Niche Marketing During The Euro 2008
When making a website targeting a specific event, like the Euro 2008 or any other large tournament, you need to be very sure you are going to reach your goals by the time the event takes place. If you miss your deadline, most if not all of the possible revenue is lost.
When I build a website, I always look at the potential profit I can derive from it. Mostly, this profit is purely monetary, but other times you can gain in relevant links to your main websites, which isn t bad at all. When targeting a specific event, often there is a time frame the site is expected to make a profit, after the event is done, the interest in these search terms will be lost for ever. During the event how ever the interest will be sky high, so it is possible with clever targeting to make a nice commission.
When dealing with only a short amount of time to make the profit, the potential must be big. Ordinarily sites making a small, recurring profit are very nice, unless to time consuming. In cases like these, I need to be sure I can make a high commission, preferably on expensive products.
As I am targeting the Euro 2008, I began to think about the obvious products related to soccer; soccer jerseys, game tickets and other soccer related products. It seemed most of these products where of hard competition and often with poor affiliate programs. And, on a site like this, I do not want to use contextual ads, the potential with a good, high commissioned affiliate program is much better.
I figured, during these weeks of soccer, every hotel and bed & breakfast will be sold out. Accommodation is expensive, and often with fair to high commission rates. Even though the competition is hard, this seemed like the best idea for me. The fact that I don t know much about soccer makes it even more appealing, looking down the road towards promoting the site I feel much more comfortable writing articles about hotels and vacations, than I do soccer and sports.
I then needed to find a good affiliate program, offering accommodation in Austria and Switzerland. I figured high commission to be the single most important factor in this case. Normally I m biased towards recurring commission, but due to the short period of time this site will actually live; high initial commission will be deemed more important.
What I like about hotel and travel affiliate programs is the common feature of setting your own price, thus making it possible to actually compete with prices, not only search engine visibility.
After a few searches, I found a five potential hotel programs, all offering online reservations for hotels near the arenas in all cities of interest. I then looked at;
Their prices
Very important factor for me, I always choose an affiliate program with highly competitive prices. This is no exception; it s no use sending visitors to a program only to have them find outrageous prices and not buying anything.
The commission and commission types
Of course high commission is important, but I d take low prices and a lower commission over high priced programs claiming to pay a high commission. As always, recurring commission is very nice, but in this case I only treat it like a bonus.
The functionality and general look and feel of the site
Is it easy to actually make a reservation? Do they appear serious? Is the site intuitive and user friendly? All of this is important for your conversion ratio, the better the site the more people will use it. The same goes for the visitors you send their way; always make the best use possible of every referred visitor.
On top of this, I was hoping to find a program offering an integrated shop and/or booking system to use on my site, simply because I do not want to spend much time designing it, that time is better spent on promoting it.
All said and done, I decided to use hotels.de, a good German based affiliate program, with customizable booking system ready to integrate on my site. They also offer fair commissions, and the ability to set my own prices, actively setting my own commission percentage. This way, I can lower the prices if I m not pleased with the conversion ratio.
When the site is done, I plan to use a few more affiliate programs to target the other areas of Euro 2008, but this program is what I m hoping is going to make the major part of the revenue earned.
By: Theo Swan
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Theo Swan is writing about niched marketing for the Euro 2008, using hotel affiliate programs.
