10 Affiliate Marketing Strategies to Effectively Maximize Your Holiday Traffic and Commissions

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 2013? or “What are the top gadget gifts for 2013?” 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 and shared, such as: Top 11 Tech Gadget Gifts for 2013, 6 Must-have Corporate Gifts Ideas to Impress Your Clients, 8 Innovated Gifts for Your Children.

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)  are great ways 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.

3. Ramp-Up Your Social Networking – Make sure you are adding Facebook friends, Facebook fans from your site traffic, 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 frequency. 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.

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, and MSN/Bing which increases the chances your site will rank under a larger variety of search phrases and bring in more free traffic to your site. 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.

5. Ask for Higher Commissions – asking your affiliate advertisers for better commission rates during the holidays is a great way to ensure you will maximize yourearnings. 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 and promote their competitor, which will change their attitude quickly. You can also offer paid placement on your website, blog, newsletter, or social networks.

6. Email your list – if you maintain a database of email addresses as you should, 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 like aweber.com. Take growing your list seriously as it will pay dividends the larger a list it is.

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, emails, wall postings, and user data from your existing website traffic. Using Woobox.com is a great way to inexpensively run an exciting sweepstakes or contest on your site, fan page, email list, and twitter. If you can get your affiliate advertisers to supply the prizes even better!

8. Turn on Paid Search – Pay-per-click search is still the #1 way to obtain targeted traffic, so why not turn on some traffic to your site for the holidays! The only issues is the cost, check out Bing Ads for less expensive clicks under your popular keyword phrases. One great technique is to purchase keywords based on a merchant’s name with coupon code attached to it. Only certain companies even allow this and it can get quite competitive, but if you can drop your cookie on those types of searches it should have a profit level, since those searchers are likely in the buying process. But check with your advertisers before starting.

9. Advertise for Fans on Facebook – The beautiful thing about Facebook advertising is the targeting! You can really drill down to the types of people you want to see your ads and gain just those people as fans. For instance you can target based on: age, location, sex, education, and “likes and interests” which ensures you will gain fans that are into the kinds of things that pertain to your niche or products/services you promote.

10. Don’t Forget to Build Your LinkedIn – LinkedIn is really coming on as a great social network to spend time on. I’ve been using it for years, but only recently have they made it more interactive and improved the usability so people will even spend time there. I absolutely love the new functionality. You can even share your affiliate deals on LinkedIn and your connections will see it. You can use it just like Facebook now. You can start a group about any niche or industry and people will just join it, which is cool. You can really build up your connections by doing a “mass friend invite” from your email contacts.

Are there anymore ideas you can share below that affiliates can apply now to increase there holiday income?

Article Source: Experience Advertising