Everybody would agree carefully planning your vacation could save you some money, but few know it can actually make you some as well. Writing down your conclusions on where to stay, how to travel there and perhaps some insightful tips about the local nightlife or sights, will if marketed correctly be a possible source of income it marketed correctly.

These days, most webmasters rely mainly on SEO and search engines to get their long term traffic, but there are other ? faster and more direct ? ways of marketing a webpage or blog.

When deciding to make a page or blog about a destination, the research done will be very time specific. That means you can't wait for any SEO efforts to kick in, you need your information visible as soon as possible. Unless you are building a larger website or blog ? with a long term goal ? there is no need to think too much about keywords or SEO. Just focus on your visitors, try to write to them.

Instead of relying on search engines for your visitors, a well written and informative article about a certain destination is perfect for various social bookmarks. Be sure to add widgets for as many as possible to your page, this is where you are hoping to get your traffic. If you know anyone active in any of the major social bookmarking arenas ? i.e. StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious or similar ? ask if they can submit it for you. This way you will gain much initial exposure, a factor important enough to make or break your plan.

You want to make sure you have a few possible submissions to the social bookmarks, so try to make a few pages, each page covering a certain aspect of the topic. If you are lucky, people will like your pages enough to submit them for you ? further increasing the exposure. While not nearly always the case, it sure is a nice bonus when it happens.

As pages like this are short term, you need to find as many ways of monetizing your traffic as possible. Visitors from social bookmarks are well known for their unwillingness to click ads, so you better make the ads well worth clicking. Going with (only) contextual ads won't give you any travel money; you need to point them towards products interesting enough to buy.

Finding just one travel affiliate program offering enough products to cover every aspect of the vacation is hard ? not to say impossible. Instead, you should find affiliate programs offering the best prices on every part of the vacation;

Airline tickets

There are plenty of affiliate programs more or less only offering airline tickets. The competition should make it easy to find an affiliate program offer both good prices AND a fair commission.

Hotel

As with airline tickets, affiliate programs offering only online bookings are common and have competitive fairs and commissions. If you are focusing on a smaller destination, you might have to look around a bit, but many hotels and/or chains are using some sort of online booking with an affiliate program.

Tours

Plane tickets and hotel nights are profitable if people use your links, but do not forget the smaller things. Tours, trips or excursions can add quite a bit of revenue to you.

If you have researched your own perfect travel arrangements, odds are others will like it as well ? If they do, you will earn yourself some travel money.