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AnniesCostumes.com, and the ExtremeHalloween network of sites, is a well-establish company of over 10 years, with a great converting e-commerce portal featuring a large product selection and great pricing. Their products include: costumes, wigs, make-up, and numerous accessories for every possible event or holiday. In addition, Annies offers costumes in niches like: babies, children, teens, adults and even pets. They offer an extremely wide variety of costumes to ensure that regardless of what your visitors are looking for they will find it and at a great price too!

In addition to offering an amazing Halloween costume product line, Annie’s offers costumes and accessories for every possible occasion including: Christmas, Valentines Day, Mardi Gras, St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, and Purim. They even offer costumes of famous historical figures, in the event children need to give a well-prepared presentation on the figure for school or an event. There are so many popular niches you can promote from Annie’s Costumes, you will never run out of ideas!

About the Affiliate Program:

Annie’s performs extremely well in the months leading up to Halloween (July-October), but there are numerous reasons why this offer converts all year round. Obviously, leading up to Halloween the costumes niche booms, as search traffic goes through the roof. So you have to be heavily promoting costumes 3-4 months prior to Halloween to take full advantage. Also, right after Halloween, many visitors will flock back to the Internet to save money on their next year’s costume at a discount. They also look for Santa suits and Thanksgiving costumes and other seasonal costumes for November-December. Consumers also like dressing up for New Years, so that can be promoted or blogged about as well on your sites. Annie’s will normally have sales going on, so check on the current promotions and coupon codes. Posting coupons is a great way to increase conversion rates of your visitors.

Since Annie’s offers much more than just Halloween costumes, this program will work leading up to any holiday if you promote it to the right audience in the right way. You can build pages on your site dedicated to promoting Halloween itself or each seasonal event that may require costumes. Theater troupes are always looking for costumes and makeup all year long for shows they are doing, so the theater niche can be targeted as well with pages, articles, and social postings.

Payout Structure:

The program pays a sliding scale between 10% and 15% based on monthly sales.

Keyword Research:

You Can Use the Google Keyword Tool Here

We have done quite a bit of keyword research for you relating to costumes, wigs, and makeup. However feel free to conduct your own keyword research to discover hidden gems and obscure phrases you can get a page ranked for. When building your site or blog or adding pages to current sites, it is best to be rational about what types of keywords you can compete with in the organic search results and through paid search. For Annie’s Costumes, you may not want to target something as popular as “Halloween Costumes” with paid search, but you surely want to target that phrase on your site for organics, and every phrase related to it. If you launch a niche costumes site you will target Halloween costumes and every other popular phrase related to it by adding articles and posts about different types of costumes.

You can basically promote any product Annie’s sells, so you may want to research how popular certain products many be and the phrases related to them. Use your intuition and whatever is popular with kids they probably have a costume for. Here are some ideas to get your additional keyword research started: What are some hot characters recently? If children are bugging their parents to get them a costume of the hottest character for Halloween, people will be searching for it. Some examples include Sponge Bob Halloween Costume and Dora the Explorer Halloween Costume. These may, or may not be hot characters at the moment, but when you get creative you can easily build a list of very highly targeted keywords based on the current popular characters and include them in your keyword list and as pages on your site. You can build pages on your site specifically targeting these characters and develop good content to include on the page. This is good for SEO and building search engine rankings for your site. You should seek to build as many targeted pages of content on your site for as many individual niches as possible. Ideas for pages of descriptive content or reviews you can add to your site include: product categories, seasonal events, and actual products. In addition to targeting the Halloween Costume niche, try targeting the holidays that most people wouldn’t think to promote costumes for (such as St. Patrick’s Day or Easter.) Again, the more creative you get with your keyword thought process, the more effective keywords you will generate. Contact us for a list of pre-research popular phrases.

Ideas for Article Topics:

Writing articles is probably the best way to build long-term, sustained web traffic which can be built over time. Articles can be used on you own site to generate traffic and also can be submitted to article directories. However, I usually recommend posting each unique article to one site. Writing a few articles on the same topic you want to target and spreading them around is a good strategy. Make sure to vary the titles and content for each. Leveraging original content on your own sites and through article directories should be a major part of your SEO strategy, as the search engines love original content and lots of it. Once you have done your keyword research and know what you want to write about you can now brainstorm some quality article titles to use. Simply ensure that your keyword is being mentioned in your article title, and again in your article. Don’t mention your targeted keyword phrase more than a couple of times in your page content, but mention related phrases in the copy.
Here are some sample article title ideas:

The 5 Hottest Costumes for this Halloween Season
5 Reasons (Sponge bob, Dora the Explorer, etc.) Halloween Costumes Are In Demand
3 Tips to Selecting a Comfortable, and Attractive Mardi Gras costume.
10 Way to Save Money when Have a Halloween Party
Where to Find the Best Deals on Theater Makeup

Again, use your creativity to your benefit. If you are targeting keywords that people are searching for, but no one else is marketing to, you will be able to more easily generate traffic for those terms and therefore affiliate sales. If you bid in the paid search for more obscure products or phrases or can get an ROI on a low bid amount. Everything should be tested on a low spend to see what converts though paid search for you.

Best Ways to Promote Annie’s Costumes: Annie’s can be promoted in a number of ways including: SEO, paid search, Facebook Ads, Social Media/Networking, and in your opted-in email newsletter.

SEO – building sites and blogs promoting costumes, holidays, and popular characters will attract the kind of visitors that buy Annie’s products. Focus on producing as much original content as possible to attract the search engines and achieve higher rankings in the organic search results.
Paid Search – Pay-per-click can be effect to promote Annie’s especially in the the months leading up to Halloween. Make sure to have all your promotions related to Halloween in high-gear at this time. Develop as much content as possible to attract more visitors.

Facebook Ads – Facebook Ads can work with Annie’s because you can really target demographically and with keywords. Be careful how much you spend and make sure to track everything properly and measure your ROI.

Social Media – You should absolutely be using Twitter and Facebook to promote your you affiliate stuff in general. If you are passionate about the niche I recommend creating an entity on Twitter and a Facebook Fan page for your costume site promotions. Then add the Follow on Twitter and join our Fan Page icons to your sites/blogs promoting Annies. This will increase the number of the potential people you can interact with and promote to later on.

Newsletters – Building your newsletter list on your site should always be a major priority. Once you have some newsletter subscribers you can send them nice newsletters with affiliate ads in them. Make sure to follow Can Spam 2003 rules and regulations by allowing them to unsubscribe from your list and being non-deceptive with the message itself.

Word Of Mouth – Word of mouth marketing is one of the best ways to spread the word about your site or blog. Tell everyone to visit your site, which is why you should probably have a domain name of your own to promote to others.

These are but a few strategies to promote Annie’s Costumes. Please contact us for more strategies or to work one-on-one with an affiliate manager. Thanks and have a great day!

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Socially Bookmark Articles – Social bookmarking is a great way to generate traffic, inbound links, and better rankings for your site’s content. You have to join the sites and create a profile. This will allow you to bookmark any articles you wish. You can submit your own articles to these sites and other people may bookmark them if they find them interesting. You should bookmark mainly other people’s articles and some of yours as well, so not to appear like a spammer.
Top Social Bookmarking Sites: http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/social-bookmarking-websites

Social Networking – Create a Twitter account and Facebook Fan Page for each actually entity you wish to build up. Example, you are running a site advertising flower affiliate merchants, so you would create an identity “FlowerGuru” on Twitter and a FlowerGuru Fan Page on FB. This will allow you to advertise these groups on your sites and generate followers and fans. Then, these followers and friends can be messaged and communicated with to generate traffic back to your sites. Social networking is very powerful and shouldn’t be abused. Always remain professional and post content you think your followers and fans would benefit from, i.e. helpful tips, informative articles from trusted sources, interactive polls, and affiliate promotions. Try to avoid being annoying because you will lose followers. You should also have a main personal identity that you can maintain in order to network professionally and with actual friends and business associates.

Coupon Sites – Coupon sites are all the rage because people are looking for coupons to save money with merchants. Many affiliate merchants provide coupon codes to affiliate to help them promote. Some merchants provide coupon feeds that you can grab and publish on your site on a page or per merchant. You need some skills or tools to accomplish this. Posting unique merchant descriptions and merchant reviews will allow your site to rank well because it has unique content and isn’t just posting coupon codes. Unique content is absolutely essentially to good rankings, especially for a coupon site when there is so much competition.

Communities and Forums – Launching your own social communities is great way to build something real and substantial that will grow over time. Social communities are great for repeat traffic and building a large member base. Like sites, the larger it builds the more traffic it can generate. Ning.com is a tremendous free tool for niche community building. Vbulletin for forums.

Link Building Strategies – Acquiring inbound inks to your sites is essential to building better search engine rankings over time.
There are many different ways you can get links to your site, such as:
- Blog roll links – when a fellow blogger links to your blog sitewide, you can reciprocate
- Blog commenting – posting comments on blogs related to yours (Google Blog Search)
- Forum posting with signature link – Join multiple forums, set-up sig links, start posting good comments

Site Stickiness – Site stickiness is a tremendous concept to grasp and implement. Making your site more sticky will allow you to capture more from your site’s traffic. Some essential sticky features are: newsletter signup, bookmark this site, follow on Twitter and FaceBook Fanpage, and RSS Feed.

RSS Feed Submissions – Every blog has by nature RSS feeds included. RSS feeds allow you to syndicate your content all over the web and into people’s feed readers. Your RSS feeds need to be manually submitted to get the best effect. Definitely check out Robin Good’s site for more excellent info on RSS and the top 200 RSS directories to submit to: www.masternewmedia.org/

Content Ideas – Coming up with article and blog post ideas can be challenging at times.
Here are some examples of article titles:
- “Top 10 ways to Find a Date Online”
- “Best Ways to Lose Weight in the New Year”
- “What are the Top Phone Service Providers for Home Phone Service”
Also how to’s, breaking news, and new product launches are good topics to write about.

Brand Your Affiliate Sites – Creating a brand with your affiliate sites is a good idea because people will remember your site and revisit them frequently. Give people a reason to bookmark your site or join your newsletter. Treat them well and grow them huge over time!

Paid requires paid hosting, domain name purchase, site builder tool access

Content, Content, Content – the search engines love unique, original content. Become a proficient writer, one that types with blazing speed and is mildly creative. Or hire writers to provide the content on a per piece basis. Articles/blog posts range from $10-25 per 400 word piece from outsourced writers. Write about things people are interested in and would return to your site read.

Syndicate your content – Submit RSS feed to: www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55
Broadcast your content – Submit post to Ping.fm for mass syndication. This updates your “status” on all your social networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.). This increases replies, comments, and responses for your network.

Be creative and timely with your content – write about things that will compel people to read your article and not abandon. Make sure to have Newsletter Sign-up, Follow Us on Twitter, other on-page functions that can increase “stickiness.” This will also help your site rank better.

Optimize for SEO – You content shouldn’t be overly keyword rich, but natural and comprehensive. Make sure your titles are well constructed and anticipate how are people are performing searches, as these become your Title Meta-tags.

Article Directories – Becoming an author at EzineArticles.com can get you rankings and some good inbound links and traffic. This can help you get multiple rankings for the same topics.
Choosing Topics: What niches should I go into?
See what other affiliates are doing. Run some searches on topics or products you are interested in. See who comes up in the search results. Study what other people are doing on their sites to give you ideas of what you should do.

Join affiliate programs – Join tons of programs on CJ, Linkshare, and Shareasale. See who accepts you. CJ programs can be sorted by EPC or best performing offers. Then go to Google and search for those merchants and see who ranks organically. There should be many portals and niche affiliate sites ranking.
Best Tools to Use for Niche Site Building:
Experience Advertising Tools – WordPress custom Blog builder, Product site builder, Store builder.
PopShops.com – Great for reviewing products and building mini stores. Some cost but cheap.
Datafeedfile.com – Good for building niche stores with the Merchant’s product feed.
Golden Can – This is great for adding a store to your existing site with just some code.
Google Keyword Suggestion Tool – Tap affiliate managers for best keywords and products.

You can sign up for the FastTrackFundraising CJ affiliate program here: https://signup.cj.com/member/brandedPublisherSignUp.do?air_refmerchantid=2442519