Stay22: My Top Affiliate Income Earner as a Travel Blogger

If you’ve been following Travel Dave for a while, you’ll know that I’m always interested in finding new ways to make my travel blog work better for me.

This blog post is for the Content Creators out there looking for advice on how to go full-time and support your travels with an online income.

Not just in terms of creating great content and inspiring people to travel, but also in finding ways that my website can generate an income while I’m doing the things I love.

And that brings me nicely onto one of my favourite topics: passive income.

You know the type. The income that can continue coming in while you’re asleep, travelling, sitting on a plane or exploring a new destination.

For me, one of my favourite forms of passive income has always been affiliate revenue.

And one company that has become a particularly important part of that income stream is Stay22.

This is my review of Stay22 focused towards content creators or those who want to support their travels by running a travel blog.

What is passive income? Let me explain

Before I get into Stay22, let’s talk about passive income.

The idea of passive income is pretty simple. You put the work in upfront, and rather than being paid every time you do something, your content can continue generating revenue over time.

For travel bloggers and content creators, affiliate marketing can be a great fit.

You write an article about a destination, hotel, flight, activity or travel experience. Someone reads your article, clicks through an affiliate link and makes a booking.

If everything is tracked correctly, you can earn a commission from that booking.

The beauty of this model is that your article can continue working for you long after you’ve published it.

That article you wrote six months ago could generate a booking today.

And the article you wrote five years ago could generate another booking tomorrow.

That is what I love about affiliate income.

My travel blog, Travel Dave, has thousands of articles

One example: yesterday I generated a Stay22 affiliate booking from a blog post I did about Switzerland ten years ago!

I’ve been running my travel blog for more than two decades now, and over the years I’ve published thousands of articles.

That sounds fantastic, and it is, but there is a downside.

Keeping on top of thousands of pieces of content is a huge job.

You need to hire a team, almost, and simply put, it’s just me running the show.

When you have a website with hundreds or thousands of articles, manually checking every single page to make sure your affiliate links are relevant, working and monetised isn’t realistic.

Imagine going through thousands of blog posts one by one, checking hotel links, booking links, travel websites and everything else.

You’d never get anything else done.

And I have tried to do this in the past, and before long, it’s all outdated, and you have to do it all over again.

And this is where Stay22 has become particularly useful for me.

Stay22 has become my Knight in shining armour.

Picking me up out of the depths of time-wasting situations.

How Stay22 helps automate affiliate links

One of the things I really like about Stay22 is that it can help automate the affiliate process.

Stay22’s Nova technology can identify relevant travel links within your content and help turn them into monetised affiliate links.

That means I don’t necessarily have to go back through thousands of articles and manually replace every single link.

Or have to worry about broken links, as it’s all automated.

With just a couple of clicks, Nova can help automate the process across your travel content.

And I do truly mean just a couple of clicks!

For someone like me, with a huge archive of travel articles, that can be incredibly useful.

It means I can concentrate on what I actually enjoy doing, which is travelling, creating content and writing about the places I visit, rather than spending endless hours managing affiliate links.

And potentially, that means I’m not leaving money on the table.

Turning old content into an income opportunity

This is one of the biggest reasons I like the Stay22 model.

As a travel creator, you are constantly producing new content.

But what about everything you have already created?

Your old blog posts don’t necessarily stop being valuable just because you published them a year, five years or even ten years ago.

Some of my older travel articles continue to attract readers through Google and other search engines.

Those visitors are already looking for information about their next trip.

They might be looking for a hotel.

They might be looking for accommodation.

They might be planning a trip and need somewhere to stay.

If your content helps them make that decision, there is an opportunity to connect them with a booking platform and earn affiliate revenue.

That’s where I see the real value.

You have already done the hard work of creating the content.

Why not make sure that content is working as hard as possible for you?

It’s a win-win for you and a win-win for the reader

One of the things I like about affiliate marketing is that, when it’s done properly, it can be a genuine win-win situation.

The reader gets something useful.

They are already planning a trip, and your article helps them find somewhere to stay or make a booking.

The booking platform gets a customer.

And you, as the content creator, have the opportunity to earn a commission for referring that customer.

It doesn’t have to be about bombarding your readers with adverts or making your website difficult to use.

For me, the best affiliate links are the ones that naturally fit into the content.

If someone is reading my travel guide to a particular destination and there is a relevant hotel or booking option, that’s useful information.

And if that booking generates affiliate revenue, even better.

I don’t have a paywall and offer my blog posts for free on Travel Dave. When a reader uses an affiliate link naturally, without it affecting their journey, it feels like a complimentary tip for my good work, and I love that!

Why I love using Stay22 on my travel blog

There are plenty of affiliate networks and travel affiliate programmes out there, but Stay22 has become one of my favourites because of the automation and wonderful customer support team that they offer when I need help.

When you’ve been creating travel content for as long as I have, anything that can save time is incredibly valuable.

The idea of being able to take an enormous library of existing travel content and help monetise relevant links without manually updating thousands of articles is very appealing.

It’s one of those things where you can set it up and let it do some of the heavy lifting in the background.

And that is exactly what I want from passive income.

I don’t want another job. I want it to work for me.

I want systems that can work alongside the content I’m already creating.

And when I do need help, I can easily chat with the Stay22 team via chat support to quickly come up with solutions and fix my problems, so everything runs smoothly around the clock.

There’s also a $200 bonus; make sure you claim it!

If you’re a travel blogger or content creator and you want to give Stay22 a try, there is currently an additional incentive for my audience.

Stay22 has offered my audience an exclusive $200 bonus once you have generated your first 100 bookings through Stay22.

Double bubble! Lovely jubbly!

To qualify, you need to sign up between August 23rd and September 23rd and use my Stay22 Referral link.

You can also use the link provided with this article to sign up.

Obviously, affiliate income isn’t guaranteed, and results will depend on things such as your traffic, content, audience and the bookings generated through your website.

But if you’re already producing travel content, I think it’s certainly worth looking at.

What have you got to lose? Give Stay22 a go!

Another thing I like about Stay22 is that if you try it and decide it’s not for you, you can turn it off.

That makes it a relatively easy thing to test.

You don’t necessarily need to completely change your website strategy or spend hours rebuilding your existing content.

For travel bloggers who already have a large archive of articles, I think that’s particularly interesting.

You might already have thousands of people visiting your website every month.

Those visitors are already planning holidays and booking travel.

So the question is whether you’re making the most of those opportunities.

Passive income won’t happen overnight; it’s still a long road

Now, I should point out that passive income isn’t magic.

You still need to create good content.

You still need people to visit your website.

You still need to build an audience and earn their trust.

And, most importantly, you need to provide genuine value.

But once you’ve built that audience and created a library of useful content, affiliate revenue can become an additional income stream that works alongside your existing content.

For me, that’s the exciting part.

I’ve spent more than 20 years building Travel Dave and creating travel content.

I don’t want that content to disappear into the internet after I’ve published it.

I want it to continue helping people, inspiring people to travel and, where appropriate, generating an income.

And that’s why Stay22 has become one of my favourite affiliate income earners.

Give Stay22 a try today and see how you get along

If you’re a travel blogger, YouTuber, website owner or content creator and you’re looking for another way to monetise your travel content, I’d definitely recommend taking a look at Stay22.

You might discover that you already have opportunities sitting inside your existing content that you simply haven’t been taking advantage of.

And if you do decide to give it a go, don’t forget to use my sign-up link when you sign up between August 23rd and September 23rd to unlock the exclusive $200 bonus once you’ve generated your first 100 bookings.

A huge thank you to the team at Stay22 for their support over the years and for creating a solution that helps content creators like me turn our travel content into another potential income stream.

For me, that’s what passive income is all about.

Create something once.

Keep providing value.

And let it continue working for you while you get on with travelling the world.

Simply put, thank you, Stay22, for freeing up valuable time to run my business, allowing me to continue doing what I love most, and for that, I’m incredibly grateful.

Happy travels!