Here’s the deal …

Instead of 10% per sale, you can get 17% per sale. That should work out to about US$10-20 for every referral. The good thing about affiliate deals like this is that:

• a) They give a fair price for each referral.
• b) They scale with your traffic and campaigns, unlike selling banner space.
• c) The product is unique, quality and low cost for the customer. It should sit well amongst other more expensive products on your site, like flights and longer tours.

Details and small-print are on their site, but you can get:

• A six-month tracking cookie (meaning visitors buying within 6 months earn you commission).
• Make direct links or embed info and tour details into your site.
• Use their API to do fancy stuff with WordPress themes or RSS feeds.
• The 17% commission rate.
• Comped access to review tours (once you’ve made some sales, or negotiable on a promo).
• Organise giveaways or promos to promote the affiliate system (and hopefully grow your audience too).

As the negotiator, I get some advantages as well — tours and commissions. I obviously want this to work out, so I’m offering to do some of the technical heavy lifting for you as well: analysing your blog and suggesting the best ways to go about integrating the program for maximum sales.

The bonus

This deal has been negotiated with Tony from Urban Adventures, and is now being managed by myself and Lindsay Young. Both Lindsay and I (Craig) am available to answer any questions you have, and to help with setting the program up on your blog. In hammering out this deal for us all I’ve found Urban Adventures to be extremely approachable, fair and really willing to make something happen that could be truly beneficial for us all.

Tony has introduced this new format of a bloggers network to those at Intrepid and they seem equally excited and keen to see a win-win relationship develop. In fact as a gesture of goodwill and to give the new relationship the best possible start, Intrepid are offering up a number of free places on upcoming trips in August for those that show the greatest level of commitment to the start-up of the relationship with Urban Adventures. I’ve seen the list of trips on which they are offering places and it includes some awesome adventures to the likes of West Africa, Iran, Central Asia, Trans Mongolia to name a few. As we all know these are expensive and complicated places to travel so if you are not booked up this August, you’d be crazy to not get involved.

To get started:

• 1. Go to http://www.urbanadventures.com/affiliates
• 2. Fill in the application form
• 3. In the “Your Special Request” field, add “Part of the travel bloggers’ agreement”.
• 4. You’ll get an automatic email with your username and password. This email will say you get 10%.
• 5. You can start building links or enabling the white label immediately.
• 6. Within 24 hours you’ll get an email from Urban Adventures staff, confirming your 17% commission.
• 7. Email Lindsay with the pages where you embedded links.

Some tips

To give yourself the best chance of making sales and getting on the Intrepid Tours, I recommend that you take some time to build in the links.

They have an XML embed which can be taken per city (they have 80+ cities online at the moment) and put at the bottom of any post about that city. Adding links to older content like this is what they are looking for and what they have told me converts the best.

The booking search widget is also cool and works well near any hotel/hostel widget you might already have. Feel free to contact Lindsay or me if you want some guidance.

New and exciting

As far as I’m aware, this is the first time top commission rates have been worked out between travel bloggers and a major travel company. I’m excited about this, the possibilities it offers in the short- and long-term, and how independent bloggers and publishers can continue to work together and create meaningful and mutually profitable relationships with the travel industry.

Any questions, email me at craig@ indietravelmedia dot com and I’ll get back to you ASAP.

Cheers,
Craig Martin
Host at Indie Travel Podcast, and chief email-answerer here at Indie Travel Media Ltd.

On June 2, Art of Solo Travel was submitted to the Amazon Kindle store, it was approved for sale on the 4th and, within 10 days of release, has made it into the top 10 solo travel guides sold on Amazon.com. It should be noted that only two Kindle ebooks currently rank higher, both priced below the Art of Solo Travel.

Art of Solo Travel - Now a top-selling book on solo woman's travel

As the publishers of Art of Solo Travel, we offer our congratulations to author Stephanie Lee, and look forward to helping her become Amazon.com’s best-selling author on solo travel guides.

You can find the Art of Solo Travel at its website, or on Amazon US and Amazon UK.

Blog4nz (or #blog4nz for you twitter-lovers) is a worldwide social media marathon aimed at filling the internet — and especially the blogosphere — with top-quality content about travel in New Zealand.

Just under a month ago, a devastating earthquake hit Christchurch, New Zealand. Damage was done, lives cut short, people are still without power, water and a confirmed death toll. My own Dad and Step-mum live just outside Christchurch and are in or about the city often enough.

The images beamed around the world showed Christchurch, and by association, New Zealand as a complete disaster zone. It looked more like the end of a Lord of the Ring’s battle sequence than the pastoral Shire pictures people are used to from Canterbury. Unfortunately that’s heavily impacted tourism down here; and unfortunately that’s 10% of our GDP and the money that will help rebuild Christchurch and keep New Zealand from a recession.

That’s why we’ve thrown our time and energy behind #blog4NZ: a worldwide social media event from March 21-23, 2011. A grassroots effort to remind people that New Zealand is here; and it’s open for business.

For more information, visit
http://blog4nz.indietravelmedia.com/
http://facebook.com/blog4nz

MatadorU Review - our latest site

MatadorU Review aims to inform people about the MatadorU writing course and MatadorU photography course with unbiased reviews from independent writers. We hope this will prove to be a useful resource for people considering MatadorU as an education option in their goal to become full-time travel writers or travel photographers.

In the meantime, drop by and check out our electronics for travel store.

Wink (wine and travel site, Twitter) announced an open invitation for travel bloggers to apply for several nights accommodation at Chalet Balaena over the period of the Tour de France. We were lucky enough to win, and very much look forward to visiting and exploring the region, tasting some local wines, and enjoying the festivities and sporting trumphs of the world’s most famous bike race.

Chalet Balaena is available for summer rental or long-term winter rental. Find it on Facebook and Twitter.

We’ll also be doing some serious gear shopping, probably picking up a new Macbook Pro to replace the rapidly declining multimedia powers of a Powerbook G4. Is there a prize for the most-travelled laptop? This baby survived trips to somewhere between 35-40 sovereign nations.

If you are in New York on Tuesday 29 June, come and meet Craig and Linda:
New York City Meetup

There’s a list of other events available here, while the official TBEX site (and online community) is here.

Craig’s business card

Craig's new business card

Linda’s business card

Linda's new business card

Logo and business card design

We offer full logo and business card design as part of our extensive range of digital design and branding services. Contact us for more information.

Meet Craig and Linda

Craig and Linda will be at the TBEX pre- and after-parties as well as attending the entire event. Craig will speaking as part of a panel on Travel Blogging and Podcasting during the conference.

After the conference, we’ve arranged a meet-up for friends, readers and listeners of the Indie Travel Podcast and our other sites. This will be a casual, chat-filled evening over a few cold ones.

More information and RSVP: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=125105354196201

There’s a tentative London meet-up being planned for early July. More details to come.

Highlights:

• Strong multimedia integration.
• Vibrant, visual effect and navigation.
• Amazing, international and independent travel content.
• 20,000 strong monthly audience plus 30,000+ media downloads each month.

Advertise on Indie Travel Podcast

I’m 28, have huge hair, and travel around the world with my wife, Linda; who happens to be our Managing Editor.

At Indie Travel Media, we love new media and travel, and do our best to spend copious amounts of time playing with both. We have no full-time office staff at the moment, just a great collection of people around the world. Completely location independent. It’s fun.

This mini-blog is designed to help you see what we’re doing at Indie Travel Media Ltd — our highs and lows, our projects, and those projects we take on for awesome clients. There’s a chance to see what we can do for you, or you can just read through these pages and steal all our ideas. We’ll probably be able to execute them for you cheaper and more efficiently though, so if you like what you see, do get in touch.

We build online travel community, especially through blogging but also on other sites like Facebook. We create great content — written, spoken and video are all part of what we do. And we can build websites to showcase them all, too. We have excellent designers on board so if you need logos, PDF ebook design or anything like that … Well, let’s just say you want to flick us an email. Speak to you soon.