can be a great side hustle.
One more thing that I saw, and I really like this one, is that on Pinterest, for example, which has a lot of traffic, they make these vacation packing lists, and they just make pictures of this, as you can see. Now, one-week packing list, and as you can see, they put a website there. Now this serves for you to lead your—your traffic elsewhere, or you can put up your link on Pinterest as well. But I like to use Pinterest in order to move traffic elsewhere, for example, to my YouTube channel or to a blog post, which then has affiliate links in it. Now, this is really, really smart. People like these things, you know, and you don’t even have to make these yourself. If you head over to Canva.com and you just type in “vacation packing list,” you will get a lot of these templates, right? All you have to do is to change it a little bit; you know, you don’t have to do a lot. For example, let’s just click on this one. So you have to customize this template a little bit and then just download it and upload it on Pinterest. And as I’ve told you, people like these things; they just want to download these; they want to take the pictures, and they will go to your blog as well. And who knows how many people will actually click on the affiliate links that you put on your blog? Then again, if you don’t want to write blogs, go with YouTube, go with TikTok, Instagram—whatever. There’s a lot of opportunity there, but it will depend on you and how much effort you put into this. So yeah, wish you good luck, work hard on it, and I’ll catch you in the next one.