A friend of mine owns an autopilot travel affiliate website. His site ranks on Google for some major keywords and he gets free traffic. It’s monetised with hotel bookings and car hire companies. So on an average week, he’ll earn a passive income from hotel bookings and car hire bookings.
Obviously lately due to the Covid-19 situation the whole world has been in lockdown. People can’t travel and so his sites have lost traffic and income. For this reason, it’s worth diversifying your affiliate websites if you can. A travel website won’t earn much right now. But a site promoting work from home can do very well!
Autopilot Travel Affiliate Website – How To Create One
It’s not easy creating free traffic from Google. I didn’t even attempt to replicate my friend’s success because travel isn’t my passion. Steve loves travelling though and always has. He built his site years ago and managed to get a top domain name and some major back links. This didn’t happen overnight and he created lots of information on his site over several years.
You can check out his website here: As you can see there’s lots of useful information on the site.
If travel is your passion, an autopilot travel affiliate website might be a good idea. However, don’t expect it to make money overnight. Steve’s site took years in the making!
To create a travel site you should start with a keyword or several keywords which you can build a site around. This website was built around keywords to encourage Google to rank it in the search engines. You can see how I built this site in my article create free website and earn money. Ideally choose a topic you love, because it’ll help dramatically. See my blog post best micro niche for blogging.
A keyword targeted domain name isn’t totally essential however it can give you a bit of an advantage.
Autopilot Travel Affiliate Website – Building Your Site
It’s going to take some dedication to build a site which is useful for your visitors and eventually gets the attention of Google. That’s the autopilot part! Without Google ranking a niche website, you won’t get any visitors and therefore never make any affiliate commissions.
Let’s assume you’ve already done your keyword research for your niche site. You’ve chosen your domain name and built your site. See how to do this here.
Now you’ve got your blank canvas to work with. You should use some plugins to give your site the best chance of ranking and getting seen. Get an SEO plugin, a social media share button plugin and a post sharing plugin. Read about plugins in my article create free website earn money.
These will help you get exposure on your site which is what you’ll need to get Google to rank it. You’ll also need some quality content so always start with that! Use the keyword planner to find other keywords which relate to your main topic. Write articles for each of the keywords you find in the planner.
Backlinks
Steve, my “niche blogger buddy” was lucky, and got a backlink from a major website. This gave him loads of traffic and when he started his autopilot travel affiliate website, there wasn’t much competition in this niche. So people assumed his site had the most authority. So they linked to it and he built a number of links just because he wrote quality content on there.
So before you think about backlinks, try to find a specific keyword which you can build your site around. Ideally one with little competition. Then, build some awesome content. Content which sets you site apart from the others.
You can then go about building backlinks in a number of ways:
- Use article writing websites such as Hubpages.com and ezinearticles.com
- Build other niche sites of your own, and link from them to your content
- Comment on other people’s blogs within your niche
- Offer to guest write for other bloggers in your niche
- Use social media to find people interested in your topic
- Share your content throughout your social media platforms – ideally use an autopilot post tool which syndicates your content as you publish it.
- Create videos on YouTube and link back to your website content.
What’s Your USP? Unique Selling Point?
There’s a million generic websites out there which earn nothing! What’s going to set yours apart from them all? Get really focused on what you are about and what you can offer people that others can’t. This is key to your site doing well. If you’re just going to create a website like all the rest, it can easily get lost among the noise.
But create something a little different and people will share you content automatically. This is what you want to create. For this to happen you need to provide a service and give massive value.
If you don’t manage that, your site will struggle to get the number of visitors needed to build a business out of. Get it right and you can have a passive income from it eventually, if you work hard enough for long enough! See how long does it take to make money with affiliate marketing.
Autopilot Travel Products
Making money with a travel blog can be a great way to travel and earn at the same time. You can build a travel blog around various topics such as:
- Travel information – Specific destinations (Like Steve’s)
- Products to buy for travelling with – A “go to” blog for travel products
- How to earn while travelling – Offer online business tools for the traveller who wants to earn while travelling
- How to save while/before you book your travel
Depending on your particular passions and interests you might choose one or all of these topics for you blog. “Earn online” products are good because you can attract travellers who want to build an income from their laptops. These kinds of products offer ongoing commissions (recurring income). Especially things like software products and memberships. Sign up on this site for more information. See also recurring income affiliate programs.
Steve’s airport site works by selling hotel bookings and taxi services. He also uses car rentals and monetises with travel accessories.
