Toronto shares Affiliate Marketing tips

Toronto Travel Massive teamed up with All Inclusive Marketing to help content creators up their game in affiliates and increase their revenue stream.

This event recap was written by Cristina Filipe. Cristina is a co-leader of the Toronto chapter and content creator at Chasing Travel. 

Affiliate marketing is by far one of the biggest advertising channels for  travel brands to acquire new customers online and generate sales.

All Inclusive Marketing is an industry leader in performance marketing for various brands in travel, lifestyle, automotive and other sectors. Their client list includes Escapes.ca, United Airlines Vacations, Southwest Vacations, Flight Centre, Sandals, Dropbox, iStock, and many others.

CEO Sarah Bundy joined us all the way from Vancouver to help us make sense of it all.

Affiliate Marketing Tips

If you own an online business or website, here are some of Sarah’s best tips for getting started in affiliate marketing:

• Make sure the brand fits with your audience.
• Sign up for the affiliate network which the brand is a part of. Apply for their program with a strong pitch about you, your platform, and what you offer.
• Focus on quality vs quantity. It’s better to create one great post rather than 10 posts of less quality.
• Create evergreen and up-to-date content as much as possible. Don’t leave expired content on your site.
• Always use deep links and make sure they are as relevant and direct as possible. Rather than sending the consumer to a main URL, linking to a specific product page is a sure way to help you convert a sale. The deeper you get, the better conversion it will be. For example, instead of linking to hotels in New Zealand try linking to hotels in Queenstown specifically.
• Test your content and posting styles. See what works best for conversion. Maybe the posts that convert better for you are top ten lists, guides, packing lists, long form, or short form posts. Test different content, visuals, channels or link placement.
• Ask the affiliate brand what their best converting products are, then use this information in your content strategy to help grow your sales.

Advice from content creators

The event also hosted a panel discussion with content creators from our community who are having great success making money using affiliate marketing. Our panel included Dave and Deb from theplanetd.com, Lauren from Justin Plus Lauren, Rain from Jauntin’, and Will Tang from Going Awesome Places. Here are some of their best tips:

• Build your audience first so that readers trust what you have to offer.
• It’s passive income but not a passive job. It takes learning, research, testing, and strategy.
• Write what you enjoy and love. There are people out there who share the same passion and will identify with you.
• Don’t speak to everyone but speak to a select few in your writing.
• If you don’t see a brand’s affiliate program, don’t be afraid to reach out and ask the brand directly.
• Rather than trying to sell five different tour companies, pick one or two companies and take the time to know the brand and genuinely experience their products.
• Don’t just tell readers to “book now”. Give a personal recommendation about the product. Tell your readers why you really love the product.
• People are lazy. Use an effective call to action such as dialogue boxes.
• Incorporate SEO into your strategy – the more traffic you have the more conversions you will see.

Affiliate Marketing FAQs

What are some of the best affiliate programs or brands in travel?
Booking.com, Get Your Guide, Amazon, TripAdvisor, CityPass.

Can you be successful without a website?
Yes! You can use other content channels and still make money. YouTube is a great platform for this. It is the second largest search engine in the world with the second largest traffic! You can add your affiliate links directly into your video descriptions on YouTube!

What are some good tools to use if you’re just starting out in affiliate marketing?

• Skimlinks and VigLink are great tools if you’re just starting out in affiliate marketing. It au-tomatically converts any links on your site into affiliate links.
• Pretty Links is a great plugin to help keep all your links in order. If you have a broken link in multiple pages of your site, the plugin will help you make changes in one place and apply it to all your pages automatically.
• Hotjar is a great tool for understanding reader behaviour using a heat map. Before you write your post, think about the behaviour of your readers and where they are clicking on the page so you can create the most effective post.

I’m a brand new to affiliate marketing. How can my brand start an affiliate program?

It takes a lot of planning and the right research to create an affiliate program. A good place to start is with an affiliate marketing company like All Inclusive Marketing which helps brands find higher performance, growth, and earning potential.

– Thanks to Cristina for sharing the event insights and to Aeryn Lynne for the photos.

👉 If you missed this talk, you’re in luck. Sarah along with All Inclusive Marketing will be hosting a Travel Massive Live Webinar. Join Sarah on July 3. Sign up for the live stream.

Follow Cristina on Travel Massive and join Toronto chapter to learn more about their future events.