Hi - just wanted to say thanks first. This is my first post here, but I've learned a lot from these forums. So, on to my main subject... I recently acquired a raggedy old plain HTML site which just so happened to dominate the search engines for terms relating to the greek island the website is about. It ranks between 1-5 for the actual name of the island (depending on what region you're searching from). There are 49,000 exact match searches per month for that island's name, and 300,000 broad searches about the island in general. My plans for monitization included (1) AdSense, (2) affiliate commissions from travel companies, and (3) some direct advertising with business on the island. I'm here to talk about mainly about (2), but for those interested - AdSense is currently earning around $200 / month. I know I can increase traffic to the site (working on it), so hoping to increase AdSense income as a result. I've also had several enquiries for direct advertising. I signed up as an affiliate with booking.com, and have been sending 200-300 targeted visitors over to their site every day for the past month. My logic in choosing them was that they've got the most available places to book on this particular Greek island, and they have multilingual pages. In my mind, this served as a good foundation for converting visitors I might send over. So far, I've had 2 people who actually made bookings. I've earned a total of $30. This isn't what I was expecting from sending those levels of qualified traffic... (1) is this normal? (2) any suggestions on travel affiliate implementation / optimization? (3) any other general advice or program recommendations?
You may also want to try cj.com as your affiliate marketing platform. They've got great travel companies (advertisers) to choose from. 0.8%-1% is not a huge conversion ratio, but it's not low either. I would say most people would be happy with 5%-10%.
It sounds to me like you're making a lot from your site, I think you should just try to scale it bigger so you increase revenue. Good luck.