1. Posting Post-Holiday Deals and Content - whether you have great Google search rankings or not, you absolutely must create some new pages and posts on your website or blog targeted at people looking for those great post-holiday deals. For example, if you are affiliated with an online electronics retailer that sells mobile phone and tablet accessories, you could write posts like, “Top 10 iPhone 5 Must Have Accessories” or “Best Apple iPad Speaker Systems for Your New iPad.” Then you would craft the content of the post to describe the products offered by your advertisers and link to them through your affiliate links within the post or under the post. Make sure to post 100% original content and try to maximize popular search phrases you are using in your titles and post content. Once the post is done, you can take the url of the page and share it on all your social networks including: Twitter, Facebook Profile, and Facebook Fan Page. This will increase traffic back to your website and generate some clicks through your affiliate links. I recommend posting as many new posts per day as you can to your site so you have lots of content to share about all types of niches and product types, suggestions might include: electronics, luggage, furniture, accessories, clothing...basically any company you are affiliate with can be posted about on your site and then shared socially. The more posts you add to your site, the more pages you have on your site, and therefore you can generate more free traffic for your additional pages. So get to posting!
2. Emailing Your Subscribers - hopefully you are building an email list from your website that is growing over time. If not, look to add a newsletter sign-up box to your site or blog, or even adding the aweber.com script to your site to pop-up your newsletter sign-up on all you site traffic (it really works). Even if you are sending a nicely formatted text email, it’s better than sending nothing, however having a nicely designed HTML newsletter to send to your subscribers is always best. Always link back to pages on your website, so you can gain that repeat traffic to your new post-holiday deal pages. Some of the easiest to use email sending tools are Mailchimp (free up to 2000 contacts, right within Google), icontact, and Constant Contact. These are incredibly affordable and easy to use platforms to send emails to your subscriber list. Email still works! Make sure you are leveraging your email list at every possible opportunity. Always use a reputable email sending platform so you make sure your unsubscribes are handled automatically.
3. Working Your Social Networks - you should always be working to build up your social networks with more friends, followers, fans, and contacts. Being really proactive on your social networks is a great way to build up your social karma and really work the channels. Make the effort to interact with other peoples updates and they will reciprocate, which gets your stuff out there more. Always try to invite people to connect with you at every opportunity, and spend time doing so. For instance, on Facebook you can invite all the people in your email contacts by uploading a csv file. Facebook has a great friend suggestion tool you should use as well at every opportunity. Also, you can invite all your Facebook friends to become a fan of your fan page. Through LinkedIn, you can spider all of your email contacts and send them all LinkedIn invites. On Pinterest, you can invite all of your Facebook friends to connect with you there. So you can really maximize your connections on each social network by using their mass invite tools and spending time focusing on that a few times a month. The more social networking contacts you build up, the more people you have to expose your pages and post to on an ongoing basis.
4. Running Sweepstakes - the post-holiday timeframe is a great time to run a sweepstakes giving away a prize like a gift card or a prize sponsored by a company you are affiliate with. Check out Woobox.com for running really cool, effective sweesptakes and photo contests. They run on Facebook so they have the opportunity to go viral when people enter the sweepstakes and then share it with their friends and followers. It’s a great way to convert your email subscribers into Facebook fans, as well as your site visitors that see your sweepstakes graphic and then enter. You get them as a new Facebook fan as well as obtain their name and email address to build your email list further. Running sweepstakes is a great way to pump up the excitement level across all of your channels including your: website, Facebook fan page, Twitter, and email subscribers. Let me know if you want to discuss ideas and best practices for running effective sweepstakes and contests.
5. Word of Mouth Marketing - this is actually one of the most overlooked methods of driving traffic to a website in this day and age of online marketing. But, it’s why you should have a relatively brandable domain name that you can tell people about out in the “real world”, i.e. “hey go check out my website for some great online deals.” You should become the biggest advocate of your own website and tell everyone you know or come in contact with to check out your site for online deals (where it’s relevant). Once people go check out your .com, it’s important to have a lot of “stickiness” going on which are things like a newsletter sign-up, fan page like box, social network sharing links, Twitter follow, etc. Make sure you are always mentioning your website in your emails with people, a great way to do this is with the Chrome browser extension called WiseStamp, which adds links to your site and social network profiles in your email signature.
These are some affiliate marketing strategies that you can focus on using until the New Year to pump up your site traffic and social networking activity. Remember, you get out of it what you put into it. Don’t expect much traffic from 1 post to your site, you should attempt to do as many posts per day as you can and then share them all socially. Also, it shows how timely you are with your website and keeping your contacts in the know with great deals from your affiliate advertisers.
A few highly recommended Affiliate Marketing books:
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