Concentrating on Affiliate Sales over Christmas

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I’ve just had a record October and am excited as hell about November and December. It’s the time of year where my affiliate income should see a dramatic increase, as people are in holiday buying mode.

In order to maximise this I want people to leave via my affiliate links rather than a PPC ad, so one of the easy ways to do that is to hide the PPC ads when the page is targeting affiliate sales.

Another nice way I’ve found to improve the CTR of my affiliate links is to have part of the text in bold, so if the price is particularly appealing I’d link like “The cool Battling Helicopters are on sale at Amazon for $68.33 the pair” (that doesn’t show up that well in this theme but the amount and word pair are in bold).

I’ve mentioned before how it can pay to monitor stats and then promote affiliate programs on pages that are getting a bit of traffic. This week I noticed one of my pages was getting about 400 visits a day, I checked the page out and the traffic unsurprisingly was coming from the search engines. The topic of the page wasn’t something that I had any suitable affiliate deals for, so a bit of research was needed.

The first was to use Google Analytics to see what keywords people were using to find the page, I then did a quick search on Google with those keywords. Checking the sponsored listings on the right revealed a fair few affiliate programs, one of which on Click Bank looked totally relevant for the page, so a new paragraph of text and a couple of links later it was ready to go. It’s still very early days (~2 days) but so far there have been a couple of sales:
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It’s not a vast amount of money but these small amounts add up and considering it took neigh on no work I ain’t complaining.

Anybody else got some interesting seasonal tactics that they’d like to share?

About Al Carlton

Al quit the 9 to 5 rat race in January of 2007, before then he was a software engineer and systems architect of financial system. Nowadays Al spends the days running his various businesses and experimenting with different ideas and opportunities.
Al can be found on twitter at AlCarlton.

Comments

  1. Last year I wrote about a product on my site and managed to get 2nd and 3rd place in Google for the site. This keyword was bringing in maybe 50 - 100 visits per day. Over 2 or 3 months I earned just over $400 from that affiliate link. It’s not a HUGE amount of money, but mixing that with say 10 products could bring in a few extra K this christmas.

    Now my site is much larger then last year, so my goal is to search through product type pages and try match affiliate links through out the site. Even if a page gets 30 views a month it could still bring 1 sale per month which could be an extra few $$. All of it adds up.

    • I find it’s a bit of a lottery finding out which of your posts will take off in the engines and it’s always nice when you find one that can be made profitable. Wishing you more of the same skill/luck this year.

      • Last year it was luck. This year I hope to add what I have learned these last 10 - 12 months and use skill.

        • I find with me it’s more luck, some of the pages I never expected to rank for anything much just do. The page I wrote about was really to help a friend promote his site, so he must be really happy with the traffic it’s sending.

  2. Interesting post Al and nice to hear someone else’s experiences. I’ve tried a few seasonal tactics for my sites (service rather than product/price related) and found that it doesn’t seem to make much difference.

    I think though that in the run-up to Christmas people are more price concious and possibly your changes/tactics will prove more profitable.

    • I think a lot depends on your niche, if it can be given as a present this is the season for you, I expect your flying site will do better at different times in the year.

  3. Well, 2 sales in 2 days seems great to me! If you have 1 sale average everyday for 1-15 november you have already $33.90*15 = 508,5. Say 500 dollar 🙂

    Anyway, great post Al.

  4. Do you have a list of the Affiliates you’ve used and had success with? If so, might you make it public in a following article or something? Might come in handy. 10x

  5. A little off topic, but I thought it may be worth sharing/ reminding people, that a profitable trading tactic involves promoting goods to tie in with events throughout the year, not just at Christmas. Opportunities include

    February - Valentines day
    March - Mothers Day
    June - Fathers Day
    October - Halloween

    …….and with a little creativity there are many more.

    Christmas may be the biggest and most profitable season, but with a little creativity it is possible to have a series of ‘seasonal’ promotions throughout the year. It has worked for me in the past and over the year these small promotions certainly made a difference.

    • That’s actually very true … Christmas is, in my eyes, the most profitable season, because people tend to buy more for christmas than for mothers day, for example. However, people still buy MORE than usual. So we should make good use of that 🙂

      Thanks for the headsup “Domaining”

    • That’s a very good point Domaining, there’s certainly money to be made all year round.

  6. Strange you should mention this I was hoping for a bumper XMAS truth is though its also a bumper time for my job so i have to give my time their, I know my day will come 🙂

  7. What’s really cool is how sometimes you don’t need to rank well in the U.S. or U.K. to get a lot of traffic.

    Hence my competition. I’m trying to get people to write down their own gift ideas with the chance of winning gift vouchers… (Feel free to enter).

    The downfall for me is, the lack of affiliate sales/products in South Africa compared to the U.S. or U.K.. Which means, even ranking well for certain things doesn’t guarantee anywhere NEAR as much profit as it could overseas…

  8. Congrats Al and good luck with your Christmas revenue. I am surprised though that having offers in bold isn’t against terms and conditions, because if was google it would be sort of deliberately focusing the user’s attention on something to make the click or would that be just for PPC networks?

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