Rosalind Gardner

Greetings from the Affiliate Convention in Los Angeles.

After spending the morning enjoying a lovely, leisurely breakfast meeting with Lisa Riolo (ex VP of Commission Junction) and then contributing to the local economy, I spent the afternoon attending 2 sessions here at the Affiliate Convention.

The first was Affiliate Marketing in Travel, moderated by Debbie Bookstaber, VP, Strategy and Business Development of The JAR Group with panelists Elisabeth Osmeloski (Managing Editor of SearchEngineLand), Jamie Low (Principal of SearchEngineMarketing) and Lena Siara Huang (eCommerce Manager of Marriott International).

I was particularly interested in this panel because I was wondering in which direction I should take Roamsters.com, i.e. should I spend the time to build it out and really try to make money with it, or should I simply acknowledge that the current economy makes travel a much less desirable niche and that I'd be better to focus my efforts on more lucrative markets.

A few positive tidbits included the facts that travel ranks only 4th (or 5th) after retailers, financial services, and education in terms of online sales and that the U.S. travel market is forecast to reach $236B in 2010. Leisure travel is a bigger market than corporate travel and fully 47% of adult Internet users are surfing for travel information. Too, niche travel sectors ar emerging in importance – think green, seniors and adventure.

The main pitfalls are shrinking margins, increasing competition and more merchant restrictions, eg. saying you can't promote via Twitter.

That said, the opportunities to deal direct with merchants are increasing, especially if you specialize in local travel, i.e. forging partnerships with local hotels and venues is the way of the future.

I particularly enjoyed Jamie Low's presentation, which focused on using your knowledge of current and future SEO to influence your domain name choices – i.e. keyword domains and lack of branding are becoming riskier strategies. I  personally can't wait until all the travel-travel-travel.com crap content sites STOP ranking so highly, and invariably this WILL happen as Google's algorithm technology improves. Yeeha!

Those latter 2 points were strongly re-inforced during today's keynote, during which Webmaster Radios Daron Babin interviewed Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan.

So, all in all, while I may not participate more heavily in the travel niche in 2010, (forecast to be the second ‘year of the deal' in the niche) I decided NOT to rename Roamsters, seniorsgreenadventuretravel.com. 🙂