Are you working in the travel industry sector and looking for a big boost in sales to your website? There are many effective online marketing strategies available on the Internet, but for big online travel companies such as Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity, and other major travel websites, affiliate marketing is a major source of online revenues.

The reason major travel websites utilize affiliate marketing as a major source for their income is the low cost, pay-for-performance model, and the ability to reach a huge target market quickly and easily. In most other online media, the advertiser has to pay upfront for all advertiser cost, whereas in affiliate marketing, the advertiser pays a commission to the affiliates once a sale or lead has occurred on the advertiser website (performance based). The party selling your products a.k.a. affiliate (or publisher), get a commission for each product that gets sold on your website (advertisers/merchant).

Usually affiliates will promote your products on their websites using tracking links or banners and once another person clicks on their affiliate link, he or she will be directed to your (advertisers/merchants) sales page. If that person decides to make a purchase, the system will trace it back to the affiliate, and he will be rewarded with a commission. At the same time, the advertiser (merchant) will be able to track all the sales metrics generated by the affiliates.

The secret to build a successful affiliate program is to locate and recruit high performing affiliates (aka super affiliates) to sell your products. You could have thousands of affiliates promoting your products, but they would not be able to generate any significant source of income if they are not proven sellers on the Internet. Most travel websites realize a 90/10 rule, where 90% of all their sales come from 10% of the affiliates. These super affiliates owns high trafficked websites, hundreds of thousands opt-in email addresses, or major traders in PPC search engines and once they join your affiliate program, you will definitely see a big difference in the amount of sales on your website.

To manage a successful affiliate marketing program, you have to give your super affiliates nice incentives to join your affiliate program. Not only do you need an attractive commission structure, but also performance incentives, which means if the affiliate generates a certain amount of bookings, he will receive an increased commission (a.k.a. commission bump) for his additional bookings generated to your website. To make your affiliate program even more attractive to affiliates, you could even offer the affiliates a two-tier commission structure, where the affiliate is not only paid for the direct traffic or sales that he refers to the advertiser's/merchant's site, but also on every traffic or sales referred by various other affiliates who joined the affiliate program through his recommendation Think of it as your own digital sales force. The more you give them incentives the more you are going to sell.