Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing represents another significant revenue stream for a Squarespace site. You can start earning from affiliate links with much lower traffic compared to what is required for ads, but a deeper understanding of user intent is crucial.
Focus on identifying buying keywords. For instance, if someone searches for the best women’s hiking pants and you know a lot about this topic, you might write a blog post detailing your favorite hiking pants and your reasons for recommending them—embedding affiliate links throughout the post.
The location of your audience is also a key factor in affiliate marketing. Some affiliate programs are country-specific; for example, Lululemon has distinct affiliate programs for the US, Canada, and Australia. If you plan to link to Lululemon hiking pants, it can be complicated to determine which program to join and which ones will accept you.
Since I’m based in New Zealand and most of my blog traffic comes from here, I can only include an affiliate link to Lululemon NZ, even though many of my visitors may be from the US.
This highlights the necessity of being strategic to maximize your earnings from affiliate marketing.
Fortunately, you can generate income without coming across as overly sales-oriented in your content.
For instance, I once wrote a blog post featuring my top recommendations for things to buy in New Zealand, with my top pick being a book I enjoyed during my travels. I didn’t expect to earn anything from that mention, but immediately after adding a Bookshop.org link, I began to see sales come in.
When you provide genuine recommendations, readers will trust you, and you deserve to be compensated for introducing them to valuable products.
Affiliate Programs for Travel Blogs
Some of the most popular and effective affiliate programs for travel blogs are linked to sites you might use for planning your trips:
Booking.com
Viator
Discover Cars
VRBO
And many others. I personally utilize Travel Payouts for my affiliate marketing, which allows me to easily share links from popular services like Booking.com, Viator, and Rental Cars. The advantage of Travel Payouts is that it consolidates various affiliate programs into one user-friendly dashboard.
Managing multiple affiliate programs can quickly become overwhelming, so having a streamlined process is incredibly helpful.
There are numerous affiliate programs available.
Challenges of Affiliate Marketing
While ads can complicate website navigation through pop-ups and distracting content, the associated content often remains valuable. However, affiliate marketing has negatively affected the internet by promoting low-quality content created solely to drive clicks on affiliate links.
Some people derive most of their income from affiliate marketing, but I’ve always felt uneasy promoting tours and experiences I’m not personally acquainted with.
It troubles me that many travel bloggers advocate for tours or activities they wouldn’t actually pay for themselves, just because they know it will earn them money.
On some level, I understand the temptation to flood your content with affiliate links once you start to see some revenue. It can feel like free money.
However, it’s this kind of affiliate-driven content that has led to widespread issues like site abuse, where large websites (like Forbes or news outlets) publish misleading ‘best of’ lists, pushing products without true expertise, such as a man writing about the best women’s hiking pants.
If you’re interested in building a sustainable brand, serving your audience effectively, and not contributing to the overall decline of internet quality, I advise using affiliate marketing sparingly. Only endorse products you genuinely believe in (even without a financial incentive), never mislead your audience for more sales, and always disclose your affiliate links.
For me, affiliate marketing is a supplementary income source on top of my other monetization methods.
My Earnings from Affiliate Marketing
I typically earn about $500 a month through affiliate marketing.
