White Label Affiliate Programs: How To Use Them To Monetize Your Blog [Ep. 43]
Curious about white label affiliate programs? Or maybe you’re simply looking for new and innovative ways to monetize your blog?
Well, you’re in luck, as in this episode of The Profitable Travel Blogger Podcast, we’ll be going over how to increase your blogging income using white label affiliate marketing!
By the end of this episode, you’ll understand:
- what white label affiliate programs are and why they’re beneficial to bloggers
- how to build a website using white label software (like Travelpayouts)
- the different types of white label software (including free and paid versions)
- examples of how white label affiliate programs can be used to monetize a blog
- And more!
Our guest for this episode is Mark Mayo, who discovered white label affiliate marketing after getting frustrated with how difficult it was to earn an income through his travel blog. He ended up launching Beat That Flight, a travel deal site run using a top white label affiliate network platform.
Mark shares more about this story — as well as his strategy — in the episode.
Disclosure: This episode + post on how to use white label reseller programs contains affiliate links to trusted partners I think you’ll love!
White Label Affiliate Programs: How To Use Them To Monetize Your Blog [Podcast Episode Audio]
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A White Label Affiliate Marketing Strategy For Bloggers [Episode Transcript]
*Note that some sections of the interview are not included in this transcript. For the full strategy, please listen to the audio version of the podcast.
Hey, everyone! I’m really excited for today’s episode as our guest, Mark Mayo is going to be sharing a really interesting new blog monetization strategy with us when I haven’t discussed before. And I think many of you will find it inspiring.
In fact, when you sit down to create your travel blog business plan, I highly recommend you consider this strategy, as it can really help you boost your travel blogging income.
Q: To kick things off, can you just share a bit more about yourself and your background?
So I’m currently traveling New Zealand, although I’ve moved around the world a few times to do a lot of traveling, working, and even travel blogging.
I went through South America and across Europe and Central Asia, which was amazing, but have now sort of settled down a bit and looked at what ways I could maybe make some money from traveling, which is how I came across this solution with white label travel affiliate programs.
Q: Amazing! Let’s get into the strategy. I think some of the terminology is going to be new to a lot of people. So what we’re going to be talking about for everyone listening is a white label software. Can you talk about what is white label software and what are the different types?
Yeah, totally. So, for example, if you wanted to build a website that searches flights from Los Angeles to Chicago or wherever you might be looking, there are literally thousands of combinations on any given day.
And for you to be able to work that out obviously takes a lot of data from different airlines — plus a developer to build a website, a designer to create your logos and graphics, a specialist to sort of take care of the database and the security to make sure that it all works quickly, and more.
And that’s really complicated.
But there’s another way.
Some companies have actually built software — white label affiliate software — that you can then take for a small percentage fee and select your own logo on it and your styling and your domain name.
And for all intents and purposes, it’s your website to search flights or hotels or car rentals or whatever it might be. And that’s what they call a white label; there’s no label on their software.
The white label software company is doing all that hard work for you so you can just get on with actually promoting your site and finding people who are looking for flights or hotels directly into your site. They do all the bookings and stuff through their third party software and the third party takes a small commission.
Q: So it’s like an affiliate marketing sort of thing, right?
Exactly!
So with typical affiliate programs someone clicks your tracking link and they’re taken away from your site.
With white label affiliate marketing, visitors stay on your website while they’re searching and so on. All the flight results appear on your site. And then when they click through to book, it’s handled by a third party.
Q: Can you share your story of how you used white label software to grow your business?
For a while I was working in Sydney, Australia, and I started at a corporate travel software company.
During that time, I was talking to people about travel, and I realized something bothering me was when I was searching for flights and visiting my girlfriend at the time who was in Canberra, I’d ask the person next to me, “How much did you pay for your ticket?”
Odds are they paid a different price to what you paid. And that just seemed crazy to me.
I was always trying to find the cheapest way to find tickets. And the company I was working at did white label software for larger industries and they charged money for it.
This got my interest piqued. And then I started to build my own website to look for deals around Australia. So at the time it was Jetstar, Virgin, Qantas, Tiger, and others who were that would have sales.
I would have coupon codes and different ways to try and reduce their prices, and I would just try to promote that. This is one of my favorite ways to promote affiliate links.
This was great; however, the only real way to monetize it was with Google Adsense — which you need a lot of traffic for them to work.
So I then started looking around and as you mentioned, affiliates, you can have a nice little box on your website that shows you that people can type in from New York to Austin, Texas, and then check your website and you will get a commission.
But, that still wasn’t quite what I was after.
After more searching, I found this white label software that exists for search sites like mine. There are different white label software companies, though then one I use and like is Travelpayouts, which offered exactly what I wanted, especially as people could book right on my site and I’d earn a commission.
Travelpayouts is a great option if you’re interested in affiliate marketing for travel.
Q: Very cool. Now, if a blogger wanted to set this up on their blog and not a seperate website, how does that work?
Totally! I mean, it gets a little bit into the weeds with setting up the connections, but you can either have an entirely new website or you can create a subdomain on your blog.
From there, you can have a tab or a widget that links to your personal white label.
This can be great for the trustworthiness of people getting to stay on your site, plus it’s less things to click, which can help increase conversions.
Q: In your opinion, what are the benefits and/or problems with a white label travel booking system?
Yes, benefits, as I mentioned, it means you don’t have to build an entire website from scratch, which is awesome. I don’t have the money to hire a team of developers and analysts and artists and the like and worry about security and stuff, taking payments, finding the data.
All that comes prepackaged for you, which is fantastic to have.
As I said, you’re can still have your own look and feel. You can provide links to your site for the bookings to people so it feels like you’ve got it all connected together.
Note that some white label software companies charge a fee, but the ones I’ve used are free. They just take a small commission.
And as we mentioned, it looks better to the user. It feels safer to not suddenly click off to a booking site unexpectedly or see an annoying pop up.
In terms of downsides, they do take commission. It’s not insignificant, but I mean, they’re doing all the work for you. They should get something. This is how it works.
You also can’t control the data because you are getting this data for free, which is great. But for example, I had a bug where some Jetstar flights in Australia were showing with the Qantas logo. I had a couple of people complaining about that and I couldn’t do anything because I don’t control the data. Luckily, this has been rare.
Additionally, it’s not quite as simple as WordPress in terms of their famous five minute installation. And so you do have to do a little bit of groundwork setting up connections and subdomains; however, there are tons of YouTube tutorials and tutorials on these white label software sites because they want you to build your website to help them get more income as well. So they will do everything they can to help.
Q: We’ve talked a lot about the flight booking type white labels. But can you do this with non flight booking sites as well?
I’ve got flights and hotels on mine just because they work well together.
But for example, one that I looked at, had a variety of things you can book from excursions to car rentals to private tours to experiences like hot air balloon rides and so on. So in the travel world, there’s a lot of different tools you can use. You can kind of mix and match if you need to.
Q: We’re talking a lot about Travelpayouts. How did you decide on them as your white label software?
I wanted a free software because startup costs were less — though there are other options, for instance, Amadeus.
But I looked at how complicated it was to set it up and it seemed straightforward. There’s a couple of others that say white label and you have to sort of play with it to see if that’s actually true. For instance, for it to be white label you’ll want your own domain.
Q: Now, for someone who is interested in trying this, specifically bloggers and creators, what would their first step be?
If you want an example you can head to my website, Beat That Flight to see an example of how it integrates with my site, including how it looks and feels.
From there, you should research your options for white label software to compare pricing and features. While I went with a free software, you might go for a paid option which typically has enhanced support.
Then set it up on your site and start playing around and making sure the settings work. Remember if you run into any issues your white label software company will likely help you since they want you to get set up to help them make money, too.
Q: In terms of implementing all this, do you have any other sort of tips for doing it right and getting set up for success?
One issue that did come up is I integrated Google Ads and started getting competing advertisements. You’ve got to be a little careful with that. Basically I had to go through Google Ads and tweak some of the categories that were being shown.
Then when it comes to promoting you can grab the links to the deals directly and share them on social media to let people know a limited-time deal is happening. It’s a fun strategy that can actually help you enjoy social media again.
What is also great is that when you share on Facebook a preview comes up, which makes everything very easy and seamless.
I’ve got a Facebook page which has a few thousand followers and a mailing list that let’s me tell people quickly that there are all these deals.
It’s been helpful to start to learn when the different airlines have their big sales on. For example, in Australia, Virgin usually has a “happy hour” on Thursday evenings for cheap flights, and Jetstar quite often has a lunchtime “Friday frenzy” on Fridays. So I quickly scan those, find the best ones, and send them out.
And there’s also deal websites and Twitter accounts you can submit your listings to. I just promote what deals I found that day, and yeah, that seems to get quite a lot of attention, which is great. It’s a simple yet effective Twitter strategy.
Also, as you start writing blog posts you can write deals and stories which then get picked up in Google and you get more organic referral traffic. If you’re going to do white label affiliate marketing, I recommend adding deal stories into your blog content planner. Luckily, there are loads of blog post ideas related to deals that people will truly want to read.
From there, make sure you follow a blog post promotion checklist to really get your deals seen.
Q: With your email newsletter, how often do you send that? Is it sort of a daily deal or weekly round up?
I do them on demand as I see deals. People are also subscribed to statewide deals, for example, for New South Wales or Queensland in Australia. Or they can subscribe to points, deals or whatever else.
And then on Friday I send out a the weekly roundup of everything that I’ve sent out in the past in case someone’s missed out.
If you’re looking to craft emails that can boost your blogging income and help you monetize your email list, these work great.
Q: It’s great to learn about strategies where the heavy lifting is taken off of you. Just to end, where are the best places to find you are?
- Beat That Flight (website)
- @MarksMayo (Twitter)
- @BeatThatFlight (Twitter)
- BeatThatFlight (Facebook)
Alright, now I hope you enjoyed this episode.
I hope you feel inspired and empowered to do some research on whitelable software to see if it could be something that could help you monetize your site.
Don’t forget to grab access to the free travel blogging resource library that I’ve linked here. There are a ton of resources in there on growing your community and increasing your blogging profits.
And of course, make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes sharing these bite-sized strategies for bloggers who want to turn their blogs into profitable full-time blogging businesses.
Happy blogging!
Monetize Your Travel Blog With These Past Helpful Episodes:
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