The Holiday Season is fast approaching and with it comes the period when consumers let lose of their hard earned cash and send it in the direction of online and offline retailers. For affiliate marketers, this brings along a time when you can earn a lot more money compared to other periods of the year.
The other day I was reading through Search Engine Watch and came across an article, 3 Steps to Happy Holidays SEM Returns. One of the things that stuck out the most was the Retail Demand Curve For Holidays (2007-2010).
As you can see from the graph, there is a steady increase in impressions, clicks and revenue throughout October. As it moves into November, there is a marked increased and as it heads towards the tail end of the month, revenue shots up over 200%. According to ComScore, 2010 online retail sales for the 2010 holiday season reached $32.6 billion. This was a 12% increase on the previous year and some analysts are predicting that retails sales will increase by 12-14% this year. Whether or not it does increase, $32.6 billion is a lot of money that affiliate marketers can get a share of. Keep in mind that these figures as only for the U.S.
Some things that come to mind to get you thinking more about working on the holiday season include:
Marketing Plan – Put together a plan that covers the next 2-3 months and make sure that all of the important dates are on it. Upcoming dates of importance include Halloween, Black Friday, Cyber Monday and of course Christmas, just to name a few. You need to know what you are going to promote, how you are going to promote and when you are going to promote.
Pages – If you haven’t already done so, now is the time to get pages ready. Besides the usual to-do’s of content and keywords, one big thing that comes to mind is mobile optimised landing pages. More and more people are accessing the internet via mobile devices and if your pages aren’t mobile optimised, you could miss out on commissions.
Email Lists – If you have an email list, get holiday emails ready now so that you aren’t rushed to do so when the time comes to send them. VerticalResponse is good email marketing service that comes with a wealth of free resources to help you get the most out of your email marketing efforts.
Testing – A/B testing of different variations of your pages and email templates is a good idea as this will allow you to determine which one will produce the best results.
This is not a definitive list of things you can do to work on maximising affiliate commissions during the Holiday Season. The purpose of this post is to get you thinking more about what you need (if you haven’t already done so) to do to work towards a profitable season.
I’m so curious about this internet marketing thingy. Yes I have idea on how it works and how to do it. But that was just a thought. I don’t know how to really do it on my blog. So I’m sticking to Google Adsense. Perhaps you can suggest a guide on internet marketing? I’ll be missing this holiday season sales.