Holiday Marketing - Cha-Ching Edition

Time to make a killing while singing Christmas Carols all the way to the bank.


Let me just preface this - The holidays are for making A LOT OF MONEY. Anyone that doesn't take advantage... well - no comment. The PC crowd wants to pretend it's about family or getting together, but when it comes down to it those same people turn into animals then literally committing assault, going into debt, and stampeding their fellow neighbors to consume and get that sale and discount.

So don't give me that PC crap - we're an online business marketing forum and we're here to make a lot of money. THIS is OUR SuperBowl!

I was on the frontline for 5 years - I've got battle scars from these animals. Now-a-days you can't catch me physically within a 5 mile radius of a mall or retail store during the last 2 months of the year - NEVER AGAIN. But I learned a lot being in the trenches during Christmases that's evolved me into the marketer I am today.

Glow
Remember the first time you kissed a girl you liked (or boy for the ladies in the audience) - right before, wondering if you should go in - the butterflies in your stomach, making you nauseous, heart racing - time slowed down completely - that uncomfortable yet exhilarating feeling - then BAM it happens and afterwards you had that uncontrollable smile and Glow of joy all over your body, feeling like you can walk on water. Your aura lit up like nothing can stop you.

That "before" nauseous feeling is what I feel right before I know something profound is in the air. I always feel it right in the first week of October. It started happening several years back once I realized how much money is to be made online during the holiday season. It was like something from beyond shaking my spirit - keeping my restless telling me "NOW is the time to ACT!"

My First Christmas Rush
I had always taken action when I felt a strong urge towards something but I didn't know how to make that leap for the holidays. My first real job was working at the Mall and I started about 4 months before the holidays if I recall correctly. Weekends were always packed and during certain times of the day you knew when you would get a rush of people, however that first Black Friday was profound. We were open till midnight every day from Friday till the Tuesday after Monday (it wasn't called Cyber Monday yet cause online retail wasn't a thing).

I never seen anything like it, packed constantly all day long until past midnight. Getting out of the Mall's parking was at LEAST 30 mins every day during that holiday. That's how crazy it was, and it stayed packed until Christmas Eve - the Mall updated it schedule again and was opened till midnight the last two weeks before Christmas; Christmas Eve was the 2nd craziest day in terms of sales behind the day after Thanksgiving - unfortunately Christmas Eve cannot transfer over to online holiday shopping due to shipping and all - however if you have a service or SAAS - perhaps you can come up with something.

The Consuming Animal
The people were ferocious - lines were long so patience was thin... and all I was doing was serving pizza so imagine what it was like to be an employee inside one of the retail stores.

For the holiday season, the animals weren't very nice or jolly to their neighbors. When I saw some of the crazies that come out during the holidays I knew right then and there humans were no more than animals. I've seen full-sized adults push other people's kids out of the way to grab simple retarded toys.


I remember seeing some friends after work during the holidays - alot would straight up quit cause it was too much for them. Managers would account for on-the-spot quitting when creating schedules - imagine that - they are scheduling people while accounting for the fact a couple of employees on the floor are going quit. A lot of my friends were and are still shell-shocked from being on the receiving end of the consuming animal's attacks. I've come to realize that most people that experience the holiday madness tend to stay away from malls and retail stores during holidays like I do simple due what we saw in the trenches.

Sometimes you try to intervene cause you are a decent human but I have a scar on my left arm that reminds me of my lesson in attempting to stop the consuming animal. Now-a-days you can't ever catch me in or near a mall during the holidays.

This new wave of Opening on Thanksgiving and Black Friday rushes - what I saw people do back then, I'm not surprised people are dying, getting crushed, and stampedes are now "common place". I mean I walked away with a battle wound the first Christmas - You can't stop this, and if they are going to spend the money - why not profit? Perhaps in a twisted way it's my form of justice for my battle scar - or I'm just using that as an excuse - maybe I don't even have a scar.

The day after Christmas it was still packed with people returning gift, but then on December 27th that was a wrap. The activity level was still higher than normal, but once January 1st came - dead.

Enter The Digital
It took a while to re-adjust to the low level of activity. However that pattern repeated itself for the 5 Christmases I was there. Once I left and decided to give this online thing a go that profound experience of the Holidays never left me. Once I started getting more and more savvy with online marketing that nauseous feeling kept hitting me at the beginning of October cause my subconscious was making the connection of my past mall experience and the "online holiday shopping" world.

Eventually I came across BlueHatSEO. Eli gave me the missing piece - the outside the box thinking to structure my actions - and that next Holiday, GAME ON.


I remember being up all hours of the night posting on different forums and websites and these new things coming to popularity called "blogs" trying to get traffic.

No one was going to stop me. I didn't care if I got banned, called out, or far worse - if big brands were making billions offline and the animal's online appetite was growing every year I could at the very least walk away with $1,000. That was my goal, cause I needed to see it for myself. If I work 18+ hours a day and couldn't make it happen that first holiday then the internet was just a giant fucking scam.

But the internet wasn't a scam...

After working myself for 20+ hours a day for 6 weeks, to the point of debilitating exhaustion I crashed on the eve of Christmas eve, and slept for nearly 20 hours. On Christmas morning I totaled up my profits - the first Holiday I walked away with a little over $10K for almost 2 months worth of work.


I had Glow for weeks afterwards cause I cracked the code. Those 6 weeks in the trenches were me trying any and everything I could think of - this eventually came up with raw sloppy forms of traffic leaks. You have to really understand the level of commitment it took though - 95% of my attempts failed, but I kept trying - I needed to check off in my mind whether it could be done or not; it was only that other 5% that generated my income and those methods I kept refining.

The techniques were refined over the years to the point I started getting more and more elaborate cause of boredom, but they kept working. When I originally started generating traffic I was still working a job - and Google was not even on the scene, so it was just "generating traffic" - no real thought behind it except small marketing concepts.

I'mma Do Numbers
That first Holiday rush clarified within my mind on how the system really works, and gave me a reminder I live with every day.

To make a long story short - the holidays are the ultimate Showdown of marketers. You don't even have to be good at it, you can be a poor marketer with a 5 page website who then does a couple of crucial traffic leaks, bum marketing tactics, or simple hits up places that have "Black Friday, Cyber Monday" threads like BuSo, Reddit, and other places do, post and sit back and watch people fall over to get your magical "discount".

And the great part about it, unlike the Superbowl, this is not a single day, it's for 2 solid months, perhaps 3 now-a-days, where you can attack and come up with creative ideas on how to generate traffic to your money site.

In 2016 only 47% of people shopped online!


We're not even at the 50% mark and it has only kept growing!

If you have a product it'd better be on Amazon. You should also gather and find every past industry "Black Friday, Cyber Monday" list and see how you can get on that list with your product/service. Right there you are getting in front of people looking to give you money.

Think about how easy it is - there are bloggers that go around curating "Cyber Monday" promotions - they NEED and WANT you to give them something so THEY can turn around and look like gods in front of their audience. Imagine hitting up every blogger in your industry and giving them a Cyber Monday promo code to give their audience, exclusively for their brand - You don't think they are going to blast that to their audience and expose their audience to your product/service so they can look good?


12 Days of Christmas
Well what if I don't have a product or service... I got ideas for you too. We'll get into all of them, but I'll give you one right now, gather 12 different product/service providers within your niche and contact them asking for a special promotion, discount, or bonus. Then have a 12 Days of Christmas campaign where every day a new promotion drops on a dedicated page. Each promotion can last 1 day or multiple days, or until Christmas - doesn't matter, but the caveat will be you are revealing a new promotion every day.

You can throw in things you are affiliate of to make your money, but the main point is to get people to come back, gather their emails, and then hit them up with the next days' promotion. And now you are growing your audience for the next holiday season, or Valentines, or any other promotion/campaign you want to do.

I wouldn't have 100% of them your affiliate cause some products/service might be great but not have an affiliate program - I wouldn't pass those up cause you should be looking for branding and creating trust while making money. However if you are just here for the 'Cha-Ching' - then go all out mercenary mode.

Now Here is why the countdown to Specifically Cyber Monday and Black Friday is important. This season it will be estimated that 3.45 Billion dollars will be spent by consumers on Cyber Monday alone - that's completely ONLINE! Black Friday will see 3.34 Billion spent:


So those 3 days will come out to 8.72 Billion, hold on, I'm going to use the zeros so you understand the magnitude; $8,720,000,000 will be spent on those 3 days - not including any promotions or ideas that will come up during Saturday and Sunday.

It's impossible for you not to make money.

I'll even take it one step further, with some of these affiliate programs you probably don't even need a website to make money. Just jump into BlackFriday/CyberMonday threads and drop your affiliate link stating "Oh Shit Best Buy has Tv for $2" -> link - but with more finesse. Maybe someone calls you out, but who cares, by the time someone figures it out you would have made your change and walked away.

You can literally start now by throwing up a "CyberMondayPromotionsNewYork.com" and start hitting up craigslist now to tell people your site is going to have all the latest and greatest Cyber Monday sales and start gathering emails for an audience. Obviously you are going to need some more finesse, but it's more than possible. You can hit up Craigslist in your area and get friends to do it in their areas during that weekends and post about deals or links to your promotion site (or landing page).

It's going to be COMPLETE CHAOS folks. No moderator in the world would be able to stop the flood if they wanted too, and most likely they'll be busy with their own holiday shopping or campaigns to notice until it's way too late - if you want to go down the bum rush marketing route.

The Countdown Already Began
But Carter aren't you getting ahead of yourself? NO.

I read the boring whitepapers and research so you don't have to. The National Retail Federation has research stating that the holiday season starts in October:



There is even a portion of those people that start shopping in October!

You need to get your designers working right now on Creatives cause come the Holiday any designer worth a day should be unbelievably busy, and getting creatives and designs from them might be impossible - at least on time. With October the designers are still lite on work and have their mental faculties intact - imagine a designer during the week of Cyber Monday getting pummeled with work for the upcoming weekend and promotions - you think they'll be able to be creative and give you their best work then? No - so get your stuff to them right now!

Enter The Pumpkin Spice
Even Starbucks has figured out how to make a killing - it's called Pumpkin Spice Latte. It's a bit difficult to sell "more coffee", but if you add a "special recipe" version that is only around for a limited time - BAM, now you've trained your audience to look forward to the Holidays AND YOUR BRAND.

If Starbucks can figure out how to sell more coffee, surely you can see how easy it is to make money.

But you don't need to even go that far just yet, the WHOLE WORLD has already conditioned consumers to spend money during the holidays. So all you have to do is make sure you are ready, have a list, check it twice, and then thrice of places you will traffic leak and bum market too, places you will push your ad budget to, get your remarketing pixel fired up and follow those consumers around the internet reminding them of your great offer.

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Here are the general topics we'll be going into throughout the season (some of this might change):

Table of Content
- Goals
- Research
- Planning/Design
- Execution
- Analysis/Pivoting
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I'm going to try something different - this is going to be a live thread - think the old BigBrand Checklist style thread at WF, and I'll update the Table of Content area with links to posts, so look for that section. If I do further updates I'll try to put dates so you know you have to go back to that new post cause there is new material.

Anyone that wants to add to the thread feel free, there are thousands of ways to make money during the Holidays. More importantly - If you have ANY QUESTIONS post them and I'll do my best to reply to your situation, ideas or questions with some creative ideas to help you out (For my sanity PMs willl be ignored - I gotta do numbers too this holiday).


It's time to get to work, most of you are already a week behind.


- CC

Wow. This is an awakening. I should find a way to sling Christmas post on my site through any outlet. That Christmas service idea makes my head spin of several service idea in my niche. Kudos

Here are a few worthy stats to take note of and who and what category you should be promoting:

Amazon dominates the holiday season (Amazon now accounts for 43% of ALL online US sales - let that really sink in.. nearly HALF of all ecommerce purchases go through Amazon now)



Source: CNBC

Amazon’s growth in 2016 was driven by sales in the electronics, home, and apparel categories. Electronics contributed to an estimated 18% of the company's sales growth in 2016, as the number of US households that own an Amazon Echo device more than doubled from 2015.

The next biggest contributors were the home and kitchen category (15%), apparel and accessories (12%), food (11%), and health and beauty (10%), illustrating that Amazon is seeing significant growth in consumer packaged goods (CPGs). The company's recent expansion of its Dash Buttons to its online site and mobile app should help fuel further growth in these categories.

Source: BI Intelligence

2 weeks left!!

I was listening to NPR a couple of days ago and was gobsmacked.



It's happening!!!

WOW. They are already admitting defeat before I even launch my holiday site... shiiiett. No but seriously, let's get to work, we got 2 weeks to prepare and most of you guys don't even know how to set proper goals.

So what happened to October - zero clue.


October was nuts, what I did was hit up all my partners and had meetings about each holiday promotions we'll be running and schedule content accordingly. Don't miss the Buku-Dollars by coping out and waiting till next year; cause when next year comes around you'll say "NEXT year I'm a get serious!"

Good luck with that bruh...

So my brain's been flooded with so much caffeine that it's gotten accustom to Cuban Coladas - that's bad new cause either I up the anties or have to figure out another mechanism to keep me awake. And then I really screwed up and BOUGHT a Cuban Coffee maker and have been making a ton of coffee nonstop for 3 days now.

Goals

So what do you hope to accomplish this season? Here are four macro attack plans to think about with this coming holiday season:

A. Grow Profits - This will consist of mostly on-site updates and internals. You'll need to Know what products are your most profitable, which customer segment is most likely to buy that product and the magic will be matching them together. The key here will be analytics. Growing profits will not necessarily happen by "increasing traffic" - this takes internal analytics of what is currently working, or not working, for you. Things to think about - removing your least profitable product will automatically increase your profitability - yet it may reduce your revenue if your least profitable product was your biggest revenue earner.

B. Grow Revenue - For this you'll need to sell more - with a service or SAAS it helps to explain more to your audience. You most likely have a returning audience that comes to your site, so growing revenue can simply mean getting more of them to understand your benefits through videos, guides, and tutorials. Fiverr is a great place for this - it's how I do it. As well you can make SAAS users more sticky by having them integrate into your API - cause once a person is hooked into an API they are less likely to unhook unless a similar API can be found.

C. Grow Awareness - Awareness can be harvested by your current userbase sharing your content, your service or pages. However you have to have content worthy of sharing; simply doing content primarily for word count means you are starting off with SEO in mind versus value. You've seen and have read that type of content all the time - it doesn't excite people. People are more willing to share things that excite them, trigger a positive or negative emotion (Polarizing Content), or convey a message that aligns with a message they want to be perceived as having.

D. Increase Traffic - This is different than growing awareness since traffic is simply traffic - it may be for CPC or display purposes and you don't give 2 shits whether that person comes back or not - anyone with an Amazon or MFA (Made for Adsense) site should be interested in this. The users aren't going to be "aware" of your brand, since driving value might not be your purpose, simply getting eyeballs maybe - it's a business model - I don't necessarily agree or like it but it makes people a lot of money. Increasing traffic can also be "temporary" - it's a case of hit and run marketing tactics or traffic leaks to places that will not be visited after the holidays. Think of "Black Friday" special pages where you see a ton of coupons (BuSo has a Black Friday/Cyber Monday thread here).

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Note: The reason Why Growing Profits and Revenue are in green - is because it mostly happens ON-SITE. Growing Awareness and Increasing Traffic happen OFF-SITE.

When you are in beast mode and got coffee being delivered to your system by IV drips, everything you do HAS to have one of the 4 goals in mind this holiday. Since the holidays are compressed time, you are hitting up places left and right but can only do it within a given time frame, concentrate on what moves the revenue needle.


I suggest picking 2 out of the above 4 goals to really sharpen your skill on. Pick one from each group. Pick the ones that are the HARDEST for you. This way as you practice, cause practice makes perfect, they'll become easier and easier just like riding a bike.

Don't try to do everything cause it'll end up in failure. My goal this holiday for my main SAAS operation is to Grow Awareness and Grow Profits. For my other projects it will be to Increase Traffic and Grow Revenue.

For the "increasing traffic" group the content schedule is laid out of what we are going to drop for blogposts with an 8 week schedule. The main point there will be to use each holiday day as anchors for content being created.

For example If Thanksgiving was a part of this content play strategy and I had a food website, I would have done a countdown to Thanksgiving for 14 or 30 days, where every day I reveal a new recipe for a dish that can be served on Thanksgiving. 30 dishes are a lot, but it creates enough variety that it will have a lasting impact throughout other Thanksgivings. I did a similar method some years ago and it grew our audience by 280% in that 30 day period.

You can then extend that to other major holidays like a countdown to Mothers Day or Fathers Day if your websites are focused on moms or dads.

Growing Awareness is a bit tricky since it's more about creating longer-term relationships with users. So creating content that provokes discussions within your industry or shows data that people overlooked and now has people talking. You have to drop multiple "mini-bombs" for extended periods of time WITHIN the nucleus of your niche. A great place for that are subreddits where members of your community constantly gather to learn the latest. Dropping mini-bomb over and over and over creates that long-lasting impact at the center of mass.


This attack at the center of gravity is HOW items go viral. Nick Kolenda (the guy behind Psychological Pricing Strategies) talks about this in his guide: "An Enormous Guide to Viral Marketing"

So let's say you want to go viral within the mommy niche - you go where mommies congregate, and if they don't congregate YOU can become the hub where they congregate by creating a resource/platform for it. A example is BuSo itself - there wasn't a place for serious internet marketing discussions so @The Engineer created one. In BuSo's case the goal this holiday would be to Grow Awareness - same if you are creating a similar platform within your niche. But growing awareness is very difficult if you have nothing to leverage off of and are a one-man operation. So what you need to do is GO to the places where Awareness is and do those mini-bombs.

What does this have to do with the Holidays specifically? Everyone is going to be in BUYER MODE or at least inclined to buy, so when you are doing your attacks you will have MORE opportunity to make money now more so than any other time. If you can add an angle like "buy this for your geek friend/family member" - BAM you have a sale.

IF it can be sold ONLINE it can be sold MORE SO during the holidays.

So first step sit down and write down the 2 goals you are going to focus on this holiday season. Really look at what you are offering and what will move the revenue needle for you the most.

Once you have your goals - now you have to create a map to your destination... That's next up.

Fa, La, La, La, La Cha-Ching


Alibaba made $25.3 billion in sales in a single day during this holiday already. BILLIONS!

Singles Day in China is the biggest holiday in terms of sales and eclipses the USA's black friday and Cyber Monday. Just to give you a comparison Amazon's "Prime Day" - when our savior Optimus Prime died for our sins, Amazon generated $1 billion in revenue in a 30-hour sales window in July.

Meanwhile Alibaba generated $1 billion within the first 2 minutes of the 11/11 holiday.

I need to be targeting China, Thanksgiving + Black Friday + Cyber Monday for 2016 only came out to $8.72 billion, Alibaba did 3x that in a single day.

EVERYONE is making money this holiday.

We got billions of dollars in sales in a single day - it seems all you have to do is have a website and drop that link somewhere on the internet this holiday season and you'll make money. It's like they are just printing this stuff.

Research



The key to all victory is research. I'm assuming you grazed over Market Research and have at least 1-3 customer profiles you want to target in general. This holiday, you have to be everywhere they are, and that's going to require Omnipresence Mode. If you are smart and are retargeting or doing a Facebook LookALike Audience campaign, you should be golden watching all the pixels running around the internet finding your brand everywhere.

What I've done for my increase traffic group is came up with a list of all the websites the competitors' promotions were posted on the last 2 years. It is a lot easier than you think with Archive.org and Googling "Cyber Monday 2016" + niche.

I've already targetted and confirmed each place I'm doing a special guestpost the day of Cyber Monday or on Black Friday. Writers are already writing mates...

On the other side I've already gotten messages on Facebook about adding my SAAS to certain Cyber Monday promotions - Thanks, but no thanks. It's one of those "let's get 12 different softwares and offer discounts on our page" situations. It's a great plan - for you. Not necessarily smart for the brands involved, but if you're in a niche where you push software, a service, or something where you can gather 5-10 different companies' promotions and create a single "Big Cyber Monday Discount" page - definitely do it.

As an individual brand though - being one of the targets makes sense IF it brings in sales, but can also cause rippling effects down your sales line like the case of AppSumo deals. With AppSumo deals you have situations where software companies are offering lifetime deals, but creates a negative situation where the userbase "won't buy the regular price" cause they missed the AppSumo deal. Giving discounts to lure new customers is a double edge sword, cause it sort of also disrespects your current customers that have been with you the longest cause they don't get the same discount.

So how do you solve this?

DUO-Promotion. I just made that phrase up - you can steal it. Include a Loyalty promotion that impacts current customers more so than new customers along side a discount to lure new customers. That way your loyal customer base gets a great offer - perhaps more capacity or something, while you also lure new customers with the discount option. A "duo-coupon" (I hate that word "coupon", almost as much as I hate "discount"). So now you've got 2 groups of happy customers instead of one group of discounted users and another group of unhappy loyal customers that see you reducing prices for something they are paying full price for.

Offline.
A great place to look for research is offline print - the nonsense coupons you get in your mailbox, and flyers you find laying around at doctors offices. All that stuff gets placed strategically there by offline promotion companies. If you were to walk in with fresh new magazines once a month for a location - do you think they wouldn't allow you to have a promotion stand there? The easiest places to get in are doctors offices, but anywhere people are waiting all day is great. Talk to receptionists at lobbies and 9 out of 10 times they'll let you place your own promotion there for free. You might have to grease some hands with some gifts like free donuts for staff or something - get creative.

Newsletters.
I swear you'd better have already signed up to your competitors' newsletters and your industry's newsletter to get the latest on what's going on. 90% of my research on what the competition is doing is sent straight to my inbox from my competition - I mean how can it get any easier? Oh wait...

Google Alerts.
Setup Google Alerts and Mentions about your industry, your brand, and more importantly your competitors. Anytime someone says something about your competition you have to be there within 10 minutes traffic leaking the stuffings out of that opportunity. So in my case I've got Google Alerts for "SEMRUSH", "AHREFS", "SERPFOX", "SERPBook", etc. The second someone says anything about them this holiday I'll be alerted cause we got an RSS feed of the alert going into a slack channel.

I go more in-depth into the Google Alert angle in the Online Reputation Management Day of the crash course, The Market Research Day, Customer Service Day, AND Traffic Leaking Day. Are you seeing a pattern - in order to be omnipresence Google Alerts are a critical tool for me to traffic leak my competition and monitor what's going on within my niche.

Let the internet do the work for you.


If you guys set things up correctly, as CyberMonday and holiday promotions talks start coming in, hit up the person in charge of that promotion and get your brand in that mix. You'll coattail the competition - and if you can afford to, try to out do your competitor's offer so the visitors that the publishers are working so hard to send to that page will see YOU as the better offer. Even if you can take an extra 1-5 buyers away, that's 1-5 buyers you wouldn't have had - that can turn into long term customers.

Doing research on the competition, what they promoted last year, and what they are looking to promote this year is not hard in the online realm. In fact you can just straight up call them and ask if they are doing any Cyber Monday promotions saying you want to "help them out" - you really don't, but get a list of places they are pushing the promotion for "examples" OR if you are on the other side as the promoter cause you have a website with "Cyber Monday offers", you can straight up hit up ALL the vendors your competitors will try to display promotions of and get them on your own site.

That's why you want to go back into the past by Googling past promotions, cause you'll be able to create a huge list right from day one. Also... I really hope you guys are doing this RIGHT NOW. Don't wait till the day before or week of Thanksgiving to get in contact with someone - THIS WEEK and next week are the only times left. The week of Thanksgiving is already too late for the most part.

The smarter people that are sending the Facebook messages I'm getting sent their messages at the beginning of the month - so... you should be acting RIGHT NOW!

@CCarter I'm planning a BIG push for my gaming site for that entire week.

For anyone else without a domain that's going to insta-rank for these keywords + your niche building links to these pages would be a waste of time, that's probably too late now for 90% of us. Plus there's no guarantees with that shit anyway.

Essentially, SEO is out. What you could do is create an entire Black Friday / Cyber Monday category on your site. Better yet, just call it 'deals'.

Want to be really crazy about it to max out your conversions? Set it up on a sub-domain.

You can still go for the long-tails this way. Perhaps you could use a sticky master post at the top of your page. Then also have smaller posts beneath targeting those long-tails.

Most of the big sites do ONE big page. You could do "Black Friday Deals For Red Nike Air" within an overall category. There's lots you can try. This specificity might even be better for promotion in certain places.

Promotion, traffic leaking, advertising is going to be most peoples only option here. Even if it isn't your only option, do all that shit until your eyes bleed. There's so much money on the table here!

Absolutely do what CCarter said here, do all of that and do it right now. Why am I up at 7am still? Because I want this to be EPIC.

I'm writing all of the content today, then all I need to do is trawl the web for deals all damn day long as soon as they start dropping. Wish I could scrape it, but shit that's too late now. If I had started this site in January, I damn well would be.

Some promo ideas:

- Competitor post commenting
- YouTube comments (find keyword search volume, comment on top video for that product or product type)
- Forums, Q&A, Image, Coupons, Submission Sites (Stumble, Scoop.it etc)
- EVERYTHING YOU CAN THINK OF
& Plan some serious traffic leaks too, do your research.

CCarter has loads of the traffic leak methods, tactics etc here and on his own site.

Would be interested to know what ideas @Ryuzaki @Calamari and others have here.

Execution Examples

Here are two examples of execution against SAAS #1 to get your creative juices going.

Simple Facebook Message asking us to participate in their Black Friday Sales:


From the vendor side obviously I'm not a "discount" type of person, so it's a no-go in that department, but the publisher's execution is simple enough that getting 10-20 people on board should be a walk in the park. Once the Black Friday campaign is up, the publisher is going to put 1000% effort into promoting that Black Friday campaign to their userbase and Bam you've just got a ton of exposure to people that never knew about you.

For me personally if I was able to put up a "Bonus" promotion of some sort instead of the discount route, the promotion would be adding value - which can be taken away (The problem is a bonus code along side 10-19 other discount code doesn't look good in the eyes of consumers looking for "discounts" - so it only makes sense to pass on it).

With discounts it's hard to go back to the original price once you've reduce your price; hence why the one competitor offering 90% off for 6 months had to close down sales threads that were mentioning that cause people came back over 2+ years later still asking for that disastrous price.


So always consider whatever discount or campaign you run to be perpetual in nature. If you offer 50% off this Black Friday, assume you will have to offer that same or MORE next Black Friday, and onward forever. It could be a spiraling deathblow.

HOWEVER from the publisher side simply hit up brands/companies Facebook pages and send a message - since Facebook monitors your response time and tries to get publishers to respond within 24 hours to all inquiries (I think they read my customer service post):


In order to keep that badge there on the page, the page owner has to respond to any message within 24 hours or better, and that makes sure you get a quick response.

Something to keep in mind - brands want sales all year round, so you can do these type of contacts any time of the year cause what brand wouldn't want exposure to new audiences for free?

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The next one almost threw me off:


Why in the world would someone want to add content to an old post - ohh... it's a play on guest posts/link building. Basically since the page is already indexed within Google and we are actively promoting it, adding this person to the page would give them new exposure but they'll get the ranking bump from the backlink.

It's a smart play since instead of emailing people left and right for guest posts, this person is hitting up "expert roundups" already in circulation and gaining exposure that way. As well it sets the stage up for the next round of "expert roundups" OR more importantly it opens the door for guest-posting on a brand's blog.

(If anyone is wondering why I didn't pixelate this one it's because it's not a DM, direct message, it's on Twitter in public already so anyone following the SW twitter account would have seen or have access to this).

Twitter is an interesting beast cause you don't know whether a brand's got their DMs open to message them, they are naturally off so you have to follow each other to DM. However something to consider is most brands on twitter will or at least SHOULD have their DMs open so they can get messages from anyone for the customer service aspect.

From a publisher standpoint hitting them up on Twitter's DM for guest post or offers makes sense - but there is no public measurement like the Facebook scenario of showing how fast a company responds, so it might make more sense to attempt a company's Facebook first and wait 24-48 hours and then try their twitter account. I would always recommend trying a company's contact us page but who knows with some of these brands.

Any company that WANTS to be in the spotlight is going to respond.

One thing I would recommend when looking for a platforms to execute on is looking at the frequency of messages on that platform by a brand. If you hit up a brand's page on Facebook yet the brand hasn't posted on Facebook in 4+ weeks, you are wasting your time.

However if you then go over and see they are active on Twitter - then you know where to hit them up to contact them. Brands are going to be more active on certain platforms cause that's were they found the most activity from their userbase...

I mean think about it - when was the last time you went to a company's Google+ to contact them? Never.

Make sure to go where they are most active.

RomesFall said:

Would be interested to know what ideas @Ryuzaki @Calamari and others have here.

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Instead of trying totally new tacts in November I would focus on what's already working.

I've been keeping up with your journal and you've been doing a great job promoting your content and getting traffic. Think about what has been your best 2 or 3 traffic sources and double down on those. You can experiment with new stuff in January.

The other thing I would do is take a critical look at your pages that are getting the most traffic. Check to make sure your affiliate links are still good. You don't want to be sending people to product pages that are out of stock or that they no longer carry.

Are your visitors skipping over your first affiliate link and clicking the second one? Move the second one to the top.

Are people glossing over your third and fourth paragraphs and then spending more time on the fifth and sixth? Move paragraphs 5 and 6 above 3 and 4 and pop an affiliate link in there. Heat map data can help you figure this out in a couple days and will pay dividends the entire holiday season.

Typically, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel this time of year I'm swapping out my slicks for studded snow tires to get better traction.

1 Week Left!!

Competitive Intel 1.0
from Adobe Digital Marketing Cloud:
1: 2017 Holiday Season Will Break $100 Billion In Online Sales
online holiday sales a 13.8% increase from the same period last year. While we’re still talking double digits, revenue growth during the online holiday season has been slowing since 2015. That said, growth continues to outpace overall retail growth during the holidays—13.8% online vs. 3.8% overall.
2: Consumers Will Be On The Hunt For A Bargain
online shoppers traditionally buy more items at lower prices during the holidays. In fact, four out of five measured product categories in ADI’s analysis show higher unit growth than revenue growth, suggesting that “consumers are making more purchases of less expensive items online”
3: Majority Of Online Spend This Holiday Season Will Go To Large Retailers
large retailers grew their revenues twice as fast as other retailers in the first half of 2017. As a result, ADI predicts that large retailers will rake in the majority of online sales this holiday season...

And that's that... With the turn of this year online sales have taken over retail sales and now the titans of the internet reign supreme.



I was out there on Black Friday and throughout the weekend looking at the crowds - people were out but there was no feverish rush; most people realized it's a lot easier to just order online and have the items delivered. The malls and retail stores were still crowded but we felt it in the air, more and more people stayed home and ordered online. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are traditionally responsible for 50% of all holiday sales. All we got is 50% left to make money the rest of the season.

I'm getting mine, I hope you're getting yours - Time to get back in the trenches...

I can tell you this... the deals sucked this year all around

eliquid said:

I can tell you this... the deals sucked this year all around

Click to expand...

I believe that was done on purpose. The deals usually were insane but cut into profits way too much. As well Amazon and a couple of other places were doing "week" of deals to spread out the impact. Example:



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I think a lot of people that were trying to pay the BlackFriday/CyberMonday game on the vendor side were simply trying to cash in on the event and increase their margins - problem is it was collective so a ton of deals looked bad all around. I guess people learned their lesson about giving 90% off.

Something that I also wanted to touch on was Amazon's strategy. @eliquid gave me a heads up on what Amazon was doing the week before everything went down and it's a brilliant move. Amazon pretty much bought up so much Advertising/Paid Media inventory across the board for the week before the "Black Friday" week that it caused a TON of people to see their own conversions drop steeply.

What they were doing was training the masses on the internet to think "Amazon" for the week following - and keep their brand in the minds of the consumers the week before the biggest holiday shopping days of the year.

That's such a skillful and brilliant move that it deserves a standing ovation. They used their brute force, deep pockets, and brand to make sure a majority of people bought from them when the shopping days came.


Now, speaking as someone on the receiving end...


Lets just say we had to make some pivots mid-stream once we saw what was happening.

^ That goes to show you the power of Traffic Leaks once again. Big Money can buy up all of the ad space, buy up all of the sites, create the biggest SEO campaigns, but at the end of the day they're always concerned with scale. They have to have a huge impact on their bottom line because their operations are so big.

That's the opening for us one-man and small team operations. Grassroots marketing will always be wide open. Big companies can't even pull it off right. Not a day goes by where I see them trying it on Reddit and getting spotted and called out immediately. They simply won't take the time and resources to do it right because the bottom line impact is much bigger elsewhere, and they can't stop thinking of it in terms of public relations (saving face) instead of marketing (making money directly).

It was still wide open for affiliates this season and still is, if you play it right. You might have to pivot your strategy a bit. This also goes to show you the power of owning your own email list, mailing list, etc, off of anybody else's platform and ability to throttle.

The 2nd to last paragraph in my Day 13 PPC thread, for media buys, I touch on this that @Ryuzaki speaks of:

"Being exclusive - This can happen, really. I know a few networks that just killed it for me back in the day and they did so well that I actually struck a deal to buy up all their ad inventory. This allowed me a "moat" that pretty much promised me profits as long as I could pay the bill and keep product shipping out the door.

Just imagine if you found an awesome media buy and then bought up all the inventory to where no one else could come in and take it over from you. Now imagine doing the same thing with your product or affiliate offer ( if you are an affiliate ) and being the only person who can sell this product and also being the only person advertising on a network of sites. It's guaranteed profit.

No more having to battle with people coming in and buying up the advertising and raising the costs up. No more copy-cat competitors buying the same ad space as you and trying to sell the same product cheaper.

You just leveled up my friend and the competition is now made irrelevant."

Amazon is playing it at a larger global level than anyone thought could be possible. Their pocket change playground is our end all to be all.