A complete guide to maximizing your Sale affiliate earnings

The Sale period is undoubtedly a big — perhaps the biggest! — opportunity to maximize your affiliate earnings. As much of your audience shifts into shopping mode, they become hungry for deal information, gift ideas, shopping tips, event planning pointers, and the like. It’s the perfect time for you to shift into service mode, researching, sourcing, and curating on behalf of your community.

It's an exciting time all around, but it can also be overwhelming for you as a creator. There’s a lot to prepare and keep up with, and for many there’s a sense of underlying pressure to capitalize on the major affiliate opportunity this time of year brings. It can make you feel defeated before the holidays have even arrived.

Not to worry! This is your guide to nailing it this year. It includes the fundamentals to work through ahead of time, several ideas for campaigns and content, and plenty of tactical tips. Let’s get started!

Why Prepare In Advance?

Amazon Shopping Events such as Amazon Great Indian Festival, Amazon Great Indian sale, Amazon Prime Day and other seasonal or topical sales are very popular events, offering bargains and offers at greatly reduced prices for a limited time. All these events have constantly changing offers and a wide selection of new, reduced bargains every few minutes. Customers can choose to search spontaneously in current offers or search for special bargains in specific categories.

As an Amazon Associate and operator of a website or blog, you have the opportunity to participate in the shopping events and increase your income by directing your audience to exciting offers. In this article, we cover how to prepare your website or blog for an Amazon shopping event in order to attract as many visitors as possible to your website, both before and during the event.

A lot of affiliate marketers and website owners start preparing as soon as the event is announced. Most of them only use banners and other tools available for Amazon Associates. While these are effective, you can do a lot more to take full advantage of the sale event. Thus, it is better to start working on these strategies as soon as possible and create a working strategy which can be used for such events. With a strategy already in place, marketers and website owners can find it easier to rank well in search results.

Preparing the Website

Start by creating sub-pages for the Great Indian Sale which deal exclusively with offers, promotions and current bargains on Amazon. Depending on which topics your website is about, it makes sense to analyze the search volume of the keyword terms you’re going to feature in advance

Create sub-pages- The sub-page will feature exclusive bargains, offers, and promotions available on Amazon throughout such sale events. Depending on what your website is based on, analyze search volume of keyword terms you’d be targeting in advance.
Optimize sub-pages- Once the sub-pages are created, optimize them as per the shopping event. For instance, a keyword like ‘Amazon Apparel Sale’ can be used for creating a sub-page where all the best offers related to the apparels category during the sale event can be posted.

After optimizing the sub-page, ensure that the sub-page is linked in the site bar and remove it when the event is over. Keep the sub-page always online as it can result in good ranking for following events.

Optimize Your Site

This is not the time to embark on a full redesign, but small tweaks to your visitor 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 behavior
Check your page load times and overall site speed (Google Analytics offers a Site Speed report that works well for this)

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.

Focus on Marketing

Amazon sale events are also the time to take the best advantage of all the different marketing methods to bring in maximum traffic to the website. Focus on multiple inbound and outbound marketing methods to get the best results.

Inbound Marketing- Inbound marketing generally revolves around creating valuable content to attract visitors. It uses modern communication technologies, like the social media, search engine rankings and mobile for attracting traffic. Content marketing, SEO, and social media marketing are some of the most popularly used inbound marketing methods. Another popular way is to target existing subscribers and visitors via emails and messages. If they have trusted you once to buy a product from Amazon, there are high chances they will do it again.
Outbound Marketing- While outbound marketing is not as popular as it used to be in the past, a lot of website and marketers still make great use of these methods. Email marketing, bulk message marketing, and even marketing through trending channels like WhatsApp are some options to consider to market websites during Amazon events.

Content Strategy

Content creation is a vital part of having an affiliate website, irrespective of whether or not Amazon is running a sale event. One thing common among all the favourite affiliate websites is that all of them offer valuable content to their visitors.

Discount Guides: This is the list that calls out the popular products that are on discount. Your readers will rely on you to share these popular discounted products curated into different product categories. For example, if you have a gadgets audience, why not create separate discount guides for each product type by price-band. Don't forget to call out the products that are going on sale for the first time.
If you do one thing on this list, make it this! Creating several product guides opens up many more 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.
Insider Picks: Curated and quirky lists containing best-sellers or unique products that are discounted
A big one is hosting supplies — curate the perfect holiday-bash kits for those folks 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.

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 lends themselves to product recommendations, so do a quick brainstorm and insert some seasonal content into your plan.

Commit To a Daily Social Media Schedule

This is the perfect time to get into a regular social posting routine (or revamp an existing one). Social content has a short lifespan, and people have short attention spans — to make sure your audience knows about your recommendations, and to drive adequate traffic to your guides, you need to stay active on social. 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 festive social content. Also make it a habit to check the Great Indian Diwali Festival Page on Amazon. Here you’ll find regularly updated deals and discounts you can share with your community — perfect for social!

Best in Class coverage from previous Amazon Sales

Resource Center