Business Blog Boost

I love the HotelsCombined affiliate scheme because it makes money for me and it’s a great resource for my site visitors enabling them to quickly and easily find a great deal on hotels through a price comparison facility.

Finding the best affiliate schemes for your site is crucial. You want to maximise revenue by using contextual links which have a high utility value to your site visitors leading to a high click through rate.

I rate the HotelsCombined affiliate scheme as excellent because:

1 I can personally endorse the site through frequent personal use.

2 It’s a useful resource to my site visitors who are going to shop around for the best deal, so why not on my site.

3 A vast array of easy to use affiliate tools.

4 You can choose which commission structure suits you.

5 One year cookie so you can earn commission for longer.

6 Good back up support.

I first used HotelsCombined as a consumer to search for the best accommodation deals for my own business and leisure stays. The site searched over 30 accommodation suppliers such as Bookings.com, Octopus, Laterooms and Venere, There’s usually a wide choice of accommodation with some real bargains, so it’s a great resource for travellers. Whenever I’m thinking about a trip, HotelsCombined is my first port of call in my quest to find the best hotel rate.

I noticed HotelsCombined had an affiliate scheme so I decided to sign up. It’s a great asset to have a hotel price comparison site on my travel site as I know that visitors are going to shop around for the best deal, so if I provide that facility on my site, visitors are more likely to stay on my site and perceive my site as a useful resource.

The affiliate tools are extensive, you can make country, city or hotel specific search boxes to add to your site or construct links to any page on the HotelsCombined site. It’s really useful as an affiliate to have such a variety of links to use contextually on your site which I believe lead to a much higher click through and purchase rate than flashing banners.

You can earn commission in two different ways. You can elect to receive a 70% of the average click through fee paid to HotelsCombined by suppliers in their database. which averages 42 cents per click. The other option is to receive commission through your direct relationship with the suppliers in which case you don’t receive any click through fee. This option isn’t yet available for all suppliers. You have to judge which commission model is most profitable for you. It’s easy to change the commission settings you just have to type in your affiliate tracking number, so you can experiment.

The other great thing about HotelsCombined is that their cookie last for one year, which could generate a fair income from frequent travellers.

I’ve contacted HotelsCombined a couple of times with queries and have received helpful replies within hours. It’s really good to have the back up of good customer service.

My only criticism is I’d like there to be the possibility of a direct relationship with all the accommodation suppliers. I’ve requested an affiliate search box which fits in the margin and was told they will look into developing one soon.

So if you’re looking for a great affiliate scheme for a travel related site I’d recommend HotelsCombined.

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I have to admit that I’ve overstretched myself. My Google Pagerank for my travel site has nosedived from 5 to 3. I assume due to the fact I’d written some sponsored posts for my travel blog had some TextLinkAds and some paid links in the main site. I’ve added the “nofollow” to the paid links and resubmitted the site and blog to Google accompanied by a grovelling note listing how I’ve amended my bad ways. I vaguely read about the new Google policy but didn’t pay enough attention to it. I found it devastating to lose my Pagerank which took me five years of hard graft to attain. 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 soon.

My Technorati ranking for my travel blog has dropped to around 140,000 although I’ve 54 links and a few months ago I was in the top 100,000. I think the drop is a combination of more blogs competing for top rankings and the number of people favouriting the blog also dropped as the faves are only valid for one year.

I was rather bogged down at the beginning of this year with the implementation of the Content Management system to my site. My son did all the technical site but there was still a lot of work for my to do transferring the content. The destination guides all came out of alignment and I wanted to try inserting my own ads in the margins.

I’ve also had a lot of work in my “day job” as a freelance social research interviewer. There was a lot of work on offer at the end of last year to meet the annual interview targets and this year there is a big survey in my locality. It’a an ongoing dilemma for me as to whether or not I should ditch the day job and just concentrate on the business.

I haven’t written regular posts for Business Blog Boost, partly due to lack of time and partly due to the feeling that I could hardly give advice to aspiring business bloggers with a pagerank of zero.

I’m feeling more optimistic now as my travel blog was highly rated by Bloggedout and I’m been invited to attend a Travel Bloggers Summit in Berlin next month. I’ve started to get more links through my participation in blog carnivals.

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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.

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Today, the 22 October 2007, is the first birthday of the my travel business blog.  A good time for evaluation and reflection.

1st Birthday Cake by PinkCakeBox

I looked back at the my second blog post, “Novice Blogger” where I stated that the aim of the blog was to increase awareness of my travel business without a large marketing budget. I think I’ve achieved this as the number of visitors to the site has more than doubled as have my turnover without any increase in expenditure. However it’s impossible to say exactly how much of this is attributable to the blog as I’ve been writing and publicising more destination guides on the main site. I also installed Google Adsense a year ago which has increased my revenue.

The blog made it into the top 100,000 of the Technorati rankings in September 2007, not bad, considering here are millions of blogs out there. However it has slipped a bit since then.

I’ve spend an enormous amount of time and effort on growing the blog. It’s been on the whole interesting and enjoyable writing for the blog. I was inspired to start this blog, Business Blog Boost, in June 2007, to offer advice and tips on blogging to boost your business to other small business owners, based on my experience creating and growing the travel blog.

I suppose one measure of the success of the travel blog is that I’m now making a bit of extra cash by writing sponsored posts. The best paid so far has been $30 for ReviewMe but the most regular is Blogsvertise which pays between £10 - $20. I know it’s hardly a fortune and I do have concerns about sponsored posts undermining the integrity of the blog.

Well, onwards and upwards, I’ve to keep focused on writing quality content for the blog, so it can keep boosting my travel business. What’s been your experience of blogging for your business?

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If you’re a Amazon affiliate it’s now easy to add a Amazon widget to your blog sidebar. There are several types to choose from.. In the Recommended Product widget below I specified books with the term “business blog”.

I’ve also added a banner widget with the books and the search term “travel Europe” to my travel blog. Initially I tried the self optimising widget on my travel blog. However as the most recent post was about airport parking, the links in the widget where to books about airports. Yon can choose from different sizes of widgets and play around with the colour palettes.

You have to play around a bit to see what works best for your blog but obviously the more contextual the links the more chance you have of readers of your blog clicking on the links and going on to make a purchase which will earn you commission.

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With the benefit of hindsight and experience blogging for my business, here’s my list of 10 ways to improve your business blog. You have to bear in my mind that I author a travel blog as part of my main website. The blog is self hosted using the Wordpress publishing platform. However I reckon that many of the tips will be relevant and help you boost your business with a blog.

1 Start the blog now. If you have already started focus on how to improve your blog. I wish I’d started my travel blog earlier. I was prompted to start blogging for my business by an email from a business studies student researching for a disseration about travel business blogs.

2 Make it easy for readers to subscribe, have an obvious suscribe button. You want to build up a core of regular, loyal readers. For the first few months of my blog the only way to subscribe was to click on text under a post. I also recently added a Wordpress plugin where a “Welcome and would you like to subscribe?” message appears on the first two blog visits.

3 Add Technorati tags to your posts. Make it easy for Technorati, the main blog search and rating engine, to find your posts by using these topic labels. I use Simple Tags plugin to do this.

4 Use more photos. A photo of a destination on my travel blog conveys a lot more than a well written description. It makes the post look more appealing then screeds of text. While that my be true for my travel blog, I don’t think adding loads of photos in this blog is relevant.

5 Add the 3 most recent blog headlines to your website home page with Buzzboost. Visitors to you home page can see that you have a blog and what sort of topics you are blogging about. You want to publise your blog as much a possible.

6 Analyse your stats more thoroughly, Feedburner is good for this. See which posts are popular so you can evaluate which topics and styles of posts appeal to readers and replicate this winning formula whilst still being fresh.

7 Submit to social networking sites. So far the most useful for me has been Stumbleupon.

8 Install Google Adsense. The blog is one of the top earners of Adsense revenue on my travel website.

9 Use the facility to set a future publishing date for posts to avoid bunching of posts. Some days I have the time and inspiration to write several entries and then nothing for a few days. As soon as you have an idea for a blog post, scribble down that idea on a list. Otherwise that idea may just slip your mind and in few days you’ll be racking your brain wondered what on earth to blog about.

10 Be more focused in your posts. Think are you satisfying readers and promoting the business as much as possible when planning and writing a post?

Please let me know if you have found any of the tips useful or if you have any that you think I should add.

[tags]business blogs, Technorati., Google Adsense, Feedburner, Stumbleupon, Wordpress plugins[/tags]

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My son installed Google Adsense for content to my travel blog and website in April 2007. I’d been thinking about having these contextual text ads on my blog and website for some but was concerned that they might make the pages look ugly and alienate some readers. I decided to go for less intrusive option of a horizontal block of 2 ads under the first 3 blog posts.

There was some initial contextual discrepancy with ads for Italian sinks and taps coming up. However after a week or so things settled down.

Google Adsense can provide some additional revenue for your business. You have to decide if they are appropriate for your blog. In my travel blog I reckoned that most potential customers were probably going to look at different accommodation options and/or shop around to get the best price, so giving them a relevant ad was on balance a good idea, so at least I could make a few pennies out of their desire to shop around.

In this blog I thought that Google Adsense could provide links that my readers could find useful in boosting their business with a blog, so again why not make a few pennies from this. I advocate that business bloggers should read from a variety of sources on how to maximise the benefits of having a business blog.

Overall I would recommend Google Adsense, other than the initial installation, it requires no effort. I don’t think that it has adversely affected the overall look, quality or feel of my travel blog.

[tags]Google Adsense, business blogs[/tags]

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