How To Track Referral Income?

What to do when an affiliate program isn't available?

[Gerry]

I operate a travel site which generates affiliate income through hotel bookings. Recently I've had a number of representatives of specific hotels contacting me to ask how they can get their hotel on my site.

Obviously selling advertising space is one possibility but what I'd like to know is what other options exist. How could I accurately track bookings through my site to these hotels when no traditional affiliate program is in place?

[Black Knight]

Hi Gerry,

Well, you'd need to do something with the hotel to do this - like having the order-form on your own site and forwarding that to the hotel's booking - basically acting as a kind of proxy

You can't track on the site of another as easily - although you could use FRAMES or an I-FRAME to have a page of your own with cookie tracking combined with the hotel site's booking confirmation page.

The simplest solution would be to place a small invisible gif on the hotel's booking confirmation page, which you could at least track hits on. It's far from perfect, but its simple.

[buckworks]

Suggestion: consider whether such a request could be parlayed into a productive link exchange. A well-placed, well-worded link could be of significant value to you even if no cash ever changes hands.

I have found that small sites who approach me are often willing to accept very specific suggestions about how I'd like them to word the link that they give me. Carefully worded link text can be a big help for improving one's rankings for target search terms, even if the other site has not developed much page rank yet.