Affiliate Marketing

Marketing a destination is a collaborative affair, and in our experience, tourism operators are particularly good at working together.

How it works

Online, Affiliate Marketing means establishing reciprocal content – so you include content on your site or in your newsletter about your affiliate’s accommodation or tours, and they reciprocate with content on yours. The aim is to provide readers with useful information on other accommodation or tour providers.

How you do this is up to you. Affiliates can charge one another a fee for the content, or you can work out a commission for bookings received via an affiliate site or newsletter.

Alternatively, simply work together for the benefit of achieving more traffic with the chance to convert more browsers into bookings.

Beware of simply uploading reciprocal links though. Google is now penalising websites that effectively purchase inbound links, and reciprocal links are included in this. You need to have genuine content that points to specific landing pages on your affiliate’s site, and vice versa.

The type of affiliate you look for depends primarily on the service you are providing. Usually they will provide complementary services. For example:

• a dive charter website may collaborate with a scuba-diving equipment web-store,
• an adventure tour operator might work with a local accommodation provider,
• a B&B could link to local wineries, and so on.

Affiliate Marketing works particularly well when your affiliate is viewed as a reliable source of information in your specific industry niche. If you are seen to be associated with (or recommended by) them, this adds credibility to your business.

High-ranking sites are also good affiliates for a lower-ranking site, as searchers are likely to find the high-ranking site first and then follow the links. The advantage for the higher-ranking site is adding value for their readers by bringing to their attention a good quality operator they may otherwise overlook.

Create a collaborative destination site

A collaborative destination site can work wonders in bringing attention to all the businesses involved, as it is more likely to get attention from browsers researching a full holiday in your region.

This is a great example of Affiliate Marketing at a dynamic level that helps to share the marketing load and grow the destination as a whole.

You may choose to work only with complementary businesses, but don’t be afraid to invite your competitors to contribute to a collaborative site, because a richer site will draw more attention and more visitors to the region – benefiting everyone.

This Great Ocean Road site (created by us for Tim Kottek & Yvonne Hunter) is a great example of an accommodation provider joining with other tour and accommodation providers to enrich a site that covers their region – a fantastic resource, carefully crafted using significant keywords, to attract overseas as well as local visitors.