You probably heard that Priceline.com is worth billions of dollars although it doesn’t own any hotels, rental cars, airplanes or cruise ships, and now you are asking yourself: how does Priceline make money?
This is a legitimate question that many people who are interested in making money online ask.
And most important, can you personally make money with the same business model of Priceline even without a big investment or technical experience?
If it was possible, then how?
And if it wasn’t, then what’s the alternative for making money online from home?
These questions and more I will be answering in this 5-minutes article, and at the end, I will tell you about the place that helped me take advantage of the Priceline business model and make money online in different industries.
So, without further ado, let’s begin!
How Does Priceline Make Money?
Priceline makes money by referring customers to companies that provide different services like hotels, car rental companies, cruise trips, and airlines, in exchange for a commission on every booking that comes through Priceline website and app.
And this commission depends on many factors such as the total value of the booking, the service provider, the location, the period, the season and more.
And this model is called affiliate marketing, or performance marketing, which is a legitimate model, and my favorite way of making money online.
And this is how Vrbo.com makes money, but Vrbo specializes mainly in home and apartment rental services, but Kayak makes money this way as well by promoting airlines, hotels, car rentals and trips for a commission like Priceline.com.
And now to the important question:
Can You Personally Make Money with The Priceline Business Model?
Sure!
I personally make most of my income with the same business model of Priceline.com, and I started doing so without owning any property or product, and I use this model to make money in different industries, not only travel and leisure.
Affiliate marketing is a popular business model and it is the best for beginners who want to make money online because you can start with it without owning a product or providing a service, and you can begin without any prior experience at a very low cost, as you will see in the last section below.
And the nice thing about this model is that you don’t have to promote hotels, flights, or car rental services in order to make money like the Priceline website and app, but you can apply it to almost any industry.
For example, you can recommend credit repair services for people who need them and get paid a commission from the company that provides these services.
Another example that I personally do in one of my affiliate businesses, I promote an online video course that teaches people how to jump higher for basketball and I get a commission everytime someone purchases the program through my recommendation.
And of course, you can also make money like Priceline.com by recommending staying properties, flights and cruise trips to people who are looking for them.
How to Make Money with Priceline itself?
If you want to make it easier for yourself, you can leverage Priceline’s huge database in order to recommend the hotels, flights and trips listed on their website and app, and when people see your promotion and go to Priceline to book a service or a hotel room, you get from Priceline a 3% commission of the total value of the booking.
This means that you work as a sub-affiliate under the big affiliate, Priceline.
This happens by joining the Priceline affiliate program and getting a link or a banner that you place on your website recommending a certain service like a hotel, a flight or a cruise trip.
And when your site’s visitors use it to go to Priceline.com and book a service, you will get the commission from Priceline.
And if you liked this model and you want to know how to start with it in order to make money like the way Priceline makes money, then the following section is for you.
Start Your Own Mini-Priceline.com Business in 3 Simple Steps
1 – Choose an Audience to Work with
This is what we call choosing a niche for affiliate marketing.
And this is an important step, because you need to make all of your promotions relevant to the same group of people.
For example, Priceline focuses on people who travel and need different services that help them like hotels, airlines, car rentals, …etc.
And this makes it easier for them to focus their effort and make more money off every visitor that comes to their site.
And the same for you, you need to focus on a group of people, and this doesn’t have to be people who travel.
For example, your niche could be:
- People who practice a certain sport like soccer, basketball, tennis, golf, …etc.
- People with a certain hobby like pencil drawing, painting, playing guitar, singing, …etc.
- People who have a passion or goal like: vegan people, green people, meditation and yoga practitioners, …etc.
- People looking for specific services like refinance, mortgage, loans, lawyers, …etc.
- And so on.
2 – Build a Simple Affiliate Site Like Priceline.com
This part doesn’t require technical knowledge and experience anymore.
Thanks to the tools I will mention in the next section, you can start an affiliate site in few minutes without worrying about the technical stuff.
But you need the website in order to be the place where you bring your audience and show them the services and products you promote, just like Priceline has their own website.
3 – Help Your Audience Like Priceline & Start Making Money
Priceline helps people find the best offers for hotels, trips, car rentals and flights and that’s why people take their promotions and that’s how they make money finally.
And you should do the same on your website.
For example, if you have a website that is related to cruise trips, then you would answer questions that people ask on Google such as:
- Best carnival cruise trips
- Best Alaska cruise trips
- Best family cruise trips
- Best European cruise trips
And s on.
And for each of these searches, you would create a simple article listing the top cruise trips available, and you would link to the website of the company that offers those trips through a unique link that is called an affiliate link.
And when someone clicks on that link and goes to the company’s website and books a trip, you get a commission.
Or, you can make things easier and join the Priceline affiliate program and place their search tool on your site and when someone uses it to look for a trip and books it, you get a commission from Priceline itself that is 3% of the booking value.
If you liked these steps and you want to do them and start earning income and profit online like Priceline.com does, but you don’t know where to start from, then the following section is for you:
The One Place to Start Your Priceline-Like Business
This place I’m recommending is the same place where I learned how to make money like Priceline.com.
And it is the best place online to learn affiliate marketing and start with it as they provide you with all of what you need at one place such as:
- The step-by-step detailed training.
- The best research tools to find opportunities for making money like Priceline.
- The best web hosting with premium support so that you don’t care about the technical stuff.
- The amazing community of 2 million online entrepreneurs who are willing to lend you a hand whenever you needed help.
And much more.
And this amazing place is a platform that is called Wealthy Affiliate.
And the nice thing is that you get all of what I mentioned above for a very low monthly fee, especially when compared to other programs that cost you thousands of dollars for the training alone, and then they leave you to go and handle the technical stuff and the web hosting by yourself.
Want something better, this amazing platform offers a free Starter plan in order to try the training and tools before paying anything.
Click here to read my full review of Wealthy Affiliate and learn more about what it offers to you, and see how you can get started with the free membership today.
This would be a great step for you to take in order to start making money online with the same business model that Priceline makes money with.
Conclusion
I hope that you find my article helpful and that now you understand fully how Priceline makes money online, and how you can make money with the same business model or even with Priceline itself without owning any property.
If you are interested in started a website that makes you money like Priceline, then my recommended program in the previous section is the place to go as they provide you with all of the necessary training and tools at a really low cost.
And if you still have any question about Priceline’s business model or about anything in this article, please, feel free to leave it below in the comments’ section and I will do my best to come back to you asap 🙂