Help ! This is my story so far. I've read so many threads and tried to absorb as much as I can. The key thing I have picked up about making an affliate program work is to write about something you love.........and so this is what I did. I built a website about travelling to Poland (see sig link). It was built using Frontpage (yeah, I know, I know) and looks like a 14 yr old has designed the site from his bedroom. I used to obsess about the design (or lack of it) constantly but after seeing a few other travel related website such as paris.org I realised that design isn't everything. As long as the design doesn't get in the way of the visitor then I don't think I will worry about it too much. With this in mind I then started building content and lots of it. Trying to offer useful advice that I thought the 1st time traveller might want to know my website quickly grew to nearly 50 pages ! So then I turned my eye to marketing. I desperately wanted to get my first PR rating of 1 and scoured the website for places where I could get backlinks. Most of the places I found wanted reciprocal links and I'd read somewhere that having too many external links on your website counter acts the benefits of having any backlinks. I also didn't want my LINKS page to have 100+ links on it (often to websites that bore no relation to my own). So I abandoned the backlink campaign. My website is ranking pretty well on very specific keywords but also on a few town names. I signed up for a few affiliate programs for hotels and hostels but so far have only had 1 booking. I think I know where I might be going wrong. My link to the hotels booking page takes the visitor directly to the affiliate website (with my branding on it). This basically means that for me to convert I need a visitor to come to my site from a non-hotel related keyword on Google and then whilst browsing my website then decide to make a hotel booking. I am not getting any traffic from people looking for Polish hotels and that's probably because my site hasn't been optimised to attract these kind of visitors. So then I get to thinking that I need to create some kinf od landing page(s) with lots of information on Polish hotels. This would then hopefully filter through to the search engines and I might start getting some affiliate relevant traffic. The problem I am having is that any landing page would pretty much have the same information as the affiliate I am dealing with. Example: I could write lots of content and descriptions for hotels in Warsaw which might get me noticed on the SE's but the website to which I am affiliated i.e. Booking.com is already ranking high for hotels in Warsaw so why would a visitor want to book through my website instead ? I'm completely stuck as to how to optimise my pages to receive traffic that is likely to convert. Although the website is something of a labour of love I would still like to make a bit of money from it. I welcome any suggestions.
I think you've misunderstood the advice about promoting an affiliate program that you are interested in. The idea is not to create something you like and try to create a market out of it, but find a viable affiliate program or programs that are already successful selling products or services that you are interested in. Basically, see what programs are out there and go with the ones that interest you the most. The topic you've picked is far too obscure. For example, I could try to create a site about "Artificial Insemination In Cows" and try to make some money with it, but it just wouldn't work. Additional suggestions I would provide would be to create your site using weebly.com. You get lots of good templates that practically guarantee your site will look good. Also, using blog software is an excellent and easy way to develop a site. I would host your own wordpress blog somewhere or set up a blog at blogger.com. Sorry to hear you've put so much work in already. It just seems like you didn't have quite the right focus.