Flying high with Virgin Affiliate Marketing
So the recent press headlines here in the UK have not been great for British Airways their brand spanking new terminal “T5″ has gone down like a lead balloon. The disaster now means thousands of bags are separated from their owners indeed many people even the most loyal BA customer I suspect are now thinking it’s time to look at what the other airlines are doing.
So it comes as no surprise that one airline is currently flying high. At the start of the year Virgin Atlantic started a £6 million pound advertising campaign to promote their new first class lounge and existing services at Heathrow. Now Virgin is a brand everyone is familiar with because of one guy but it has recently attempted to move the Virgin brand away from being the soul domain of Richard Branson and attempt to sell on the individual companies merits.
Affiliate Marketing with Virgin Atlantic
So what this got to do with affiliate marketing, well once you have started to get your first few cheques in, it’s worth putting some a side into a quick project slush fund. Not millions just a couple of hundred dollars for when events are just to quick to miss. So lets see how I would spend that fund right now:
- Buy a domain name
- Setup a quick mini site 3 pages or so on the current problems at T5
- Create a dedicated landing page for Virgins new lounge
- Base the headlines around the air line that gets you and your baggage their
- Sign up for Virgin Atlantic 2 Affiliate schemes
- Drive traffic
Buy a domain name
Domain names are cheap, so it’s worth setting the majority of your projects up on their own domain name for a $8 investment you have nothing to lose, if the project fails and or is similar to existing projects you can redirect the domain when you are finished for a little benefit from search engine traffic. When buying a domain name either keep it very generic or very specific, in this case be care to avoid domain names with Virgin Atlantic, Premium Economy or Upper Class in them as the Virgin affiliate program prohibits those terms. Given the current crisis and it will be in peoples minds right the way through the summer is baggage I would start there. Indeed flywithyourbaggage.co.uk is available from me if anyone is interested 
Setup your mini site
We don’t really need to tell you how to do this part, suffice to say content, template rinse repeat. Find a suitable theme if your pushing the first class lounge aspect or Virigin all the way then Reds and Purple colour scheme will be your best bet. There is plenty of content out there, so use your imagination or scraper depending on your hat preference.
Create a Dedicated Landing Page
Or two, it really is worth creating specific pages dedicated to Virgins Services and those of others I’m using Virgin as the example, but let’s take Virgins Chauffeur pick up service, their are plenty of companies offering this service many with Affiliate Programs of their own. Each product your planning should have it’s own page. You might even want to consider a US to UK page and a UK to US version.
Sign up for Virgin Atlantic 2 Affiliate schemes
Following up from the 2 pages their are in fact 3 Virgin Atlantic Flights affiliate program and several others based round their credit cards. Both of the ones we are interested in for this article are run by the same company but require you to sign up twice. Why? Well the first is the UK based version of the program, this allows you to make money selling Flights booked from the UK to the US and to sign up you need to visit AffiliateFuture UK To make money booked from flights from US to the UK you will need the US version AffiliateFuture USA their is also a European option. Each program only pays out in its currency Sterling, Dollars, Euros and only by wire transfer. This is not a problem as your bank will do the conversions for you automatically just be aware when your looking at your currency values if you have never worked in multiple currencies before.
GeoTarget - Given you are using two programs you don’t want a Brit accidentally clicking your US link so Geotarget this is not very hard you could use Nick PHP Class to make sure Brits only see the right code
Drive traffic
You can drive traffic to your site via all the normal methods while the story is hot I would suggest PPC just be careful what you bid on. Terms such as Virgin Atlantic are out but Baggage Chaos is in. Focus on the terms that are topical today. Avoid things like Cheap Flights the cost per click certainly isn’t cheap. Ultimately while this example is a throw away site it could be a long term investment. Baggage going missing is a fact of life and people will be discussing terminal 5 for the next 10 years so don’t just use PPC build up more long term traffic streams and search engine traffic.
This was a quick example
This was an example in a pretty unsaturated market, but with a couple of hundred dollar slush fund and an eye on the news (ideally before the story breaks big time) you can make these sort of opportunist sites. Affiliate Future have an interesting range of travel related sites and I picked virgin because they are riding just so high at the moment. Just think in a few years time you could be promoting Virgin Galactic and making money off people going into space!
