Lammo.net: Affiliate Marketing Blog

Pinch, Punch. first of the Month - No returns! Yes, it’s the first of July today, the sun is shining, and that can mean only one thing - it’s time to start planning for Christmas! Of course, some people have already been working on their Christmas sites for a couple of months, but for me July is when it all starts to happen. If you don’t plan your Christmas strategy until the nights are drawing in and the days are getting colder and darker, then you could be missing out on a huge amount of sales.

It can be really hard knucking down and thinking about Christmas when it seems that Summer is only just starting to arrive - Hell, it’s hard concentrating on anything when it’s nice and sunny outside - One of the pitfalls (or benefits, depending on how you look at it!) of being a Bedroom Affiliate workingfrom home is that when it’s a nice sunny day, and you’re working in your Summer Affiliate uniform of T-shirt and shorts, it’s really easy to “nip outside” for a cup of tea and 10 minutes in the sun. And then ten minutes becomes half an hour as it’s so nice, and then you come back in to work and spend the next 3 hours wishing you were still sat outside. Still it could be worse - I could be stuck in an office wearing a suit!

So the best way to motivate yourself is to plan accordingly - Planning isn’t difficult, and it’s certainly easier than doing! And at this stage, planning is all you need to do. Zak from Prezzybox issued a rallying call to Prezzybox affiliates yesterday to join him and his team at the Christmas in July exhibition in London on the 9th and 10th July. The exhibition is free to enter, and you’ll leave with the knowledge of what are likely to be the top Sellers from a huge range of retailers for Christmas 2008, and find out the products that the National Press are going to be writing about in the preceding months.

This knowledge is worth it’s weight in gold to you. Knowing what consumers will be buying, and what the national press are telling them they should be buying months in advance means you can steal a march on all the other affiliates who will wait until the Top 12 Toys list is published in October before manically publishing their content knowing that the surge in sales has already started, and only has 6 weeks or so left.

Armed with this knowledge, you can then start to plan target keyphrases etc, and start thinking about your landing pages. Are you going to go for a standalone Christmas site, targeting these products, or plug them into your existing site? How are you going to get content for these products - Will you be writing it yourself, or outsourcing reviews etc? Or can you badger the suppliers themselves for some content? Either way, you’ll know what the Top 12 products are (in truth, you’ll probably know what the Top 100 products are likely to be), and by the time the Christmas Shoppers are starting to look for those products, you’ll have built your pages/minisite, have a good number of links to them and a nice level of unique content on them.

All of which means you can sit back and relax whilst ten thousand other affiliates fight over the Top 12 list in a rush to get some sales in before the Christmas rush dies down. And not only that, but you’ll still see sales coming in long after the last cracker has been pulled and the last of the Turkey sandwiches has been polished off. Remember, an Affiliate site is not just for Christmas! Oh, and btw, there’s now only 177 days to go…

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!