IMMania.com

It’s only 2 days left to Christmas Day and the online shopping season for most of us doing business online effectively ended a week ago. It really is pretty amazing how short this online shopping season is. This is now the third time I’ve been through the cycle since I first got started in affiliate marketing.

I learn a little bit more each time through.

Below are a few of the things that have become a bit clearer about doing affiliate marketing during the holiday season:

• Start Preparing Early - yes, this one is pretty obvious, but it’s one that keeps tripping me up. It’s probably because I’m a die-hard procrastinator and usually get started late. However, putting off getting things in place is guaranteed to cost you in lost revenues. Doing organic traffic generation takes time to work its way into place so things like article marketing and Web 2.0 stuff should be prepared well in advance.

  Even if you don’t start PPC campaigns until late October, things like updated keyword lists and new landing pages should be ready to go once you’re ready to launch.

•  Certain markets have multiple seasonal peaks - things like fitness-related products and certain types of clothing as well as a host of other products may sell heavily during the holiday season, but may also have other peak demand periods during the year. There’s always the New Year’s resolution motivator that can push demand for things like fitness products beyond Christmas and well into the New Year. So it might be worth allowing PPC campaigns for these items to continue to run after the peak holiday season ends.
• Get commission bumps before the peak holiday season begins - just a slight increase in your affiliate commissions can make a big difference during peak demand. I recently received an increase from 10% to 12% from a merchant that I typically do pretty well with this time of year, and all it involved was picking up the phone and having a friendly chat.

  It’s great to see the larger numbers showing up for this merchant in my CJ stats. The higher volume I’m currently doing for this offer is probably the result of building a fresher landing page and this combined with the higher payout is really compounding my earnings for this merchant.

• Find out why certain offers are no longer profitable - things are constantly changing online and what sold like gangbusters last holiday season may flop this time around. This happened to me with one merchant that did fantastic last year, but has laid a complete egg this year. The traffic and clickthrus are decent, but conversions are no where to be found this year. I’ve checked for obvious boneheaded mistakes like incorrect affiliate links, but all that seems to be in order. The merchant’s Web site looks OK, so nothing immediately jumps out at me. In this case I need to touch base with the affiliate manager and mention my poor results. I’m just afraid to hear that all the other affiliates are selling the heck out their products!
• Adwords is getting more expensive - I’ve posted about this before and some of my affiliate offers are no longer profitable when promoting them using Adwords. I accept this as the pressures of a competitive marketplace and know that some offers either need to be dropped from my portfolio or I need to find less expensive means for promoting them.

Like most anything to do with online marketing, you need to fling a lot of mud at the proverbial wall and then take a moment or two to see what sticks. It’s really an on-going process of pruning the losers and nurturing the offers that show potential. It’s really not enough to be content with what is currently working. Unless of course it’s something that will make you gobs of money into eternity.

Building a diversified foundation of revenue sources is a must.

Before the year is out, I’ll share some of the broader things I’ve learned over the past year in IM and what my goals are for 2008. I think posting them publicly will put me in the awkward position this same time next year of posting how well I did in achieving them.

That’s one way to be held accountable for one’s resolutions.