Ten Essential Tips on Making it a Lucrative 2007 Ho-ho-holiday Season!
Both the Purdue Retail Institute and comScore Networks estimate there was $26.5 billion in online sales in the USA alone in Quarter 4 2005. With a massive increase forecast for 2007, Nadeem Azam provides ten top tips to ensure you get your fair share of this year’s humongous holiday season pie.
Now that the Christmas shopping season is upon us it’s time to grab a cup of warm milk and curl up on the sofa in front of the coal fire. Quarter 4 is when affiliates are rewarded for the previous nine months in which they have been assiduously working on their holiday season offerings and laying the groundwork for a ho-ho-holiday season that will generate more dollars, pounds and Euros for them than parcels that are waiting in the North Pole to be delivered to the world’s children.
What, you haven’t even begun to work on your holiday sites?! Ah well, the lecture about planning early for the holiday season will have to wait until some other time. Nadeem Azam provides you with ten essential tips on ensuring your websites are not left out in the cold in the fourth quarter when many websites generate up to 70% of their annual profit:
1. Increase Pay-Per-Click Bids
Many online businesses let rip in the fourth quarter and up their PPC bids because they know the honey is sweeter at this time of year. According to a report SG Cowen & Co. the cost per click increased 9.4% from November to December 2005 for retail-oriented keywords. As the ratio of people who buy and average basket sizes are higher, you should be able to nudge-up your PPC bids slightly.
In past holiday seasons, searches, sales and conversions have plummeted around December 18, but people forget to drop their keyword prices. So remember to reduce your bids around that time.
2. Bid on Holiday Season-Related PPC Keywords
Do you sell gifts for teenagers on your website? Don’t just bid on “teenage gift ideas” but “holiday season teenage gift ideas”, “christmas teenage gift ideas”, “xmas teenage gift ideas” and “christmas 2007 teenage gift ideas”. You can use the Search and Replace feature in whichever software you use to do this easily and quickly.
3. Optimize for Organic Listings
Pepper words like “holiday season”, “christmas” and “gift ideas” into your pages’ meta tags, ALT tags and on-page text.
Instead of using the name playstation-2.jpg for an image, call it holiday-season-playstation-2.jpg and it should give you more traffic in the holiday season from not only text results but image ones as well.
4. Dump Adsense, YPN and Fastclick
It can be wise to use contextual ad networks like Google Adsense and Yahoo Publisher Network and CPM networks like Fastclick from February to October, but for November, December and January you should consider giving as much inventory as possible to advertisers who pay per sale.
Losing a visitor who clicks on an Adsense advert for eight cents may be fair enough in August when nobody is shopping but, even taking the increase in bid amounts over the holiday season into account, sites should be able to make more in the holiday season through Cost Per Sale affiliate links.
5. Add Mistletoe to Your Websites
Make sure you have seasonal images or effects on your sites in November and December. Whether it is a snowman next to the logos or snow floating down your pages, it will endear your websites to shoppers.
As Jakob Nielsen writes: “Commemorating special events is a way for websites to connect to users and be seen as welcoming environments, rather than places focused solely on money grabbing.” He also comments that commemorating special occasions makes sites appear current and up-to-date.
Don’t go overboard with Christmassy effects, though, or else your web properties will look like something from Geocities circa 1998. You can pick up a javascript to show snow floating down your website here: http://www.hypergurl.com/snowmaker.html and Christmas graphics here: http://www.yuleloveit.com , but avoid the poor quality clipart.
6. Watch Television
Yes, we’re encouraging you to watch TV, but there’s no time to sit back and watch your favorite sitcom. Flick over to those dreary QVC-type shopping channels and study the special programs they put on to sell gifts for the holiday season. It’ll give you an idea of what is hot and what is not… and even how to pitch the products.
There are, of course, many websites which can help with your research. Good examples are 10bestselling.net, which is a guide to current bestselling products in various categories and My Best Gadgets which shows the latest and greatest gadgets. Here is a a brilliant article which highlights the products which should be flying off the shelves this Christmas.
You should also, of course, keep an eye on major websites in your niches and see what they are promoting.
7. Ask Affiliate Managers for Advice
Merchants and networks don’t pay Affiliate Managers to twiddle their thumbs so ping the ones in your sector, build up a rapport with them, and ask them for advice.
Send them links to one or two of your sites and ask them for feedback. You’ll be surprised at the pearls of wisdom you’ll usually receive on how to maximize revenue from your web entities.
8. Study EPC Statistics
All good affiliate networks release conversion metrics. Study these like a hawk and see which merchants and products are on the up. This will provide guidance on what to give prominence to on your sites and mailing lists.
9. Promote Different Products at Different Times
You shouldn’t really be curling up on the sofa, but optimizing your links and banners based on far away the Big Day is.
For example, up until the end of November you can promote customizable items which may take weeks to create and deliver. In early and mid-December you can market items which you know will arrive before about December 22. And, from December 19 to 25, there is no point selling gifts which have to be delivered by post, so promote vouchers for the likes of Amazon which make last minute emailable presents.
Get up bright and early on December 26 to put up those January Sales links!
10. Send a Holiday Greeting to Everyone
Whether it is a paper card, an ecard or an email, don’t forget to take some time out to write to all your cyber-contacts and wish them good tidings for Christmas and the New Year.
People often send a card to a neighbor they have only met twice in the year but don’t bother to send a greetings to an affiliate manager, programmer or Search Engine Optimizer they may have communicated with dozens of times during the previous eleven months. This shouldn’t be for commercial gain -- even the most hard-hearted of online entrepreneurs ought to shed their money-making instincts for a few moments and get into the ho-ho-holiday spirit!
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5. Add Mistletoe to Your Websites
9. Promote Different Products at Different Times
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