Hey all..I hope your November is going well! I wanted to put together some useful tips for generating more traffic and affiliate commissions during the busy holiday shopping season so you can maximize your affiliate marketing earnings. Here are some online marketing tips you can use to maximize your efforts:
1. Post about hot gift items - posting about the hottest holiday gift items is a great way to build your site or blog with content people are actually searching for during the holidays, ex. “10 hottest gift ideas for 2011″ or “What are the top gifts for 2011.” Do your research and depending on your niche there will be a set of hot products that are in-demand this holiday season. Then, create pages on your site or blog with good content write-ups about these hot products and use “lists” as well because they tend to be read, such as: Top 11 Tech Gadget Gifts for 2011, 5 Must-have Corporate Gifts Ideas to Impress Your Clients, 8 Innovated Gifts for Your Children. Titles like that can really pull in the traffic. Remember, the more content you post the more search rankings you can garner with each page of your site, so post a lot of pages and fill them with great, keyword-rich content to maximize your SEO benefits. Great your initial November promotions towards Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which a lot of people will be searching for deals with those keywords for various merchants, so make sure to weave that content into your postings and pages. Once that passes, you are into December great deals for the holidays that can be promoted all month long. Finally, you have your after-Christmas sales that can promoted from every merchant you affiliate with.
2. Ask for Special Coupons or Promos - asking your affiliate managers and Advertisers for special deals, coupon promotions, or vanity coupon codes (coupon word matching your site) for your site is a great way to leverage your site’s branding to market exclusive deals to your traffic, subscribers, fans, and followers. Not all affiliate Advertisers will be able to provide this because they can’t do it for everyone or may not at all due to lack of resources, but you can get lucky with a great promotions sometimes and really kill it. Make sure to get the current month’s deals from the Advertisers you are promoting so the offers in the posts will be compelling and convert higher with your visitors. Make sure to keep your deals current and timely, otherwise visitors will hit brick walls when trying top use the codes, which isn’t ideal at all.
3. Ramp-Up Your Social Networking - Make sure you are adding Facebook friends, Facebook fans, and Twitter followers on a constant basis so you have more people to expose your offers, promotions, and pages to during the holidays. However, don’t crush people with too many offers in a short span or they may get turned off from your suggestions. Don’t recommend something you haven’t tried yourself, however you can make product suggestions and promote really good deals and coupons from merchants you are affiliated with. If you always have fresh content and promotions your audience will really appreciate that and you will be building branded with your traffic which is good for the future.
4. Post Your Butt Off - Posting tons of original articles to your site or blog, then sharing it all socially, are the best ways to ramp up your traffic in advance of the holidays. Adding frequent posts of fresh content to your site can really expand the number of pages you have indexed in Google, Yahoo, ann MSN/Bing which increases the chances your site will rank under a larger variety of search phrases and bring in more free traffic. Once you make a new post on your site you can immediately share the title and page url on Facebook, Twitter, and your fan page. Make sure to add something like, “Isn’t this a wonderful deal?” to your postings to increase interaction and response especially on Facebook. You goal is to get as make Likes, Comments, and Shares on Facebook as you posiibly can to gain the most exposure and traffic. Also, make sure to submit your new posts to Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and other bookmarking sites to maximize your exposure. Post other versions of your articles and posts to 3rd party article directories, like ezinearticles.com, with rewrites of your articles and titles to maximize your organic rankings. I recommend 1-10 posts a day to your site to increase your frequency and page count. But you can never post too much to your site as long as it’s all unique content. Over time, you can build your page count into the thousands of pages which will bring your site more organic free traffic.
5. Ask for Higher Commissions - asking your affiliate Advertisers for greater commissions during the Holidays is a great way to ensure you will maximize your earnings. Some Advertisers may only do this if you have produced a good amount of sales volume in the past, but it never hurts to ask…they can only say no. Most affiliate Advertisers have some room to increase affiliate commissions so you need to ask for a higher payout whenever possible. If they say no or are rude, tell them you will go promote their competitor, which will change their attitude quickly. You can also offer paid placement on your website, blog, newsletter, or social networks. If you have a decent amount of traffic, fans and followers, there are Advertisers that will pay an additional paid placement fee in addition to your affiliate commissions, so that’s a great reason to try to expand what you are doing steadily over time and build the relationship with your Advertisers.
6. Email your list - if you maintain a database of email address, make sure you are messaging your database at least weekly with the newest offers from your affiliate Advertisers. Make sure you are growing your list with email opt-in plug-ins on your site. Take growing your list seriously as it will pay dividends the larger a list it is. You can use services like icontact, constantcontact, or mailchimp to blast your email list. Make the investment in Dreamveaver to edit your HTML, and have a nice HTML newsletter designed which you can use as a template for all your future blasts.
7. Run Sweepstakes and Contests - running sweepstakes and contests on your website during the holiday time-frame is a great idea because you will gain more fans, Wall postings, and user data from your existing website traffic. Using WildFireApp is a great way to inexpensively run an exciting sweepstakes or contest. If you can get your affiliate Advertisers to supply the prizes even better! You can do anything from giving away a $100 gift card to a multi-prize, mega-contest! This is the best ways to really maximize you traffic, fans, and followers. It’s my #1 recommendation to basically everyone, so make sure to implement a sweepstakes or contest during these pivotal next few months. Let me know if you need any ideas about how to run your promotion effectively!
These are a few Affiliate Marketing strategies you can use to maximize your traffic and commissions during the Holiday Season. I hope it was helpful and let me know if there is anything you want to discuss more in-depth with me. Thanks!
