If you are new to online marketing and want to make money fast, one of he easiest products to sell is hotel accommodation.
The online accommodation booking market is growing at a staggering 400% each year, with more people now starting to choose online bookings for accommodation than walking into a travel agent.
The beauty of online accommodation is that you have the option to easily compare the best rates at your own leisure, which is great if you already know the location you want to holiday at.
the other advantage of online accommodation websites is that you can read reviews of other people that have visited the same hotels or resorts and get some feedback. This feedback is a general overview but gives you a good idea that your travel agent might not be able to.
Often travel agents are paid incentives to try and get you into a particular hotel, so the advantage of choosing yourself online is great.
If you are looking at an online venture to make money while you literally sleep, hotel accommodation marketing online is great as the returns are high, so if you set your website up correctly you really don’t have to work to hard to market the website. You literally make money while you sleep.
Here is my story on how I turned a day’s work into $100,000 worth of sales in a single month with a simple, small, accommodation website.
A few years back as I was already designing and building accommodation websites for other people, I thought I’d try my hand at creating my own online accommodation website, more as a hobby website than anything else.
I chose the Whitsunday Islands as my niche as I am a regular visitor to the Whitsundays and Airlie Beach, so know the local area.
Yes, it’s a small niche, which was probably a mistake on my behalf as the internet is global. Since creating my Whitsundays website I now have 4 International hotel accommodation websites as well. So, before diving in, think big!
Step 1:Find your niche, and your niche market.
Find your accommodation niche. It might be schoolies accommodation, romantic holidays, luxury holidays (pays better, but sales are usually less than budget accommodation), or choose a particular location or country you would like to focus on.
The website design should also suit the location and your target audience. Don’t use dark black colours if you are promoting a luxury beachside resort. Take into consideration the age of the market you want to target. If they are younger you can make the website design a little more fun and funky, if they are older think about making the text larger, and with simple navigation.
Step 2:
Choose the right domain name
You will have greater success on the search engines if your domain name is specifically related to what you are selling. For instance, I chose www.WhitsundayApartments.com.au as I was selling Whitsunday Apartments, resorts and hotel accommodation. (I also registered WhitsundayHotels.com.au to cover more search terms).
By having your main website with a good domain and some simple but good search engine optimisation, you are almost guaranteed to be on the first page of Google, if not the #1 spot for at least this search term. If you can achieve this there is really no need to spend money on paid advertising to get a good sale rate.
Step 3:
Set up a website
Purchase a hosting account and create a website. I usually choose Hostgator.com web hosting for international accommodation websites because Hostgator are based in the United States, which means international visitors will have a faster viewing rate than if I host locally here in Australia. If the website audience was purely targeting Australians I would choose a local web provider in Australia, like Webcrowd.
Hostgator allows you to purchase one account and split it into multiple accounts, so if you want to build multiple websites there is no extra costs for hosting. You simply purchase additional domain names, split your initial hosting account and hook up the domain name to the newly split account, so it acts like a totally independent hosted website. Nice and cheap!
Step 4:
Building your website.
Believe it or not, this is actually the easy part of the process!
You don’t have to actually know anything about hotel accommodation bookings, or spend thousands on creating an expensive accommodation marketing system, you can start with one single webpage.
The hotel accommodation booking system itself is actually provided by an affiliated company, so you simply build a simple webpage and link to their system for free, and you generate income for each sale that is created through your website.
Obviously, you want to look professional, so for the return you will be getting it is worth hiring the services of a web designer for a day to create and set your website up for you. Make sure they also offer search engine optimisation services as part of the deal.
To get started, you will need to find an accommodation affiliate partner, such as HotelsCombined.com or HotelClub.com There are plenty to choose from, as well as Airlines, Car Hire, Tours and more holiday related products.
Many of the best online hotel brands will offer an affiliate program. You can find them by either scrolling to the footer of their website and look for Affiliate Program, or simply type in ‘Hotel Affiliate Programs’ into Google.
You usually need to have a basic website setup before they will approve you, so build a simple page first, and you can change it once you are approved.
Affiliate programs are usually free to join and on average pay around 6% to 10% per sale on the booking price. So on average if someone books say a week of accommodation for $2100 you would make $189 in commission from a single sale.
Thats not bad from one single booking! If you can get 10 bookings a day you will be doing nicely.
Most affiliate programs will provide you with an affiliate coded piece of script which you simple customise and then past into your webpage, which created the booking form on your page, allowing people to search through the hotel affiliate’s accommodation database. When they find and book, you make money! It really is that simple!
Step 5:
Optimising your website for the search engines
the major misconception with many web developers is they believe you need to flood a page with search engine specific keywords in order to achieve a good ranking. This is totally untrue. I can show you a number of examples I have created myself that have only 3 lines of text on the entire single page website and they achieve a #1 Google listing.
Choose the keywords that relate you your domain name, the target location and add them in a short paragraph or two at the most, and try and leave out as many non-specific words as possible, without the sentence sounding like it is written for the search engines to your visitors.
Run your website through a good SEO software package such as Web CEO before uploading and submitting your website to ensure it has a good keyword ranking. Web CEO will also let you submit your website for free to all the major search engines, usually with great results within days.

And that is the step finished! Sit back and wait for the search engines to do their thing and the booking to flood in.
There is nothing better than waking up and finding you have earned your days’ pay before you were even awake!
$100,000 sales in a month for one day’s work isn’t bad, and the money keeps coming in each month for doing almost nothing.
Step 6: Marketing your website
If you want to really give your new website the extra push, you can use paid marketing such as Google Adwords to attract visitors, or include a Subscribe/VIP club newsletter form allowing people to sign up and be added to your mailing list for future marketing. This helps generate potential sales to people that have already visited your website.
Check out Aweber email marketing system which is perfect for this type of online marketing and promotions.
Of course, you can always book your own holidays through your own website, saving you on the full price of accommodation! You’ll never pay full price for your holiday again!
Happy online earnings!
About the Author:
Chris Bourke from Devision.com.au and WebSEOCoach.com
Chris is a web designer and online marketer, specialising in holiday accommodation website development for clients throughout Australia.