A recent post by Chris (HW Techie) describes one of their (eStuff Ltd’s) latest success stories in a niche that many people overlook just because it is seen as ‘an extra’ and not the main product but as they have done they have made this niche their own and proven that there is good money to be had.
In the travel industry transfers are often overlooked as the big rewards from packages and accommodation tend to get all the attention. Lets face it if you were coming into travel and were offered 10% of a £60 transfer or 7% of a £400 hotel booking which would you take? Bear in mind that if you go for the big reward you put yourself up against some very established sites – Trip Advisor (Expedia), Holidays Uncovered (TUI) and Holiday Watchdog (independent).
If you take the niche route of transfers, and transfers alone who are you up against? Transfers.net that’s who!
Below is a mini interview over MSN with Chris just to try and get a bit more information from him about the project and how its come along.
Did you already have the domain or was it an acquisition made specifically for this project?
Acquired specifically for 2400 EUR via Sedo
Initially what traffic levels did it receive from Holiday Watchdog, and now that its become established what sort of split between natural and Holiday Watchdog referral traffic do you receive?
Initially all of the traffic was referred from Holiday Watchdog destination pages, in October 2006 we started to get a decent amount from Google and id estimate we now receive 90% of our traffic from natural search results across Google, MSN and Yahoo.
With the first sale netting you £1.28 did you really expect it to ever reach £6k per month in commission?
Probably not so quickly, but we’ve learned from experience that if you get a site right anything is possible
Do you think its possible for someone new to affiliate marketing to re-create this sort of success without the initial traffic injection from another site in the same sector?
Yes, all it allowed us to do was to skip 6 months to a years worth of link building
In your first year of affiliate marketing how well did you do?
I think I got up to $300 one month, mostly due to a tip from Shane Robinson about citi credit cards, but other than that just dribs and drabs
By sending traffic from Holiday Watchdog to Transfers.net did you notice any decline in sales or would you describe the Transfers.net income as genuine growth?
Well we didn’t really have much in the way of transfers links on HW, so it’s all growth really
Do you feel that by offering a price comparison service your improving the customer experience, and having done it on Transfers.net are there any plans to introduce a comparison model to Holiday Watchdog?
Compared to having a list of merchants on a page, price comparison done properly certainly adds more to the users experience
And that’s all from Chris for now!
I think that this should be fantastic inspiration to anyone new to affiliate marketing as a whole, or just new to a sector it’s the same principle. Target what other people aren’t. This isn’t just applied to products such as accommodation & transfers either theres a very strong market for transfers in Spain, transfers in Majorca or even drill right down to resort level and target Palmanova airport transfers.
One of the merchants that Transfers.net promotes is Transferstore.com an Alpha International Accommodation Ltd company which is available on Affiliate Future offering 10% commission on all sales going up to 12% after 5 sales. Transferstore.com converts transfers.net traffic month on month at over 6%
So whos going to give us a holiday insurance comparison site?
