Today I’m going to share with you the exact tactics that I used to make $11,024.61 with the Amazon Associate Program during Black Friday & Cyber Monday.
These are the same tactics that smart affiliate marketers have been using to CRUSH holiday promotions year after year.
The best part?
You can apply what I’m about to share to increase revenue for any affiliate programs.
In short: if you want more affiliate revenue during the holiday sales season, you’ll love this guide.
Let’s get started.
Things to Do Before Black Friday & Cyber Monday
These steps are critical for you to have a profitable holiday sales season. My suggestion is to start doing these at least 3 months before it starts.
Grow Your Organic Traffic & Email List
Even without the holiday sales season, these are the 2 most important tasks that you should be focusing on in your business already.
Keep publishing new content and building new backlinks to your website.
Updating existing pages with more optimized content is also super effective to improve your rankings and traffic in a short amount of time.
But getting more traffic is simply not enough. You need to convert some of the traffic into subscribers as well.
Chris Lee from RankXL recently published an awesome article on why you should absolutely build an email list for your affiliate website.
For lead generation, I’m using Thrive Leads to display all type of opt-in forms on my websites.
Run a CRO Campaign
This is another activity that you should be regularly doing to grow your business.
Your website will receive multiple traffic spikes during your holiday promotions.
So a well-executed CRO campaign will ensure you convert the most visitors into conversions.
Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to do CRO for your affiliate site written by Kurt from Convertica.
Kurt has been working on one of my sites for the past few months.
Here are some early results:
Create & Rank Your “Holiday Deals” Posts In Advance
This is a big one.
It has contributed the most to the results that I got from Black Friday & Cyber Monday.
And I’m surprised that not many affiliates are aware of this yet.
Basically, the idea is to create posts that target “black friday deals” and “cyber monday deals” keywords in your niche.
An example would be this 2018 Best Cyber Monday Deals for Baby & Kids page.
or in the Online Marketing niche, we have:
Internetmarketing.blackfriday by Matthew Woodward
or BlackHatFriday.com by Charles Floate
The key here is to create these posts at least 3 months in advance so you have enough time to rank them highly on Google.
Try to sign up with other affiliate programs in your niche too. Don’t just rely 100% on Amazon.
If you get lucky you might find one that even outperforms Amazon.
It’s good to mention that you’ll not likely be able to maintain top spots for your main keywords during Black Friday & Cyber Monday.
Big publications know these keywords are highly profitable. So they will create a ton of these posts right before the sales season starts.
Of course, they will be able to secure the top spots very fast pushing your posts down in the SERPs.
That happened to me too but I was still able to get a good amount of traffic & sales.
Things to Do During Black Friday & Cyber Monday
Make Sure Your Affiliate Links Are Working
This is a very important task.
The worst thing can happen is doing all the preparation work only to find out that your affiliate links didn’t work properly.
Either you do this yourself or hire someone to handle it for you.
Check each of the affiliate links on your website manually to make sure they’re working as expected.
If the links lead to out of stock products, swap them out with ones that are in stock.
Update & Promote Your Deal Posts
There are literally thousands of new deals added to Amazon and other merchants during the sales season.
So be a good curator and update your posts with as many good deals as possible.
Ideally, you should dedicate 2-3 hours each day to update your posts with the latest deals.
It’s also a good time to start driving traffic your deal posts too.
Here are a few ways to do it:
- Using your email list – This is why I told you to focus on building your email list earlier. This is the most effective way to make a ton of sales during the holiday season. Send multiple emails to make sure your readers know about the latest deals. Remember that you can’t promote Amazon products directly via emails, so send people to your deal posts instead.
- Post to FB groups & online communities: This is also a good way to drive social traffic to your posts.
- Run FB & Reddit ads to your posts – I was not able to do this successfully but one of my friends had great success running ads directly to his posts.
- Display a floating Hello Bar on your website – You can create one easily using Thrive Leads
- Place banners on the sidebar and your most trafficked pages – This is very easy to do. Just hire a designer to create some graphics and use AdInserter to display on your site.
What To Do After Black Friday & Cyber Monday
If you implemented all the tactics I’ve shared above, your earnings would have skyrocketed during the past 7 days.
So pat yourself on the back.
As awesome as it can be, holiday sales don’t last forever.
You’ll see a big drop in traffic & sales after Cyber Monday.
Don’t worry.
It’s likely that sales will slowly pick up again during the first 2 weeks of December.
What you do now is totally up to you.
Keep grinding like Gary Vee…
… or do something fun like taking a trip somewhere to celebrate your success.
That’s exactly what I’m doing 😛
A 12-day scuba diving trip in the Maldives in December would certainly be enough for me to unwind and be ready for a bigger 2019 😎
How Did You Do?
I’d love to hear about the results you got from Black Friday & Cyber Monday. Please let me know by commenting below.
