Holiday Marketing Cash Cow - PART 1
One of my favorite marketing tactics is "Holiday" or seasonal marketing.
Most people think "Holiday" marketing means getting ready for the big
Christmas push…and most of the time it does. But savvy marketers like
yourself can easily increase their annual holiday profits by simply adding a few
extra dates to your holiday marketing calendar.
For example…most people don't realize it, but recent studies have shown
that the almost 40% of the Q4 online sales actually come after December 25th.
And, in fact, December 31st ranks as the 4th busiest online shopping day of
the year…that just goes to show that many common beliefs about online holiday
shopping are just plain wrong.
So here are 3 things you can do now (on February 1st) to maximize your
profits from the Holiday Marketing Cash Cow.
#1 - Get into the proper "Seasonal Mind-Set"
Many guru's recommend niche marketing. I'm not going to dispute that.
Finding and marketing to a highly-targeted group of people is a great way to
build a business.
But another way to produce a steady stream of income is to identify several
micro-niches that are only popular during a few months of the year. So,
instead of finding just one topic that you work on day-after-day-after-day…instead
find series of 5 or 6 topics that you work extremely hard on for only 1-month at
a time (and then take the rest of the time off!!).
Examples of seasonal micro-niches that I've found profitable in the past are:
Halloween Costumes, Christmas Lights, Valentines Treats, and Mothers Day Gifts
Once you've identified good seasonal micro-niches, then your marketing
process is similar to launching any other niche product or service.
I've found the affiliate marketing business model to work extremely well for
seasonal micro-niches. Taping into existing affiliate programs for
seasonal micro-niche products gives you the opportunity to focus all your time
on marketing…giving you the greatest return on the limited amount of time
invested in each micro-niche.
#2 - Create your Holiday Marketing Calendar
The key to effective seasonal marketing is planning ahead. By looking
out over the next 12-months and identifying what seasons you want to focus on,
you can properly allocate your time to picking good micro-niches, finding great
seasonal keywords, building up a list and creating traffic.
Don't over look the importance of knowing exactly what seasons you want to
target and starting early enough to get great positioning in the marketplace.
For example…if you have a Holiday Marketing Calendar then, while everyone else
is scrambling to get their last-minute Christmas promos together…you'll
already have dominated the XMas market and will be starting to get your Easter
campaigns in place.
#3 - Start looking for seasonal trends in your keywords, web-stats and
split-tests.
It's no secret that certain products and services sell better a different
times of the day, but did you know that some keywords are more popular a
different times of the year. I mean, other than the obvious (like
"snow-blower" being more popular in the winter).
Many terms or phrases that have no rational reason for seasonality will have peak demand during certain specific times of the year. You can review your web-stats and split-test
data from the past to help identify these trends. You can also use
Google's Keyword Research tool to show the demand for each keyword on a
month-by-month basis over the past year.
I'm not saying to dedicate a significant portion of your life to this type of
analysis…but if you can spend a couple hours once a quarter looking back at these
things then you're sure to find a few highly-profitable seasonal trends to take
advantage of.
So there you go. There's a lot more to know about effective Holiday
marketing, but hopefully this helps you get moving in the right direction.
Enjoy!
Dearl Miller,
Trafficology.com
PS: Stay-Tuned…in Part 2 of The Holiday Marketing Cash Cow I'll reveal 3 real-life
seasonal micro-niche opportunities that you can take advantage of right now!
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