Affiliate Programs

The Holidays are coming, is your affiliate marketing program ready? Is your blog or website optimized? It’s never too early to choose new affiliate programs and optimize your site for the Holiday onslaught!

Waiting To The Last Minute Can Cost You Money

I can’t tell you how many people wait until after Thanksgiving to start thinking about the Holiday season and what they should be doing to prepare their websites to take advantage of it. Here’s a little tip: if you don’t have your website or blog ready by Thanksgiving, it’s too late!

Once a year you have an opportunity just like retail shops to take advantage of Holiday shoppers. For some retailers, the Holiday season is what carries them through the entire year. For website owners, the Holiday season is what can make you stand out from a crowd and fill your bank account.

Tips to Take Advantage of the Holiday Shopping Season

Here are a few tips you can use to optimize your Holiday marketing plan and your website.

• Review your affiliate programs – If you had the same affiliate programs last Holiday season, review your data and see which ones performed and which ones didn’t. Kick the low performers to the curb and start looking at new affiliate programs to join.
• Review Past Traffic Patterns- Hopefully you know where your traffic came from last Holiday season. Make a marketing plan to increase this traffic this year. Last year I had one source of traffic that out produced others by 2 to 1 to my Tool site. However, that source was very low converting. I had another traffic source that sent less traffic, but the shoppers converted very, very well. Guess which source I’m going to spend more time optimizing this pre-season?
• Make Changes to your Website or Blog NOW – Don’t wait until the last minute to change up your website or blog if you’re going to. It may take weeks or even a month for the new changes to show up in the Search Engines. It may take that long for a new keyword your trying to rank for to work it’s way up the SERPS. Build links to your affiliate product pages and write articles for article marketing now! Putting it off until November is a good way to miss the money boat!
• What’s Hot and What’s Not? – Have you looked into what the hottest item in your niche is? What’s the hottest toy this year or the one cool electronic gizmo everyone must have? Now’s the time to start optimizing some of your pages for this hot item. One way you can keep abreast of what’s going on is to go to Google and sign up for Google Alerts. Just use your hot keyword and Google will send you alerts everyday on where, and how, this item is mentioned. Trying to push what was a hot Christmas toy 2 years ago is leaving money on the table!
• Budget for a PPC Campaign – If you don’t normally run ads on Google Adwordsor similar PPC programs,  you might want to think about it. Google Adwords can do wonders for your affiliate marketing. If you are already a user, plan on budgeting a lot more for the Holiday season, twice the amount your normally do is a good beginning. Remember, this is a one time-per-year deal and you want to take full advantage of it.

Even If You’re Not An Affiliate Marketer You Can Take Advantage of the Holiday Season

Even non-affiliate marketers can capitalize on the Holidays. Even if you have a plain Jane personal blog, think about stories or articles you can start writing now to take advantage of the Seasons.

Plan these articles out and start posting them in October. Every Thanksgiving the searches for Turkey recipes goes through the roof. Searches for gift ideas, depression, the homeless, holiday travel and Charity go through the roof as well. Plan now to be at the top of the Search Engine rankings and take advantage of these and many other search phrases. All it takes is a few well written articles and plenty of backlinks!

And most important – Don’t forget your favorite blogger who got you started early this year