How The Booming Online Travel Niche Can Make Every Website And Blog

Why is it that some people only make a few dollars a day – while others can’t keep up

with the activity in their bank account? It's all to do with the niche they pick.

You have to analyse your niches very carefully before you set-up shop. Just browse

through any “internet-business” forum and you wont get far before seeing someone’s

frantic post claiming that despite good traffic flows their site is making next to

nothing.

More often than not, this happens because of a mix of 3 reasons:

1. Poor Niches. Many people do no research before deciding what business to set-up

their sites in. Not all niches are created equally – far from it in fact.

2. Poor site design. If the site/blog is ugly, has poor content/layout…visitors will

simply not hang about.

3. Poor monetisation – unless the site has laser-targeted offers that speak directly

to the visitor, they will probably have poor conversion rates. This in turn is

dependent on there being adequate affiliate options to feed to potential visitors.

You really need to get all these factors right in order to benefit from a successful

site that yields revenues like a hyper-active faucet. Let’s look at each of these

factors individually, and how the travel niche fits in:

(a) The Travel Niche – One Of The Most Potent For Any Blog/Website Owner, And Here’s

Why

So, the first step in making a solid return online is to pick the right niche. There

are many good ones, but lets see why travel

is right up there with the best of them:

- The online travel niche is experiencing an unprecedented boom. The mainstream market

itself has only been around for a little over a decade, and has grown at about 300%

per year since. In a nutshell, well over 75% of people now book their travel &

holidays online. They research their plans online. Hence the demand for good websites

& blogs.

- Travel is essentially a big ticket product – especially the package holiday market

which often generates five figures per sale. This also means that commissions for

affiliates (site/blog owners) are far higher than practically any other niche you

could throw a dart at. Remember, it’s the underlying financial muscle of a niche that

will go a long way towards the sort of rewards we as online entrepreneurs can expect.

Travel is a multi-trillion dollar market.

- Targeted travel sites have some of the best Adsense returns around. It’s to do with

the nature of the visitor as well as the level of targeted ads. For example, if you

have a blog about England, and you break it down into locations…your page on “London

Hotels” for example will return highly targeted ads on exactly that. The match is

first class – which means that visitors are far more likely to click. In addition to

this, a lot of people research their holidays online – and Adsense can be a major

source of finding holiday deals, hotels, flights and so on. This means that targeted

visitors are likely to click several ads as they move through your site.

- Travel is one of those niches where zero & low cost traffic is quite abundant.

So to summarise, we’re looking at a big growth niche, with some huge multi-national

brand name companies offering real commissions and millions of responsive buyers. But

don’t pop open the champagne just yet - there are problems too…

(b) The Downside Of Entry Into The Travel Niche – This Is Why You’ll Probably Never

Own A Quality Travel Site

There’s always a downside. In this instance, it has to do with the way your site look

and what it contains (or more important, doesn’t contain).

- With a travel site/blog, if you have just written content then you may as well not

bother putting it online. It sounds harsh, but I’m afraid it’s true. Pure text only

sites just do not cut it. Visitors in the travel niche want to see as many visuals as

possible. They want to see videos & photos of where they’re going. If you can provide

this it will give you an incredible sticky factor. The problem of course is that

getting the private label rights to multimedia travel video & photo is very difficult

– and expensive. In fact, I’ve developed 5 of these packages over the past 3 years –

and each project has been jaw droppingly costly because I’ve had to source the videos

and photography privately. There’s no PLR merchant to go to – and that’s actually a

pretty big bottleneck for most people.

- Finding good content for the travel niche can be challenging. If you have a

destination in mind, you would probably need to commission an author or article writer

to get it done. The trick here is to research the most popular destinations within

your chosen travel niche and make sure you assign the most content to the most popular

topics/locations. You also need to create the content with the search engines &

targeting of Adsense ads in mind. Map out a plan of your site before you commission

the writer – and each article should correspond to each page on your blog/site. And a

final word of warning… don’t take shortcuts on the quality of the writer you employ.

Poor content can be the final nail in the coffin for your site or blog.

Despite the above problems & expense associated with setting up travel sites, they are

still well worth the effort. I have several travel blogs set-up, and they are

consistently among the best of my site portfolio.