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The sales season is upon us yet again (where did that year go?!), and this is the time where affiliate marketers like you and I make a LOT of commissions.
What is the sales season? It's the magical time around the end of the year where people are in the mood for buying and finding bargains:
- Starting at the beginning of October
- Rising up around Halloween
- Peaking to a crazy high over Black Friday and Cyber Monday
- Higher than usual sales in 2-3 week lead up to Christmas
- Finishing off with last-minute pre-Christmas sales
But I get it, you're pressed for time and you're probably doing 100 other things… right? It sounds like a lot of work to prep for all those promotions!
If you don't know what to do to maximize your affiliate marketing to get the maximum ROI on the time you have available, you're in the right place.
Here's your treat – we've been busy putting together a list of low hanging items that you can execute with minimum fuss, yet still get a good return for the effort.
Below is our list of 8 quick things you can put onto your task list that take very little time to execute, but will help you maximize your affiliate marketing this sales season.
#1. Retailer Roundup
The good thing about sales periods like Black Friday and Christmas is that pretty much every retailer around, in all sorts of niches, has a large sale going on.
Why not round up all of the retailers that are related to your niche? You can even showcase a few items that people might be interested in hearing about.
Link to the retailers themselves and let them take care of the hard marketing of the products. You just need to make people aware that they're on sale.
#2. Amazing Product Roundup
Product roundups are a staple, and they're one of the easiest promotional posts you can put together when you're short on time.
This year, put together a “best ever” list – your most amazing product roundup – and promote that to your audience.
It doesn't take long to grab a few product photos, write up a short description for each, and link them up using your affiliate links.
#3. Roundup Newsletter Blast
With all this product roundup content going around you need to find ways to promote it.
If you have an active social network, by all means, blast it across all of your channels. But don't forget about your email list.
There's nothing wrong with promoting to your email list, but just make sure you're still providing a lot of value.
Link back to your big roundup posts and let people know all about them. Writing an email is quick to do and it might lead to thousands in commissions.
#4. Adjust Your Existing Links
In ThirstyAffiliates you can easily adjust the destination URL of your affiliate links.
This gets even more powerful when you are using the autolinker function in ThirstyAffiliates Pro, which lets you automatically link up keywords throughout your blog.
Change the destination URL of your links during the sales periods to link to your merchant's sales pages.
Many of the big merchants put together special landing pages just for these holidays. Take advantage of the higher conversion rate of those pages by linking directly to them.
The beauty of using ThirstyAffiliates to do this is that you can easily switch the links back to their normal destination once the holiday period is over.
#5. Add More Generic Autolinked Keywords
As mentioned, the autolinker in ThirstyAffiliates Pro lets you automatically link up keywords throughout your site to your affiliate links.
Usually, people just put the product names here, but why not send a bit more traffic through those links by also linking up more generic terms.
For example, if you are linking to a Nespresso Vertuo Coffee Machine, instead of just putting keywords like “Nespresso Vertuo” and “Nespresso,” why not link up more generic terms like “coffee maker,” “coffee pod machine,” and “coffee machine” as well?
You might not want to do this long-term (unless it's working well for you), but you can do it for just a few days to pump a bit of extra traffic through those high-return affiliate links.
#6. Run A Giveaway To Incentivize Sharing Your Roundups
Getting the word out about your roundups is hard once you're exhausted your email list and your social networks.
One way to get more viral leverage on your posts it to run a giveaway. This might take a bit more time than most of the tips here, but it's well worth it for the viral spread you can achieve.
Can you afford to give away one of the items that you're mentioning? Maybe frame it as the “Editor's Pick” and give people a chance to win the item.
A giveaway tool like KingSumo can be used to incentivize people by giving them extra entries for sharing your post with their friends.
This, in turn, sends more traffic back to your site – individuals who then enter to win the item as well, and share, and link, and share and so on.
A lot of these people will click on the links in your round-up post, which means the more it spreads the more commissions it generates.
#7. Add A Temporary Banner To Your Review Posts
Think people are just impulse buying during these crazy sales days?
People are looking for reviews at this time of year more than any other time. In fact, people spend a LOT of time looking for reviews of items prior to the sale days and will often return as the day approaches.
Here are two things you should do with your review posts:
- Before the particular sale day that you're working on promoting (e.g. Black Friday), add an email optin to the top and bottom of your review posts so people can go onto an email list to be alerted about special deals in the upcoming sale. This will give you a warm list of recent leads that are interested in this product on that exact sale date. You'll see an amazing conversion rate on those people. Not sure how to do this? Try getting someone on Codeable to do it for you or use a tool like Optinmonster.
- Create a temporary banner to load onto the posts on the sales days, and simply drop it in at the top and bottom of the posts. Need someone to do up a killer banner for you? Try using someone on Fiverr to create a professional looking banner ad. This can help you drive holiday traffic where it needs to go.
#8. Find Your Popular Affiliate Links And Promote Them
Not sure what is most popular with your audience? Sometimes it can be tough to guess what products might have the most cut-through with your audience, but that's where ThirstyAffiliates comes in to play. Even if you're on the free version, it has been keeping track of how many clicks you've had on your links.
Goto ThirstyAffiliates > Reports and see what you can find there. If you have the Pro add-on you'll see more advanced reports.
Here's my quick reporting suggestion that will give you great insights with about 3 minutes of work:
First, separate your links into different link categories. You can do this easily by creating link categories under ThirstyAffiliates > Link Categories, then assign each of your affiliate links into whatever categories they belong. Depending on whether you've done this yet or not, it might take longer than three minutes, but it's totally worth it!
Next, go to your reports and create a report with all the categories on the graph.
Finally, save the report so that you can re-run it again with minimal fuss.
Adjust the report time period (depending on how busy your site is, you might want to report on the past 3-12 months), then click load report and load up the report you saved. This will let you find the groups of affiliate links with the most clicks over the period.
Now you can quickly and easily see which were your most popular link categories, and that should give you an idea about what types of products are resonating with your audience.
You can even do this type of reporting on individual link basis, but that might take a while if you have a lot of links. This is why I recommend separating links into categories. It's easier to visualize on the graph and quicker to do.
Do you have any other holiday affiliate marketing ideas to add?
We know that we're just scratching the surface here, so if you've had some success with certain ideas in the past we'd love to hear about them!
Leave a comment below with your best affiliate marketing tips for promoting during the upcoming sales and holiday period.
