(not sure i'm posting this under the right category so feel free to move it around)

I have a domain name that if i create a mini page for i should be able to get 30,000 or so uniques a month without too much trouble.   The niche is for people looking for hotels.  I am wondering if anyone else is playing in that niche, and if it is worth doing a whole affiliate site or just a site with google ads? 

Thats alot of a traffic, won't that be a very competative keyword?

Thanks for the replies.

Nobby I was surprised when I found this site.  After researching it there only looks to be about 90 other sites that have this niche in their intitle and inanchor.  And of the 90 only a handful are trying any kind of seo on their sites.

Daniboy I might just have to go the affiliate route.  Though I might just put up a mini page to see if what I believe is true is in fact true.  Then I can expand it to a full blown site if I think the profit is there.

We have a Hilton Head Hotels domain that we built a few years back but haven't really done anything with it. Our primary customers are vacation rental companies and they got upset when they found out we had a site dedicated to competing with their niche. Hence, we never built many links to it, but it is still in the top few positions on Bing and Yahoo.

Of course, now that the economy is so lousy I just may build a few links to it so it moves up in the Google rankings.

Anyway, we became a Travelocity partner (through WTC Travel) to provide our hotel listings, car rentals, air fare, etc. and the special discounts. The provide you with all of the info that you need if you want to build an XML solution for the listings, but we just use their HTML feeds and put them in a Joomla wrapper.

We haven't made much money off of the site, but that's due to the fact that we haven't done anything with it in a few years. Actually, a three or four years ago it was top 5 in Google for the phrase 'Hilton Head hotels', and even though that's a good KW it still didn't bring in a lot of money. My guess is that the design was kind of crappy, and we did not emphasize the Travelocity connection enough, and because of that web surfers did not have a lot of confidence in the site.

My suggestion is that you may want to partner with Travelocity or another top web travel company and use their tools to provide the reservation system, then try and get additional ad revenues from local hotels and tourist related businesses in that market.

 

You're welcome.

Interestingly enough, we have only 8 hotels on the Island. there are 4 larger hotels (Marriott, Hilton, Crowne Plaza, and The Westin) and 4 small hotels. there are a few more limited service hotels on the mainlaind, but nothing much to speak of. Most people that vacation here stay in one of the thousands of villas that we have on the Island.

And here's something interesting. In most destination vacation markets when people search for a condo or villa they search for 'city name + vacation rentals' (i.e. Hilton Head vacation rentals). But in this market that's not true. They drop 'vacation' and just search for Hilton Head rentals. Yep - another shameless plug for one of our sites