David Fiske Affiliate marketing & web development musings from Fiske Towers

Way back when, I couldn't understand what Kirsty found so attractive about travelling the world. Up to a few months ago, I didn't have a passport and holidayed around Britain. Why explore the world if you haven't seen the UK?

Anyhoo, an overseas holiday disparaged that theory, after returning to the UK with a travel bug. I'm keen on seeing various areas of America (New York, more of Florida, etc.), Canada, Lapland :-) and a few more places.

So what has this got to do with affiliate marketing? To cut a long story short, I've made my first commission with Sunshine! It's bizarrely not from the source I expected though...
 
When Sunshine were running their competition, I set up a demo site called Fun 4 Less Holidays using Price Tapestry and the Sunshine Price Tapestry template. The site was used to demonstrate how easy a travel site could be set up.

Admittedly, I didn't expect my site to do well. I added a couple of portfolio backlinks and just left it sitting there. I updated the feed twice, I haven't added any content, I haven't done anything to it, focusing more on Orlando Florida Holiday. Since it's launch in the middle of June 2008, it's had 15,212 clickthroughs to the Sunshine site. Some of those will be spiders I imagine.

15,212 clicks and no sales is not impressive but given I built it as a "throwaway" site from the purposes of the tutorial, I'm not bothered by it.

As I said before I have put quite a bit of effort in creating nice fresh content on my Orlando site. When I saw the sale appear in my panel, I was chuffed. Someone had bought a holiday to Orlando on the back of what I had to say about it.

Er, well no. They'd stumbled across the F4L site and bought through that. Instead of sunny Orlando, they're off to sunny Madeira! Nevertheless, it's not the destination that is interesting, it's the commission.

Sunshine pay an industry leading 7% on hotel bookings which is great for travel. After all, 7% of £100 is £7. I forgot one major thing though - holiday's aren't *that* cheap. My commission was based on a hotel fee of around £1,000 :-)

This has both intrigued me and excited me. One sale like this a day and I've added more than £25,000 to my bottom line each year. One sale a day doesn't happen overnight but with a lot of effort, time, content and a Price Tapestry element ;-) I should be able to get somewhere decent with it.

I've caught the travel bug and the travel affiliate bug. Expect lots of posts about holiday sites ;-)

Oh, and perhaps the odd aeroplane picture! (This was our actual outbound aircraft (photo taken on the date we flew)).