affiliate marketing travel working nomad

Travel affiliate marketing is perfect for a working nomad lifestyle

You may never have heard about travel affiliate marketing, but if you are travelling or planing to, then consider this strategy to support your endeavour.  

You have asked yourself many time, how do all those bloggers make money? Is it all from those annoying ads on their pages? It can’t be. The answer travel affiliate marketing, and we are going to show you how much you can make. Be ready.  

Bit first, our expert guest Victoria will tell us why traveling and affiliate marketing is such a great match

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5 reasons that affiliate marketing is perfect for long-term travelers

Living a non-traditional nomadic lifestyle and getting away from the 9-to-5 grind is really appealing, but it brings its fair share of complications, such as how exactly you pay for everything!

It isn’t always as simple as finding part-time work along the way, and besides, you don’t want to be relying on sporadic employment (or delving into savings) in the long run.

Thankfully, the digital era has made it more viable than ever before to spend your life doing what you love and seeing the world— and travel affiliate marketing is a key ingredient in the recipe. 

By working with brands to get commissions on their sales, you can pick up some extra money from anywhere in the world.

Here are 5 reasons why affiliate marketing is a perfect addition to any long-term travelers financial strategy:

Traveling all the time might be rewarding and a lot of fun, but it certainly isn’t simple or easy! 

There are borders to cross, bumpy journeys to get through, financial restrictions to handle… in short, there’s a lot that a successful traveler needs to deal with on a daily basis to keep the dream alive.

To make it viable, you’ll invariably be relying on products and services of all kinds; everything from the robust clothing you wear to the software you use to plan your trips without blowing through your budget.

That means you’ll already have a wealth of knowledge about prospective affiliate products and partnerships, making it as simple as recommending the things you genuinely prefer to use. 

That sounds like a win-win to me.

working nomads travel affiliate marketing best books programs travel bloggers booking tripadvisor mastery

The social element of the nomadic lifestyle is incredibly important in today’s world. 

Whether it’s crowdfunding to offset the costs, distributing promotional material to build up an audience, or networking to find places to stay for little money, there’s always some way of using social media to make traveling easier— and affiliate marketing is the perfect accompaniment.

That means you don’t need to host any seminars, or dole out any sales pitches. You don’t really need to do anything forced or unnatural at all. 

You just need to talk about the products and services you’re using, explain why they’re worth trying, and let people know how to find them.

As long as you stay honest, you’ll find that your followers will appreciate the insight into how you live and the products you use, and will want to support you along the way.

 

If you really want to get the most out of affiliate partnerships, you’ll want to find creative ways to use, review, or generally discuss the things you’re recommending. 

When you’re on the road most of the time, you have opportunities that the traditional marketer could only dream of. Scenic views, events of all kinds, new people to meet and learn about— travel blogging is ideal.

You can even let your ideas steer your travel for some added fun. If you were partnered with a particular tent brand, you could set out to test their new model on every continent, and you might well get a decent sponsorship from them in the process.

The traveler community isn’t as cynical about arrangements like that as most. It respects the hustle of finding ways to live extraordinary lives, so you needn’t be overly concerned about people thinking you’ve ‘sold out’!

The most basic form of affiliate marketing is the affiliate link. You provide a URL that forwards the user to a product or service page and gets a commission from the resulting sale. 

Now, filling up your website or blog with affiliate links won’t do all that much if you don’t have any traffic, but as you attract more followers on social media, you’ll find that your visits will go up too.

If you manage to become established as an authority when it comes to the products and/or services you’re recommending, there’s a very decent chance your content about them will bring in a fair number of visitors, whether through search engines or social media links. 

That means that a link you put live two years ago could still be making you money today.

Basic links might not bring in huge sums, but they slot neatly alongside other revenue sources like teaching English online, setting up an online store to sell relevant products (Shopify users can sell custom merchandise with zero inventory using Merchify), offering exclusive updates through a Patreon account, or releasing an ad-supported podcast. It all adds up.

If you’re making the traveler life work, meeting people along the way and telling your story, you’re going to get asked about it by people curious to see if they could do something similar. 

They’ll ask you how you decided to get started, how you managed to begin with, and what advice you’d give them to help them give it a try.

Since you’re going to get those requests no matter what you do, why not add affiliate marketing to the equation?

 You can even be completely honest about the nature of your arrangements and coach prospective travelers on how they can diversify their revenue streams too, which is good for them and good for the brands they end up backing.

If you’re determined to live life on your terms, why not give affiliate marketing a try? You might just find that it’s exactly what you need to bolster your income and free up even more time so you can focus on doing exactly what you want to do every day.

Victoria Greene is an e-commerce marketing expert and freelance writer who remains very envious of those out there seeing the world! You can read more of her work at her blog Victoria Ecommerce.

First you study - the best affiliate marketing books out there

Assuming you got convinced by Victoria, and are considering affiliate marketing, we highly recommend you start studying the subject, and the best way is by reading books. 

Do that before you start reading how to’s blog posts, they only tell you part of the picture and tend to be skewed, while books and even online courses tell you everything you need to know. 

Now, there are many books out there, and many of them are very poor, we are in the era of massive ghost writing. But no worries, we did the full research for you, and have the recommendations.

The best book written about the subject is already 8 years old, it may be a little outdated but it is written by an industry reference, Evgenii Prussakov

We did not make it first pick because in the last couple of years to good books were also published, so we made the best of them our first pick.

We researched most of the market, use the next gallery to check our suggestions and also to see other books you might have considered and hopefully haven’t spent money yet, happy reading:

Then you apply - best affiliate programs for travel bloggers

Great, you know everything about affiliate marketing. Do you already have a website? With some decent traffic on it? If yes to both then it’s time to start applying to the best affiliate programs or travel bloggers.

You will not be surprised because you are probably tired of seeing them everywhere, but that’s because they work. The top 3 are also the ones that offer more options, which increase the chance of conversion too. 

You can check out the bigger list further down.

Biggest booking service online 

Commission: 25% of their cut

Network : None

Payout: Monthly by Paypal

Min payout: 100 US$

 

working nomads travel affiliate marketing best books programs travel bloggers booking tripadvisor mastery

Biggest travel website 

Commission: 50% of partners

Network : CJ Affiliate

Payout: Monthly by Paypal

Min payout: 0 US$

 

Biggest airlines website 

Commission: 50% 

Network : None

Payout: Monthly by Paypal

Min payout: 0 US$

 

Ultimate travel affiliates list

You have done the main three, now it’s time to open up the options, and we have just the right table for that. We researched dozens of programs to save you time.

If you find more programs that are not here please send us a message or comment here so we can add to the table. 

Happy Affiliating. 🙂

affiliate marketing

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Already have your e-commerce business? Check our tips to make it greener

Want to learn more about other ways of making money online? Check our working nomads resource page

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