Deals Season: How to boost your affiliate earnings

Deals season is undoubtedly a big opportunity to maximise your affiliate earnings.

What is deals season?

Simply put, it’s last three months of the year where Amazon makes most of its sales.

Why?

Well, it’s getting darker outside, everyone becomes cozy and people like to stay home.

So they are thinking of things that could make their home even better. 🙂

That’s why all major shopping events of the year are located in this time.

Let’s take a look.

• Prime Day
• Black Friday –– End of November on the first friday after Thanksgiving
• Christmas shopping –– Until December 24th.

Those three events are HUGE sales drivers. When many people go into shopping mode and become holiday supershoppers, they strive for

• gift ideas
• shopping tips
• event-planning pointers

There you have it. Some first-class content ideas rightaway. 🙂

In any case, it’s the perfect time for you to shift into service mode and do some researching, sourcing, and curating on behalf of your community.

Not to worry! Any successful affiliate business will run all year long and not depend on the deals season. But it can be a nice bonus to your commission income.

This guide will show you EXACTLY how to do it.

It includes the fundamentals to workthrough ahead of time, several ideas for campaigns and content, and plenty of tactical tips. Let’s get started…

Deals Season – Content Action Plan

First of all: there is so much fun content you can create this time of year.

Here’s a list with some content formats.

• 🎄Holiday-themed blog posts. Write about your favourite holiday memory, the best gift you ever received, your tips for great holiday parties, seasonal stress-busting techniques, etc.
• 🎁 Gift-guide blog posts. list and describe each product, and maybe
  even document the process as you create guides, explaining why you chose certain items. Do some sneak-peeks on social media, too
• 🥑 Fresh-seller blog posts. Google has found that people are especially open for new retailers during deals season. So why not present some competetive yet undiscovered sellers to your readers?
• 🎧 Podcast call-outs or holiday-themed episodes. if you have one, shout out your vanity URL for your Influencer Storefront in any podcasts you’ll be a part of. If you host your own show, plan some seasonal episodes
• 🥚 Product reviews. Share what you love about products you recommend with blog posts, video reviews, Instagram Stories – whatever suits your style
• 🐦 Done-early challenge. Organise a community challenge, perhaps in
  your Facebook Group, to complete holiday shopping early (a push everyone could use)
• 🗓️ Event-planning tips campaign. Are you a coordinating whizz? Create a whole series of content – blog posts, social posts, videos, and more – to share your tips
• 🛍️ Holiday-shopping tips campaign. Same as above, with your top shopping secrets
• 💆🏼 Holiday self-care tips campaign. If stress management is more your speed, do a series on seasonal self-care.

Want to go back to the basics? Then check out our new Affiliate Marketing guide right here.

Prepare for Prime Day

Prime Day is only for Prime members. So your seasonal content should always be about promoting Prime suscription first. Otherwise your readers might be disappointed that the product you promote isn’t available to them.

The big advantage of Prime Day is this: there are no competitors. It’s 100% Amazon-exclusive.

If someone reads through your content just before Prime Day, you can be sure this person ends up buying on Amazon and not somewhere else.

Focus on Black Friday

Black friday is the ultimate holiday supershopper event. And it’s becoming increasingly popular.

Nowadays EVERYONE produces Black Friday content.

So it’s really hard to stand out.

But it definitely gets easier with this technique. 👇

Get live! 🎥

Video content is a much better way to promote Black Friday deals than blogposts.

There’s no need to plan your content calendar months in advance.

Just pick your niche, pick the deals and get started.

This way people are gonna find you much quicker and easier than with text content

Create Multiple Shopping Guides for Black Friday

Another good idea for Black Friday content is this: Create several product guides (‘Idea Lists’, if you’re part of the Amazon Influencer Program) and open up many opportunities for you to both further serve your community and boost your earnings.

In addition to any gift guides you’re already planning – and you should do several, as most of us have a lengthy list of loved ones to shop for – think about non-gift items your followers may want or need this time of year.

A big one is hosting supplies – curate the perfect holiday-bash kits for the people in your audience who plan to host an event or two this year. Another fun one is a self-care guide.

For many, the holidays can be as stressful as they are joyful, so a list of feel-good items people
can pick up for themselves in the midst of gifting others is likely to be appreciated.

Brush up your Affiliate Tools

Make sure you’re taking full advantage of all the resources available to you as an Amazon Associate.

There is a variety of ways to link, share, display and optimise, all made easy through web-based tools, browser extensions and even APIs.

The details and how-tos are all outlined in pages and articles under the Tools tab in
Associates Central, so if you need a refresher, plan an afternoon of education and dive in!

You’ll likely find a tool or two to implement that will seriously simplify your marketing efforts.

Optimise Your Site

This is not the time to embark on a full redesign. But small tweaks to your user experience can have a big impact, including on the success of your affiliate marketing. Some ideas:

• Evaluate the placement and relevance of your existing ads and banners
• Consider new opportunities to display ads or incorporate links
• Look through your analytics and troubleshoot any unexpected or undesired visitor behaviour
• Check your page-load times and overall site speed (Google Analytics offers a Site Speed report that works well for this). Google’s own PageSpeed Insights tool can also track the speed of your website. You can find a detailed article about how it works here

Don’t stress yourself out by turning these into huge projects – you can deep-dive after the holidays. For now, just polish up the place as best you can and move on.

Audit Your Editorial Calendar

Take a look at the blog and social-media posts you have planned for the season: have you accounted for holiday (and/or shopping) themes?

You don’t need to redo your whole calendar around affiliate opportunities, but if you don’t already have some relevant content planned, pop in some holiday blogs.

There are plenty of authentic, brand-appropriate pieces you can create that naturally lend themselves to product recommendations, so do a quick brainstorm and insert some seasonal
content into your plan.

If you don’t have a calendar set up, there are a number of great tools on the market, such as this Universal Marketing Calendar to check out.

Plan your Social Media Schedule

This is the perfect time to get into a regular social posting routine, or to revamp an existing one.

Social content has a short lifespan and people have short attention spans, so to make sure your audience knows about your recommendations and to drive adequate traffic to your guides, you need to stay active on social media.

Put a daily time-block in your calendar, and be ready with a game plan of social topics and tactics.

Share your blog posts and write original holiday social content (‘sub-holidays’, such as National Frankenstein Day, make especially fun prompts).

Also make it a habit to check the Promotions tab in Associates Central. Here, you’ll find regularly updated deals and discounts you can share with your community – perfect for social media! You should consider using an app to help you with organising and posting your social media, too.

You’ll also want to plan time to interact with your followers, as opposed to simply posting.

For your holiday-affiliate efforts specifically, offer to answer questions about your posts or product recommendations, or even to research or shop on behalf of your community members.

Each of these provide natural opportunities to link up your store, lists, and product recommendations, and/or to include native shopping ads.

🥾 Now it’s your turn

By working through these to-dos for your holiday affiliate marketing, you’ve laid all the necessary groundwork and you’re as prepared as possible to have a really successful season. Great work!