sunshine.co.uk a4uexpo

Good afternoon.

Welcome to So You Don't Do Travel with Alan Gilmour and myself, Chris Clarkson, from sunshine.co.uk

The purpose of our presentation is to encourage you to consider the travel vertical and demonstrate the tools we can give you to make building and operating a travel site much easier

We've timed our presentation and if everything goes to plan we'll have you converted in 25 minutes.

Travel in Affiliate Marketing

UK online travel market valued at 11.2 Billion for 2007(1)

41% year-on-year growth 2002-2007(2)

Affiliate Marketing generates an average of 18% of online sales for travel merchants(3)

Travel is considered one of the big three in Affiliate Marketing, along with retail and finance.

After a slow start and some early failures, the travel industry embraced affiliate marketing as it caught up with the selling potential of the Internet.

The growth of online travel sales has been staggering, and while overall travel sales are expected to decline in line with the economy, the online share should continue to grow, even if at a lower rate.

(1) Denmark's Center For Regional & Tourism Research www.crt.dk/Default.asp?m=42

(2) EyeforTravel European Online Travel Report 2008www.eyefortravelresearch.com/reportsales/record/id/1/id_permalink/european-online-travel-report-2008

(3) e-consultancy AM Merchants Report 2007 http://www.e-consultancy.com/news-blog/364437/travel-industry-making-most-effective-use-of-affiliate-marketing.html

About sunshine.co.uk

Online Travel Agency
Flights, Hotels and Transfers - 37 countries

Stealth Comparison
Availability searches poll multiple suppliers simultaneously

Low Margins
Prices offer customers great value

No Hidden Costs
What you see is what you pay

Dynamic Packaging
Allow customers to easily build tailor-made holidays

sunshine is a member of Hays Independence Group, meaning Hays do all the legal stuff and let us get on with selling holidays.

When a customer searches sunshine they are getting the best results for each room and board type of each hotel from up to 6 suppliers. We are effectively a comparison site!

sunshine is aimed at the discount end of the holiday market. In the current economic situation, we believe price is and will remain the customers over-riding priority.

sunshine.co.uk Affiliate Programme

7% Commission
on accommodations and transfers

No Leakage
no highly visible phone numbers. No sales taken over phone

Affiliate Tools
wide range of banners, search boxes, feeds and other stuff!

Incentives
Laptops, holidays, chocolate, holidays, tickets and holidays

For a few years before sunshine, we were travel affiliates.

We knew when we built sunshine we'd eventually have an affiliate programme. We designed the site as affiliates; minimising leakage; intuitive navigation and making the search and book process as simple as possible.

Creating our own Affiliate Area let us provide regularly updated feeds, relevant banners, a good selection of RSS feeds amongst other useful tools. A usable XML API was pretty high on the agenda too.

Affiliate Programme Numbers

Average Basket Value483.73

Average Commission33.87

Commission Reversals6

A quick note, 5 of the reversed commissions were due to AffiliateFuture kicking grubby affiliates from the network.The other one, I managed to book Kirsty McCubbin's mini-moon with a cookie from Andy Sears' Salou site. He took the news very well!

The ticket price on holiday products makes travel commissions worth chasing. Once you start generating regular sales it can quickly become a substantial income.

To date the largest single commission sunshine has paid out is 224.58

Top Secret Project - Aims

Encourage more affiliates to enter travel vertical

Lower barriers to entry

Increase conversion rates and stickiness for current affiliates

Help affiliates build their own brands

We want you to promote sunshine.co.ukActually we want everyone to promote sunshine!

We wanted to make it as easy as possible for you to get up and running with a travel site, whether you're a coding guru or are just dabbling with HTML. We're not big fans of white labels, we thought we could do something better.

We wanted to make our XML more accessible, without everyone having to take a crash course in SOAP Web services.

Allow you to get on with writing good content and marketing your site, rather than being bogged down with product feeds, sorting links or coding.

Finally, provide a back end with good functionality and ease of use.

Like all good ideas, the solution seems obvious once you get there!

WordPress

Everything we wanted to offer affiliates could be wrapped up as a plug-in, sunPress was born.

Rather than try and explain it on PowerPoint, Alan is going to give you a demonstration of sunPress

sunPress Install Summary

Download WordPress
www.wordpress.org

Install WordPress
codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress

Download sunPress
www.sunshine.co.uk/affiliates/wordpress/

Install sunPress www.sunshine.co.uk/affiliates/wordpress/instructions.html

Travel Niche

Finding Your Gap In The Market

Now we have hopefully converted those of you who don't do travel, your next decision is what will your travel website be about?

Rather than try and cover the width and breadth of the travel sector, here's the advice we give to sunshine affiliates having their first attempt at travel.

The Basics Remain True

Passion / Knowledge / Interest

Research Potential Competitors

USP

Add Value

The basics remain true no matter which sector you're working in.

It's easier to keep working on a site and make it more engaging to your users if you have a passion for your subject. Failing that, a bit of knowledge or even a personal interest stop it feeling like a chore!

Have a look at the sites whose traffic you aim to take. Ask yourself What could I do better? Pay attention to their site structure, internal linking and keyword density.

Aim to educate / inform your user. If you find your site useful, Google should too!

Find Your Level

Find your niche, kick it's ass

Don't bite off more than you can chew

Plan for expansion

When you pick your niche, you want to dominate it. Pick a key phrase that you feel is within your grasp. Ranking for Ibiza may be a bit ambitious to begin with, whereas San Antonio Bay Apartments will be more attainable and nearer the end of the research and buying cycle.

Again, choosing all of Ibiza as your niche means writing content for dozens of resorts and hundreds of hotels. If it feels like a never-ending task, chances are it will be.

However, if you do well in your niche, you may want to expand within your site or build a network of smaller sites. Keep in mind where you want to grow.

If You Build It...

Unique Content

Build Backlinks

Relevant Title Tags

Be Patient

Repeat

If you build it, they won't just come I'm afraid. Here's a quick list of important points, apologies if this is site building 101 to most of you, but it's worth covering.

Travel Is Too Competitive

Let's have a look...

One of the most common reasons that deters affiliates from getting into travel is that it's too competitive.

Here we'll take a look at the search space for some travel key phrases

Majorca

Approximate Average Monthly Search Volume from Google Adwords Keyword Tool - 823,000

Majorca

Affiliate

Wiki

Tour Op

Affiliate

Tour Op

News

Affiliate

Affiliate

Travel Agent

Rentals

Majorca Holidays

Approximate Average Monthly Search Volume - 49,500

Majorca Holidays

Tour Op

Travel Agent

Tour Op

Comparison

Tour Op

Travel Agent

Private Villa

MFA

Affiliate

Travel Agent

Palma Nova


Palma Nova

Affiliate

Tour Op

Affiliate

Affiliate

Affiliate

Travel Agent

Affiliate

Travel Agent

Travel Agent

Portal

Palma Nova Hotels


Palma Nova Hotels

Portal

Portal

Consolidator

Consolidator

Affiliate

Tour Op

Travel Agent

Travel Agent

Hotel

Travel Agent

Santa Ponsa


Santa Ponsa

Affiliate

Affiliate

Affiliate

Tour Op

Travel Agent

Consolidator

Consolidator

Affiliate

Affiliate

Travel Agent

Benidorm


Benidorm

Affiliate

Affiliate

Affiliate

TV Prog

Affiliate

Wiki

Consolidator

Portal

Affiliate

Travel Agent

Benidorm Hotels


Benidorm Hotels

Portal

Affiliate

Affiliate

Consolidator

Affiliate

Affiliate

Consolidator

Hotel

Consolidator

Affiliate

Conclusion

Demonstrates search space for affiliates

Targeted niche sites are highly competitive

Compelling unique content

Affiliate sites appear in all these high volume searches to varying degrees.

The opportunity still exists to rank well for travel related terms. Bear in mind it won't happen overnight.

Almost without fail, the sites that rank have good informative content around their chosen subject. These sites aren't just lists or directories of hotels and resorts, time and effort has been spent in their creation.

Acknowledgments

David Fiske - http://www.davidfiske.com/

Frank Paul - http://www.smingle.co.uk/

John Lamerton - http://www.lammo.net/

Kirsty McCubbin - http://www.affiliatestuff.co.uk/

Pete Dickenson - http://www.affiliatefuture.co.uk/

A quick thank you to those people who've been involved in both the creation of sunPress and of our presentation.

So You Don't Do Travel?

Thank You!

That brings us to the end of our presentation.

Thank you for listening to us and I hope we stirred your interest in the travel sector.

sunPress has taken over our lives for the last few months and we hope you'll find it a useful tool. We're very proud of it and look forward to see it being utilised by you.

Any Questions?

sunshine.co.uk a4uexpo

Technology

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