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We are analyzing an interesting affiliate website called hotels-with-pool.com. The website helps people to quickly identify hotels with swimming pools in all major cities in the world and it’s a direct affiliate of Booking.com. The website receives an average of 90 000 visitors per month however its traffic trends are a bit different from usual.
In this article, we are analyzing how this website grows its traffic exponentially and how it monetizes the traffic.
Traffic Analysis
Traffic statistics show that in July 2021, hotels-with-pool.com was re-established after being down for several months. From then, it had a growing traffic trend with an average of 90 000 visitors per month up to today in January 2022. However, its traffic trends for the last 2 - 3 years indicate that the site always goes up every July and it totally goes down every February. Which is something that’s about the seasons which people tend to travel for holidays.
The website’s traffic is all organic from search and it ranks highly on the keywords that involve “hotel” together with "pool" and any city in the world.
Traffic Sources
According to the data on Semrush, 100% of the website’s traffic is organic. It receives most of its traffic from the USA, UK, Australia, and Switzerland. It also receives an of 500 backlinks and 61 referring domains.
Website Monetization
When you look at this website, there is no single ad displayed. This means that its main form of monetization is by affiliate links. The site lists hotels in every city with pool areas and gives you an option to book your stay at the hotel on site. Once you click the "Book Now" button, it forwards you to the booking page of that hotel that’s on Booking.com. This simply means that it’s under the Booking.com affiliate program.
To have it working this way, they must be using Booking.com’s extra affiliate tools and not just a simple affiliate link. The Booking.com affiliate program offers many tools and widgets that affiliates can freely use, and they include:
Hotels-with pool.com uses most of these tools from Booking.com which gives the visitors an experience like that of a proper hotel booking site. The site is also built with the same color theme as Booking.com which enables the natural transition for the visitors.
Revenue
As mentioned above, this site is a direct affiliate to Booking.com. This means that they get paid a commission when ever their referred visitor books a room. The affiliate commissions from Booking.com start from at 25% of the paycut that Booking.com receives from the host/ hotel but it can go up to $40 depending on the number of referrals you send them per month.
Booking.com receives a 15%, 17% or 20% commission from the property owners depending on the type of property. However, Booking.com does not disclose what type of property falls under what commission rate.
The majority of the hotels in the USA and UK charge an average of $135 per night. Assuming that Booking.com receives 15% as a commission, this means that the minimum commission booking.com gets is 20.25 and affiliates receive a minimum of $5 as a commission for a referral that pays for a single night.
As we have seen, the site has an average of 90 000 visitors per month. Assuming that it converts at 10% and is paid $5 per conversion. This means that it generates a minimum of $13 500 per month.
You can get this figure by multiplying:
90 000 visitors * 3% * $5= $13 500
This is just the minimum estimated revenue. The conversion rate of the website could be higher due to its design and optimization and also its affiliate commission could be above 25% which is the minimum paid by Booking.com. And also the guests could book for more than 1 day.
Conclusion
Building and integrating a website with a big site for affiliate marketing purposes is another great angle of doing affiliate marketing. It can generate passive income on autopilot like hotels-with-pool.com, which generates a minimum of $13 500 during its active months.
However, this leaves you in a situation whereby you totally depend on the trends of the big site that you are promoting and the economy of its niche. If the travel economy goes up, Booking.com will go up together with your site. And if the travel economy goes down, it will drag booking.com down alongside your small affiliate site.
This also explains the downtimes that hotels-with-pool.com faces between February and May, whereby the websites traffic goes down.
