Thanksgiving Day And Affiliate Marketing

You probably all know that tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day and I wanted to share with you some of the insides of this special day but from the Affiliate Marketing point of view.

Thanksgiving Day is a huge market. Imagine if the forecasted 2008 receipts to farmers from turkey sales was around $4.3 Billion. And the amount to be spent on gifts by 33 percent of Black Friday shoppers was at $875; 17 percent plan to spend over $1,000!

The question is how to tap in this gold mine and take a piece of the action? Luckily for us, there are hundreds of affiliate programs out there that are just waiting for you to start driving traffic and make money while doing so.

But first, you need to figure out what people are interested in and what are they actually looking for online. Are they looking for gifts? Are they looking for wallpapers to decorate their desktops or maybe they are searching for thanksgiving recipes.

Your first task is to find out what is the best way to monetize all this. And the very first thing to do is keyword research. The tool I always use is the free keyword suggestion tool from WordTracker.

If you search for “thanksgiving” you will get the top 100 keywords related to it. Now you will get all sorts of searches, related to all kinds of niches. You have to separate them into specific groups like: “thanksgiving crafts”, “thanksgiving clipart”, “thanksgiving coloring pages” etc. All these keywords, or better to say key-phrases, clearly show a desire for specific thanksgiving crafts that people, especially children, can work with.

Another category would be: “thanksgiving history”, “the first thanksgiving”, “thanksgiving backgrounds” and the like. These key-phrases tell us that people are also interested in the beginnings of this tradition.

And finally, yet another category that you can create is by putting together key-phrases like: “thanksgiving recipes”, “thanksgiving dinner ideas”, “traditional thanksgiving dinner” clearly has something to do with the food department J

These are categories that represent niches. Once you decide on what niche to focus on, you can “dig” deeper using KeywordTracker, to find better targeted keywords, long-tail keywords that you can use in your SEO strategy. If you didn’t know, long-tail keywords are much easier to use in terms of ranking your website.

And the best part with KeywordTracker is that you can dig as deep as 3-4 levels of keywords if the main keyword is broad enough. So, let’s take one example: after searching for “thanksgiving”, this would be the first level, I decided to go with “thanksgiving recipes”. On the second level I found “thanksgiving dinner recipes”.

Then on level 3 I found “old-fashioned thanksgiving dinner recipes”. I opted for this niche because it’s obvious that recipes can be sold online in e-format. Like downloadable files, PDF’s, audio and video format. And the costs involved to produce and distribute these materials are much lower than it is with otherwise offline marketing.

That is why the “manufacturers” can pay a greater percentage to their affiliates. Now all I have to do is set up a simple blogspot blog containing the long-tail keyword in the URL, write some simple articles or even better, I can find Public Domain sources online, and get what I need, for free.

I usually go to ClickBank.com to search for affiliate programs that are related to my niche. But you can also search Commission Junction or Amazon (for physical products).

Connect the new blog with the affiliate program with links and banners, reviews and articles about thanksgiving recipes. You can also look for a free PLR e-book containing recipes, that you can offer your visitors for free, once they decide to opt-in and that way you can even build your list. You know how everybody is talking about “the money is in the list”.

And that’s it. You don’t have to complicate things by searching for elegant templates for your blogger blog or waist time searching for “the perfect” affiliate product. Just go out there and start working on it. Soon you will see the money coming in. Than you can think on issues like outsourcing, paid traffic and professional design.

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