How To Prepare Your Affiliate Site For Holiday Season

For many affiliate marketing sites, the holidays are a dream come true. Some affiliate sites see their traffic double or even triple as millions of shoppers from around the world bypass the mall for the convenience and fun of online shopping.

Most people would agree that if they had a choice between navigating snowy roads, finding a parking space and then battling crowds only to stand in a checkout line for 30 minutes or staying at home in their pajamas with a hot cup of coffee and doing their shopping that way, they would choose the latter.

So, how can you make sure that your affiliate marketing site is ready for the holiday shopping season? Let’s take a quick look at a few things you can do to spruce up your site and get it ready for that special time of the year.

• First off, if you don’t have your site all spruced up by the Monday after Thanksgiving, don’t worry about it. Evidence shows that “Cyber Monday” isn’t really the sole busiest shopping day of the year, but it’s more spread out between that date and the 15th. You can still revamp things and capitalize on the Christmas shopping season.

• Make sure you have a handle on the cut off dates for shipping. No matter what product you link to, they should have clearly posted dates for shipping, both domestic and internationally, for Christmas. Make sure you post those dates on your site, too, so that no one ends up disappointed on Christmas morning.

• If you deal with a major online superstore like Amazon, remember, you don’t always have to sell books or CDs. Some sites offer big rewards to affiliate marketers for gift cards, and since they are a smaller item to ship, they usually have later deadlines then gifts so people can order then after the cut off deadlines and still get them by Christmas.

• Try and concentrate on specialty niches. While it may be tempting to get into an affiliate marketing program with Sears or Wal-Mart, most people have these stores near them. If you with someone like The Sharper Image or L.L. Bean, you’re dealing with very high-end product that is unique. You’ll make more money and you’ll find that you’ll do better business on your site.

The holidays come only once per year and the chance to capitalize on it is brief. But if you tune up your affiliate marketing site in time, you’ll be full of extra cash as well as holiday cheer this season.