7 Holiday Content Ideas for Affiliate Marketers

It’s the holiday season and that means that there are plenty of opportunities to bring the holidays into your affiliate marketing efforts and generate excitement for your affiliate promotions. In this episode, I’ll share seven ideas for holiday-specific content that lead to affiliate sales.

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Links Mentioned in this Episode

The Ultimate Guide to Holiday Affiliate Marketing Promotions

How to Write a Product Review that Ranks and Converts

Our Black Friday and Cyber Monday Deals

Warm Up Your Audience Guide

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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy

7 Things Your Affiliates Need During Holiday Promotions

How to Stand Out as an Affiliate During the Holiday Season

Holiday Affiliate Guide Pt. 1: There’s More than Just Black Friday & Christmas

3 Lessons from a Hater

Affiliate Marketing Sales Secrets: How To Sell Without Being Salesy, Scammy or Sleazy

Here we are in part five of our eight-part series on holiday affiliate promotions, we’ve shared four episodes so far. We had part one, we talked about there’s more than just black Friday and Christmas. In part two, we talked about how your affiliate program can stand out during this holiday season.

In the next episode, in part three, we talk about how you as an affiliate can stand out this time of year. And then in the last episode, I shared seven things that your affiliates need during the holiday promotions. So we’re back to the affiliate-side here. So we went back and forth on affiliate management.

Now we’re back on the affiliate side and I’ve got seven ideas that I want to share with you for holiday-specific content. These are things you can do this time of year to really drive affiliate sales.

1) Gift Guides

Gift guides are huge this time of year because buying the perfect gift or giving the perfect gift is an art form. So if you’re an affiliate and you put together a gift guide, especially if it’s really niche-focused, it’s a very effective way to attract eyeballs and drive people to buy specific products. I know I just looked at a gift guide.

I’m trying to figure out what to get for some of the people in my life that maybe, I don’t know them as well, but I know enough about them. Like what they do and a few things that they like, and I’m like, what do I want to get for them? And so I’m consulting gift guides for this.

One of them is a gift guide for an entrepreneur, a fellow entrepreneur. And I’m thinking I know what I would want, but I want to see, like, what are some of the suggestions out there? Another one that he’s really big into, I won’t mention the show, but he’s really big into a specific show on television. And, and so I’m like looking up like gift guides for fans of that show. And so these are great for almost any channel, any platform, anything. They can be just for holidays, but you could also do these for things like anniversary gifts and mother’s day gifts, and father’s day gifts.

Obviously, you can drive traffic with these, with social media posts and all kinds of things like that. And you can even do dedicated Facebook image albums where you feature each thing or a dedicated Pinterest board, things like that. There’s especially great video content, so doing a video where you explain why each product makes for the perfect gift. That’s really cool where you actually just do kind of almost like a video review really quick.

It can be curated content where you are taking and kind of like putting reviews and things of the gifts on there. Like what other people are saying. Now, speaking of curated, they need to be curated and they need to be tailored to the niche.

When I say curated, they need to be organized, manageable. They need to be put in lists based on specific factors like age and gender interest budget. If you’re going to a pretty broad category make sure you narrow it down by things like maybe it’s Christmas gifts for entrepreneurs.

Maybe you have it separated by gender, or maybe have it separated by age again, gifts under in these specific ones, I’m looking for a gift that will, wow, but I’m not looking to spend a thousand dollars you know? So I’m looking for Christmas gifts that are in the range of 200 to $500. And there’s one particular site that I found that literally had, it was like under 500 to 1000, 200 to 500 and it was like a 100 to 200 and under a hundred dollars. I think they even had an under $50 category. And like, this is perfect.

Because I want this to be something that blows the people away, but I’m getting like 30 of these, I don’t want to spend $30,000 on these Christmas gifts. So I was pretty pleased to find this particular website for a large chunk of the people that I’m buying for this Christmas. You might have it all be about affordable gifts. You might have it be about all of them under $50. Maybe it’s, they’re all for men or they’re all for women or for boyfriends or for girlfriends or husbands or wives or stocking stuffers that are under 10, 15 bucks. things like on a budget, things like that. The best tech gifts, best gifts for travelers, food lovers, entrepreneurs, photographers, tech geeks, eco-friendly, best gifts for, again, for soccer players or for golfers, things like that.

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Now when you do these gift guides, again, get as specific as you can make sure you include a bunch of high-quality images along with the text, tell them why you recommend it, or why someone else recommends it, make it easily accessible. And navigatable navigable, whatever the word is, right. They should be able to instantly click through. So make the image a link, put a text link in the description, and have a button.

2) Wishlist

Now, these are kind of self-explanatory. They’re self-explanatory because you are creating a list. You say what you want for the holidays and that’s going to inspire others. It’s going to give them inspiration to, you know what I want that too. And that’s going to impact the buying decisions. So you create a list of these things, different products, different stores, again, tailored to your niche. These are a lot like gift guides, really, but they’re for you, you’re the niche, right? You’re the person that’s representing the niche. And so these are the things that you want. You want to make it specific to you.

You want to make it an experience for the people who are going to be reading this. So again, pictures you want to have those pictures, you want to have texts that describe them, and this is why you want it. Why you’re so excited about it, easy to buy. You want the button, things like that. So you want to make this page and experience if you’re using Instagram and then you can post images filled with the wishlist items and then each with a number that corresponds to the product name. And when you do the post you basically kind of outline what is like number one, here’s what I love about that, number two, et cetera, et cetera.

Since there are no links on the image, you want to make sure the product names are in the caption and things like that. And then include info for how they can purchase in the captions, tag the brand’s Instagram page, things like that. And you can put your affiliate link in your bio.

With YouTube, create videos, that kind of feature a rundown of each product on the wishlist, share why you want the product, why it’s a must-have this season. You can create a wishlist on YouTube and then include your video links, make pretty links. So if you’re talking about a product, make a pretty link for each product, put it up on the screen and make sure you put it down below each video.

Pinterest, you can do a holiday-specific Pinboard and do your Pinterest is a fricking wishlist. So make sure that you make it easy, make sure you make have your affiliate links on there that directly lead to the specific products where they can easily make a purchase.

Again, just like the gift guides. They need to be curated and specific. So if the affiliate programs not necessarily making, products clear, and maybe they’re not creating a wishlist, create your own and make sure that you’re using search terms. So they show up in searches. So use the search terms that your people are looking for. Fitness, travel tech, entrepreneur, things like that.

3) Create How-to Guides

The third thing you can do for holiday content is a how-to guide, Creating a LinkedIn post longer is better because it’s going to rank higher. That’s targeting your target audience, the things that they need during the holidays. You know, for example, how to plan an office holiday party, how to protect your cyber information during holiday vacations, things like that, how to buy the perfect gift for a picky husband.

It kind of turns into a little bit of a gift guide, but think about the how-to articles, how to decorate your Christmas tree. I’m trying to think of an example there, how to decorate your house for the holidays and for under $500 or something like that try to think of what are the things that people are wanting to know how to do.

How to make sure you don’t blow a fuse, your lights like I did last year, I learned that lesson the hard way we literally had to have an electrician come out and put in more. When you call the things where you plug stuff in, I can’t even think about the outlets we had to put in more outlets outside. Because I was blowing so many fuses and like I ruined literally hundreds of dollars worth of Christmas lights.

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So think about what do people want to know this time of year? How to put together the perfect Christmas day brunch, might be something that people are searching for. I know we host Christmas day. And so we do brunch and I’m kinda curious how that is. So maybe looking for that, “Hey, you want to get me on your to buy something from you?” That might be the way to do it.

4) Holiday Deals Page

This time of year deals, sales are synonymous with the holiday season and it’s likely that your merchants are going to be having special discounts. You know, that affiliates can promote, so start a holiday sale page. This is a general way to convey everything related to your holiday sales. And then when you keep promoting this page. It’s a single page that updates. One page with all the deals you recommend. And so you might send an email. Here’s a cool thing. It’s like a toolbox page. It has so many things on it.

And when somebody says, Hey, what podcast might you recommend? I say, everything that I recommend is at Mattmcwilliams.com/toolbox, right? Then you go there, you get the podcast mic, but you also get the other stuff that I have on that page. And maybe even buy another product that has nothing to do with podcasting. And you spent $300. So we do the same thing with this page. It’s one page. All of my recommended deals are at Mattmcwilliams.com/2021deal. Now just clarity. That’s actually not this kind of page. The 2021 deal is one specific thing, by the way. So what I was going to tell you about it.

We actually are doing a really special deal for Black Friday through Cyber Monday on our ultimate affiliate swipe file. And so this is a physical book, so you can keep it right on your desk, where you write. And it has taught like all of our best emails from an entire year. We’ve got 128 emails in there. I think it’s 190 something pages, almost 200 pages. And that was responsible for over $200,000 in affiliate commissions. So every type of affiliate email you can imagine we’ve got in this swipe file. So it’s a physical book and we’ll send it to you and we’re doing it at basically 66% off.

I mean, it’s like a crazy deal for the Black Friday ceremony. It’s available now. It’s actually going to be available through cyber Monday. So if you’re listening to it now I’ll put a link in the show notes, just go grab that, you don’t want to miss out on that and it’s live now.

Again, it’s at Mattmcwilliams.com/2021deal, but we didn’t do it this year. But in the past, we’ve done that where we put up a bunch of deals and they were all on one page and as deals expired, we pulled them off. So we would do that is we’d actually put a countdown timer on there for each deal when that deal expired. It just deleted that off the page. And then periodically we would go in and like move stuff around. So it didn’t look weird, but yeah. I mean, these kinds of things work and it’s a lot less work for you because you just keep pushing people to the same page.

And affiliates can basically post an overview of all the sales, featuring different discounts, different promotions, bundles, whatever. And it’ll have when the sale is active, how much they can save. And it just makes it really easy for you because you keep pushing people back to one page. And if you’re going on a Facebook live for example, or doing a podcast and you’ve got six deals, 10 deals you’re promoting, you have to remember six or 10 different links and people are confused. You just keep saying, “Hey, all of them are at, blah, blah, blah.com forward slash deals.” Right?

5) Product Reviews

Now I have talked about product reviews to death. I’m going to point you to a guide at Mattmcwilliams.com/reviewpost. You can get my ultimate guide. That’ll show you how to create a review post that ranks and convert. You need it to rank and you need it to convert. You can’t have one without the other. Oh yeah. I’m number one on Google and nobody ever clicks through to the affiliate product. Well, that sucks. Yay. I have half the people are clicking through to the affiliate product. Yeah. One out of two, because you’re on the ninth page of Google.

This is the time of year when searches go up because people are buying gifts for others and they don’t know about that topic as well. So they’re looking up and they’re looking up a product review on this thing and that thing, as I heard you once, but is it really that good? and product reviews can easily be tied in with gift guides during the holiday season.

So you can do this as a post. You can do this as a video on YouTube, for example, the product reviews tend to rank really high. They tend to be more in-depth. They show the product in action and you can do video reviews or written reviews, but consider doing those, go grab the guide.

It’s Mattmcwilliams.com/reviewpost. Learn how to do those. Okay. And then you just kind of holiday ties it. Is that a word holiday ties it? whatever you may get holiday-ish, S or other, something like that? So you talk about the gift side of that.

6) Giveaways

The sixth thing you can do to a great time year for contests, for giveaways. Do some sort of a giveaway. It’s a great way to create some buzz and grow your list. There are tons of ways to do this. We use a plugin called KingSumo. I don’t necessarily recommend it or not recommend it. It’s just what we use. I personally have never actually used it. Our team uses it.

And so do a giveaway where it’s like, Hey, it’s around that time of year when people are thinking about giving. So do a giveaway, put together a bundle and give away $200 worth of something. And when people come in to subscribe to get that bundle, they get an entry. Then it incentivizes them to share the contest, to get like everybody, they refer earns them like 10 entries or five entries or three or whatever, and it incentivizes them to share. So it goes viral.

We’ve done these in the past and added thousands of people to our list and great. Only four to 800 of them will stick around for more than a year. That’s four, 800 people for 200 bucks. I did one, I did my top five marketing books. I don’t know where they cost 15 bucks on Amazon costs me 70. I think it cost me like $92 to buy the books in ship them. I mean, I literally think we, on three of them, actually went with the hardcover just to be nice.

There were two that didn’t even have a hardcover, but we bought the most expensive version of the book. One of them. I actually had it signed because it was by a friend of mine and oh, I had to have them sign that’s right. We had to have them signed. And so they got two signed books and then the other three books. And then we shipped them off. I think it cost me like 92 bucks. I shipped them off, like the more expensive shipping I’m still only like $92. And I gained like five or 600 long-term subscribers. People who have made me well over $10,000 for 92 bucks, pretty good deal. So it was a great time of year to do that. It’s just kind of built into the season, right?

7) Create Content Around Deadlines

There are lots of deadlines this time of year. So create content around deadlines. I talked about this a little bit in the first episode of the series, but you can use social media posts to convey short messages and posts, use stories, use graphics on Facebook, and especially in like, Instagram stories and Facebook stories and Twitter where things are a little bit more time and you can create countdowns. You can do a post with only six hours left three hours left one hour left, 15 minutes left to get this right. Focus on those dates. Those important deadlines time is running out there are last-minute deals, sale ends today, last chance to save the flash sale, things like that.

So focus on those times on those days and hours, when things are a little bit on the kind of crazy side, this is the time of year where you can get away with that more than you can even, you can do it five, 10 times a week. And not, it doesn’t seem out of place if you did that in the middle of August, it would seem weird. So it’s that time of year to do that. So use it to your advantage.

So there you have it, seven ideas for content this holiday season go and do it. Create something, sell something, make some magic, and have some fun with it.

If you want more holiday tips, do three things for me, not for me for yourself:

1) Make sure you subscribe. So you don’t miss the next episode, I’m going to be talking about The Five Myths About Holiday Affiliate Promotions. It’s going to help you with the mindset side of things. And I think this is going to be a supercritical episode. I probably should have done it at first.

2) Check out past additions of the ultimate guide to holiday affiliate promotion. I’ve got a link in the show notes there, and we got to like 20 posts and podcast episodes there for you to learn how to do all of your holiday affiliate promotions from both sides as an affiliate and as an affiliate program and learn how to warm up your audience right now. We’re getting into the holiday promos here. Your audience needs to be warm. Go to Mattmcwilliams.com/warmlist, download that guide to warm up your audience right now. And we’ll put a link to that in the show notes as well.

3) As I said before, come back for the next episode, overcoming five myths about holiday affiliate promotions. I’ll see you then.