There are many ways to make money with WordPress. You can become a freelancer (complete with your own portfolio website), open up an online store, or sell WordPress themes and plugins.

Or you can sell travel packages to your visitors! Sounds awesome and impossible but you can have your own online travel agency and sell travel packages to your visitors in very short time. You can check this ready made solution How to Start Online Travel Agency.

Few words on affiliate business for those who don’t know what’s all about.

Affiliate marketing is an interesting option because you can essentially earn money in your sleep. All you need is a website, traffic, and products you are willing to advertise. The rest sort of happens by itself.

Time is money, so let’s get started right away.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Before anything else, let’s first clear up what exactly we are talking about when we say affiliate marketing.

Basically, affiliate marketing means that you recommend someone’s product on your site by linking to it. The link (a so-called “affiliate link”) contains information that identifies visitors as coming from your site. When one of them completes a purchase, the merchant knows you helped make that sale and pays you an agreed-upon commission.

This is slightly different from ads where you get paid merely for eyeballs on the ad banners, regardless of whether somebody clicks on them or not. Still, affiliate links can also be used in ads, the difference is just that you only get money for completed purchases.

Advantages of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a very common and very successful business model on the Internet. For good reason. It offers several advantages:

Sounds good, right? However, of course, there are also some drawbacks.

Disadvantages of Affiliate Marketing

We already talked about the fact that you only get paid if a purchase actually goes through. So, if you can’t convert anyone to click on the links and actually buy something, nothing will come your way.

Secondly, commissions vary across different programs. Some only offer low percentages. You can still make this work but need to keep in mind that it takes a lot more traffic and clicks to earn a full-time income.

Talking about traffic: one of the biggest “disadvantages” is that for an affiliate website to work, you still need to figure out how to build a successful website, get traffic and convert visitors into buyers. If you have never done so, this will be your biggest hurdle and take a lot of effort and energy.

If you want to build your own affiliate website, your can choose several ways to do so, each with its own strengths, weaknesses, pros and cons.

For the travel business, which we are interested in, you can have a website up on which you could sell air tickets , vacations, travel packages , practically anything related to travel and tourism industry. The very good part is that the solution we use (Travel Affiliate Website Businessw) has everything setup already and it can be used by people with no experience.