Choosing the best affiliate schemes for your site
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The best affiliate schemes for your website are the ones that make the most income for you. To achieve the maximum potential income the schemes will have to link to products and services that your website visitors are interested in, to increase the chances of them initially clicking on the affiliate link and then continuing to make a purchase. If your site just looks like a jumble of flashing affiliate banners you’re unlikely to generate revenue.
Unfortunately there’s no quick, easy answer to which affiliate schemes are best for your website. You’ll have to do some research and a bit of trial and error. I’ll outline my experience of choosing and using affiliate schemes to give you some pointers in choosing the most appropriate schemes for your own website.
I have a online UK based online travel business where I use several travel affiliate schemes. They fall into 2 main categories, suppliers who run their own affiliate schemes such as Venere a hotel booking site (paying 3% commission) and Auto Europe a car hire broker (paying 10% commission) and suppliers who use an intermediary such as Affiliate Window or Affiliate Future to administer their affiliate scheme.
I find that the main difference between the 2 types of schemes is that supplier run schemes generally have a much more extensive range of linking tools. With the in house affiliate schemes I can link to a specific hotel when I write a destination guides, with a 3rd party scheme I’ll probably only be able to have a text link or a banner to the suppliers home page. The amount of commission paid varies between 1 - 10% depending on the type of product, flights generally pay the least commission 1 - 3 %, hotels vary between 3 - 10%, car hire 6 - 10%, and travel insurance around 10%. However I wouldn’t recommend that you choose your affiliates scheme soley on the basis on the highest commission. You have to look for what is the best fit with your website and remember it’s better to make 3% on 100 hundred sales of £100 i.e. £300 per month than 10% on 10 sales of £100 i.e. £100.
Although Venere only pay 3% commission for hotel bookings, they have an extensive selection of hotels in Italy, one of the most popular destinations for my clients. and I can use tracking links to specific properties. Another fairly low commission payer at 3.6% is Travelodge through Affiliate Window. However Travelodge offer great value for money, meaning you get a fair number of bookings through your link and I use Travelodge regularly myself which means I’m happy to recommend them.
Until recently I’d been happy to recommend Auto Europe, paying 10% commission, for car hire. I’d used them myself on many occasions and found they offered the best deal. Then I found another site, Economycarhire which In some cases offered a better deal but pays between 6 - 9% commission. I reckoned that as Economycarhire was cheaper for some travellers that I should go ahead and promote it through affiliate links on my site because I want to build up trust with visitors to my site and have them coming back regularly to my site making purchases.
You can see that there are many factors you have to consider when choosing the best affiliate schemes for your site. I hope that I’ve highlighted some of the issues for you to consider.
on November 9th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
Hi Karen
I am a happy Auto Europe affiliate man but I will take a look at your recommendation. I agree with you - good partnerships are based in my view on good rates and in the case of hotels availability.
When I first got into this industry I picked providers that paid the most commission and had the most amount of coverage and inventory. What I soon found out was they werent always the best when it came to conversion. I realised quite quickly that the size of the cheque rather the percentage rate was more important.
I use booking.com for my hotel product and have been very happy with them. They pay less than some others but my commission payment was much higher with them than other providers.
What I also like about using Booking is they provide good online management tools. At the touch of a button I can see visitor numbers as well as conversion rates. I can see instantly how well my site is doing.
I also like hostelworld as they provide stock at the cheaper end of the market. Not everyone can afford 3 star upwards.
on November 9th, 2007 at 10:03 pm
Thanks for your comments, John. As with most things in life, choosing the best affiliates is about balance. You want to provide appropriate and appealing products/services for your site visitors that will also bring you a decent income.
on February 8th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
[...] So far there’s no discernible drop in visitors to the site or blog and my revenue from affiliate links is steadily increasing, so let’s hope Google reinstate me [...]
on February 29th, 2008 at 10:05 am
[...] the best affiliate schemes for your site is crucial. You want to maximise revenue by using cotextual links which have a high [...]
on February 29th, 2008 at 10:34 am
[...] the best affiliate schemes for my site is crucial. I want to maximise revenue by using contextual links which have a high [...]
on April 24th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
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