IMMania.com

This morning as I post this it’s “Black Friday” here in the US. It’s supposedly the biggest holiday shopping day of the season when everyone lines up early to be some of the lucky ones to snap those “Dog Buster” specials at Wal-Mart for big screen TVs and the season’s hottest toys. This year, some stores are opening at midnight to get a jump on the start of the holiday shopping season.

I think it’s been shown that “Black Friday” isn’t really the biggest holiday shopping day of the year. It’s probably a day much closer to Christmas when the urgency to purchase is much more intense. A lot of people are most likely just window shopping or looking for an excuse to get out of the house on the day after Thanksgiving.

Walking around the mall is probably the most exercise some people get ordinarily, so it’s a great excuse to burn off a few of those calories from the massive quantity consumed the day before.

As an affiliate marketer, the true holy day for online shopping is “Cyber Monday” — the Monday immediately following “Black Friday”. Allegedly, this is the day that many shoppers, frustrated by the crowds they encountered at the Malls on “Black Friday”, turn to the Internet to begin their holiday shopping in earnest. Whether or not “Cyber Monday” is truly the biggest online shopping day of the year, which I doubt, it underscores the importance of this time of year to the bottom line of most all affiliate IMers.

Just like offline retailers, the holiday shopping season is when affiliate IMers do the bulk of their revenue and for many, it’s make or break time.

To my shock and horror, I currently find my self completely unprepared for what has been one of my more profitable niches that I use PPC for and that did well last holiday season.

My site for this niche was brutally slapped by Google last spring and my plans to resurrect it under a new domain have yet to materialize. I had initially planned on using a WordPress blog as the basis for the new site, but issues about how to rework WP and a theme to make it look like a static content site bogged me down. I basically know how to do that thanks to a great video series on the subject put out by a member of Earn1KaDay.com. Unfortunately, it still involves a bit of time and effort that I can’t afford at the moment.

So short of doing a cheezy direct-linking PPC campaign for this niche, which doesn’t work very well to be honest, I have no choice but to build out a new site from scratch in less than 48 hours.

You’re probably thinking I should just bag it and wait for the cycle to swing around to next year.

Well, don’t be too hasty to throw in the towel just yet. I may have an ace up my sleeve that I didn’t know about until just recently.

I’ve been messing around with eBay affiliate sites that have been dubbed “Mini Money Sites” (MMS) by Dennis Becker of 5BuckaDay and Earn1KaDay.com. I’ve been using Dennis’ automatic page builder along with the framework I created to use the eBay RSS product feed on these pages. Well, my plan now is to use the domain I registered for the new site and crank out a MMS on it for the same niche in eBay.

I’ll then add in some additional RSS feeds from other sources to beef up the site and hopefully appease Google, so in return I’ll get decent Quality Scores for many of my keywords. My plan is to then build focused landing pages on the same site for the merchants that I did well with last year during the holiday shopping season.

Anyway, wish me luck!