Travel affiliate programs can be a great way to monetize your travel and lifestyle blog, or affiliate website based around travel-related products.
While most travel writers and travel agencies know about the standard hotel/flight companies and their corresponding affiliate programs, many don’t know that there are also land travel companies available as well like 12Go.
>>Affiliate Links Without Traffic Won’t Earn You A Dime<<
See how the pros are cashing in with simple affiliate websites using my recommended affiliate training.
Includes, live help, tech support, and step by step lessons!
–>START EARNING $$$<—
When I first found this out about this I got really excited because I write a lot of DIY type guides helping others to travel around the world on their own without the need for hiring expensive hotel tour packages and the like.
12Go is for all of the Asia region primarily and offers bus, ferry, car, and flight services. The most common type that I have used them for it for is booking bus trips with them in advance!
Guaranteed seats without waiting in lines
This brand isn’t widespread used across the world but in the Asia region it’s widely used for it’s convenience and affordability. While it is true that you can go to any bus station and get the tickets you need for a similar price, but what makes this service so much better is that you get your tickets in advance, you don’t have to wait in lines, and you don’t have to worry if you’ll be there in time to actually get a seat.
I remember many times I’ve gone to bus stations and the bus was sold out so we end up sitting there for a few hours waiting for the next bus. What a pain!
There are no fees or minimum orders needed to be an affiliate partner for 12Go, so you’ve got nothing to lose by signing up. You do have to work hard to make money with their affiliate program, so keep reading to find out how to monetize your travel website with 12Go links.
What Type Of Products Are Featured
12Go offers a wide variety of products that you can’t find on most other sites for travel. I’ll review each of these below:
- Bus Tickets: They offer point-to-point bus tickets available in advance. This guarantees you a seat on the bus and allows you to avoid the lines and potentially not getting a seat.
- Car Transfer: They offer car service including a driver to get you from point-to-point. This can be one way or round trip and is a personal trip with no additional passengers.
- Flights: Plane trips are offered via many different carriers. 12Go does the searching on their partner sites in Asia to find you the cheapest rates.
- Trains: They connect you with all of the major railway companies in Asia to offer you the best routes.
- Hotels/Tours: This is one of the newest services available from 12Go in which they have started adding hotels and tours in Thailand for customers. Soon to launch further into additional locations.
12Go also offers country guides which is extremely helpful when your visitor is figuring out their itinerary.
Another great thing about 12Go is that it provides you with suggested best routes to take which might be a flight, or it might be a train and taxi combo. They take the headache out of having to determine “If I take the train here, then what do I do next to get to the place I want to go.” They will provide you the point by point step on how to get there.
Here’s an example in Thailand where they provide you train and bus joint tickets. They even inform you that you will be transferred between the trips.
What Is The Commission Rate
12Go does not have a set commission rate per transaction but rather they offer you 50% of the commission that 12Go would have received. The average commission on each booking is approximately $3.21 but it will also depend on the amount of the sale.
The company has some really awesome stats as well on their average customer conversions which I will quote directly from them: “The average affiliate reward is ~$3.21 per booking. ~6.8% of visitors who see the search form on partner website make a search and ~8.1% of these visitors book a ticket.”
With their average stats, this means that for every 1,000 people who view your site and come across the 12Go affiliate link, on average you can make $17.70. The commission rate is quite competitive on the market and the earning potentials is definitely there!
Alternative Affiliate Programs
The biggest competitor on the market for bus/transportation type affiliate programs is gotobus.com which offers between 3-5% commission depending on the type of service offered. Gotobus.com also offers a large variation of tours, deals and hotels which 12Go has only just started enhancing their service to include.
Since the 12Go program is primarily used for travel/transportation niche, it is great to partner it with other similar affiliate programs such as hotel and tour groups. A great tour affiliate partner for 12Go is Klook.com which offers food, city, culture, and nature tours. You can also easily pair this with other hotel affiliate programs such as Agoda, Booking.com, and others.
There is a very wide variety of other travel affiliate programs that you can partner with 12Go which is why it makes it such a flexible and fun program to work with. Keep exploring new ways to partner your affiliate programs together to give customers the ultimate package!
Website Ideas
12Go is a great tool for tourists to use when coming to Asia as it removes the pain and challenges of finding bus depots and figuring out how to book tickets with them. So naturally I would suggest pairing this with your travel blogs or travel/tour company.
Within your travel blog it’s great to tell people about certain destinations, but often we neglect to inform them how to get there easily. Maybe someone is visiting from another country and doesn’t have a car. Or maybe they don’t know how to find the routes to go to certain places. It’s great to show them the path to go there and then also give them 12Go as the easy way to book it ahead of time.
If you own or are thinking of starting a travel/tour company then having 12Go will be a lifesaver for you because you can cater to all of your customer’s needs for transportation and hand it to them in one complete package.
Here are two sites which utilize 12Go that you can use as reference:
- This Thailand site has the ferry schedule available in it: www.adventureinyou.com/thailand/things-to-do-in-phuket
- This Philippines one has bus transfers from one city to the next in a search box: https://mynomadiccompass.com/2018/01/08/banaue-batad-travel-guide/
Can You Make Money With The 12Go Affiliate Program?
You can absolutely make money with the 12Go affiliate program! You just need to have the right content which attracts viewers to your page who are interested in traveling. Once you have great content that tells your viewers how to go to different places in Asia, you then add the affiliate links that gives them the end to end package they need.
The great thing about 12Go is that they offer different ways for your customers to search with some customization as well. Here’s a quick look at the tools available for the affiliate partners:
- Search Box: The search box functionality is one of the most common that you can use when inserting 12Go on your site. It gives the visitor an easy to use box to search their origin and destination. When they click find tickets from this it keeps your affiliate ID with that person’s browser for 30 days so any booking they make with 12Go you will receive a commission. The search box is customizable both in size and color.
- Text Links: These work great for inserting simple hyperlinks to text like “click here to see bus routes and prices”. While these aren’t as flashy, the absolutely work, especially on mobile devices. You can also use these with your own custom graphics as well on your site. Graphics tend to be a bit more visually stimulating but they do require more work on your part.
Play around with their affiliate functionality and see what works best for your site!
Pros/Cons of Working With 12Go
While each company has it’s ups and downs, 12Go for me was all ups.
What I like most about working with 12Go is that their partner affiliate tool is so simple and easy to use. Often times affiliate programs can seem so complicated to figure (like eBay) out how to get the code to make the ad appear on your site properly. With 12Go it’s just one simple screen and you can drag the box to be bigger or smaller and it adjusts appropriately.
I also like that their tracking screen is easy to understand so you can track your impressions and purchases made. This helps with optimization later down the road as your site gains more traffic and you start getting more sales.
Hopefully you learned more about the 12Go affiliate program and if you have any other travel related affiliate programs you love, share them in the comments below!
Keep learning and traveling always!
The Internet’s #1 Affiliate Training
It sounds like you’re pretty familiar with the basics of how affiliate marketing works. Awesome! But is your website profitable yet? Are you stuck spending hours wondering why you aren’t seeing results yet?
You aren’t alone. Most newbie affiliate marketers are a little lost, jumping from one “how to” guide to the next, hoping to learn the secret sauce of how to make money with affiliate marketing
I was able to turn my basic niche blog into a six-figure earner in 18 months following the training from this company. They focus on building a sustainable business that will earn for years, not just a website that will “game” search engines for temporary rankings. That’s why 8 years later my websites are still earning and still growing.
What’s up ladies and dudes! Great to finally meet you, and I hope you enjoyed this post. Sign up for my #1 recommended training course and learn how to start your business for FREE!