The Ultimate Cyber Monday + Black Friday Guide for Affiliates – Part II

As soon as Thanksgiving hits, many of us enter into a holiday-induced frenzy that only gets worse as we creep closer to the end of December. Website traffic across the board and time-spent-on-page tends to dwindle. People simply don’t have the time or attention span to indulge in meaty new content or read thought-provoking narratives. We want festive, straightforward and visually pleasing bite-sized content bits to browse through and shop.

A great tool to utilize during the holiday rush is the ShareASale Dealsbar.  With over 14,000 Merchant deals and coupons available through the platform, this tool makes it easy for bloggers to display select deals from their Retail partners. You can choose the style and location of your Dealsbar for maximum impact. 

Let your readers know which Merchants are rumored to have the biggest deals and help them pare down their list of prospective targets. Start posting previews and sending emails featuring your top Merchant partners, outlining the exact time you will have deals active on the big day so they can streamline their shopping process.

Check out our special Black Friday + Cyber Monday Edition of the Deals Database:

Break up long stretches of text with images and graphics. And keep your graphic style consistent. For example, in this Black Friday + Cyber Monday series, we chose a consistent color palette (Black, yellow and white), a set of fonts and style to keep all the sections looking consistent.  Don’t have Photoshop? Check out these free design resources: Canva.com and Gimp. 

Help people find what they’re looking for faster. Add a temporary “Gifts” category to your blog’s main menu or create a new landing page that features all of your holiday-centric posts and special promotions in one place.  

Update or create a new sidebar to use on all your holiday shopping posts. You can feature deep linked hot product features or highlight relevant high-converting posts from the past year.  

Consider what your readers will relate to – remember that they are not necessarily shopping for themselves during this holiday season.  They might be shopping for people on their gifting list. Organize your posts and Gift Guides with a new menu structure so that shoppers can shop by price point, category or recipient type. Cross-link to other relevant posts and embed links throughout the body of your content to allow seamless navigation through your posts.

Make sure each post meets some basic criteria: 

Search Engine Optimization remains important during this time because it has potential to help you scoop up some new visitors from product or gift-related searches. Most holiday shoppers will utilize an online search to gather inspiration for a purchase or to find out more information about a product in question. 

Headlines & Titles

Make sure your blog titles are clearly supporting the content of the post. Google typically cuts off the title after the first 65 characters so include the main keywords towards the beginning of your title. But this doesn’t mean you should keep your titles short and vague – that will not help you! The more vague your headlines are, the more keyword competition you will face in the search results. Especially if you are an emerging content site going up against Real Simple or , a headlined post named “Best Gifts for Kids in 2016!”  means your product review or gift guide will likely get buried. 

 Experiment with long-tail headlines, like “Superman Gifts for Super Girls!”  Because this is more targeted, you will face less competition from other content sites. 

URLs

URL’s should be relevant and accurate to the content of the blog. You want to have the URL setup so that when someone views it they will have a good expectation of where that link will lead them. Make sure they are focused and don’t contain words like ‘a’, ‘of’, ‘the’, etc. These add nothing of value to your URL. Also, be sure to use hyphens instead of underscores to separate words.

Images

It’s important to squeeze as much out of your images as possible. Not only will images help improve readability as mentioned above, but they can help you show up in image searches on search engines and on social media platforms. 

Tips for image optimization: 

• Always name your image files with something relevant and related to the content. 
• Make sure your image files are compressed or “saved for web” to reduce file size and speed up page load time. Even if your blog scales down an image to a thumbnail size, the page will have to load the original image file which could be huge.
• Include alt text.

More SEO Resources: