Selling Tips

Most partners in the affiliate program are focused on different industries and verticals other than the lodging business.  Vacation services can be a perfect addition to any gear, sale, review or outdoor related website.  The trick is in the merchandising of the lodging/vacation services.  Here are a few tips to help you maximize the effectiveness of your on-site display:

1. Create pages on your site dedicated to “vacation planning.”  Make sure to add navigation from your homepage so visitors can easily find this section of the site.

• A good example can be found at Vail.com.  On the homepage you’ll notice a drop down under “Plan a Trip”, click the “Lodging” page.  A page like this can easily be created using AvantLink’s suite of tools. 

• Creating pages dedicated to a specific property are great for SEO, just make sure all the content is unique.  

• We offer a branded booking widget that would be a nice addition to a page like the example above.  You can find the widget in your AvantLink account under- Tools>Get Merchant Ads> (now filter by HTML ads).

2. Add the Mountain Reservations product datafeed to your site.  The most successful partner websites are the ones marketing at the property level.  The three most important factors for lodging are pictures, price, and location.  Try to segment the lodging by destination/resorts so people can quickly find listings in places they are most interested in.

• A good example of a partner using our product datafeed can be found at www.utahskivacationpackages.com.  He has navigation to each resort in Utah, once drilling into a resort you’ll notice he’s marketing at the property level which will yield higher conversion rates.

• Adding the Mountain Reservations product datafeed will also help your site rank better organically, as long as you add unique content around the integration.  Higher organic rankings mean more traffic to your site from the search engines. 

3. Depending on your website, you may want to segment by destination or ski resort.  Mountain Reservations has product for just about every major mountain destination across North America.  If you have geographic specific content, make your ads and product listings are geo specific.  This can be accomplished by using the tools in AvantLink.  In addition, we have location specific creative to help brand the pages you create.

4. Add “featured properties” to the “vacation planning” section of your website.  By doing this you can engage consumers and get in them into “browse” mode for lodging and properties. 

• We have a featured properties program where we highlight two new properties each week.  The properties typically have an outstanding deal associated with them.  You can subscribe to these featured properties by configuring the Dynamic Coupon Feed in AvantLink.

5. Utilize the booking widget, which is now available through AvantLink under Tools>Get Merchant Ads (filter by HTML ads).  This is the easiest way to get people browsing properties and eventually contacting us. 

6. Custom landing pages.  We are able to create custom landing pages with unique content and specific/filtered product listings per your request.  Contact us for any additional ideas or needs and we can make it happen!

7. Use your custom phone tracking number directly on your website.  Each partner website is assigned a unique telephone number that populates on the Mountain Reservations homepage when you refer traffic.  If you need your number please contact us.

8. Create an events calendar on your website by target location.  For example, if your target location is Telluride, create a summer events calendar highlighting what’s going on.  For popular events like the Bluegrass Festival provide lodging options for those dates.