Practical guide to affiliation: Maximize your income during Black Friday

In 2022, online product purchases reached 43% of total Black Friday purchases, with significant growth in the Toys, High-tech, Major Appliances and Beauty categories(source).

There's no denying that Black Friday is the major sales event of the year, an undisputed benchmark among sales highlights. So how can you maximize your sales when you're doing affiliate marketing online, and take full advantage of this event? What are the essential preparations you need to make for your website and its various channels? How can you find attractive offers via Google or Amazon? In this article, we'll give you some tips on how to optimize your affiliate marketing strategy. To make the most of Black Friday, you need to plan your affiliate content production carefully. Whether it's about your media, your offers or audience engagement, your affiliate strategy needs to be carefully prepared in advance.

Sourcing online offers for affiliate marketing during Black Friday

Finding the best Black Friday deals on the web is crucial to your success as an affiliate. So how can you avoid missing out? As is often the case, the solution lies upstream, in preparation.

Affiliate marketing platforms will send you the best offers in advance, so it's up to you to sort through the different promotions and brands to highlight those with the most potential to your audience.

💡Customer expectations are very high for this event, so make sure you don't offer discounts that are too low. Depending on product categories, percentages vary; while 5% may seem significant for a high-end smartphone, 20% on certain dematerialized products may seem derisory.

First of all, don't delay: find the websites and brands that interest you. Then familiarize yourself with fast affiliate link generation. Deep link generators are invaluable tools; learn how to use them to save time. Product catalogs can also be very useful. Once again, it's essential to know where to find them, transform them and extract the relevant links. Finally, to avoid any mistakes, Affilizz lets you generate your affiliate links in just a few clicks.

With some brands, it's also possible to get dedicated promo codes on certain products. These codes will only work with your affiliate links. In exchange for targeted communication, such as specific product or brand promotion, you can benefit from these exclusive promotions and share them with your community.

Finally, if you've already built up a sizeable audience on your website or social networks, you can consider negotiating dedicated budgets with brands (see our article on building an affiliation audience mattress). A package of promotions could include, for example, exclusive adverts on your website, publications for the products and marketing offers your partner chooses, and promotion of these offers to your audience on your various channels.

On the day itself, in the hustle and bustle of the event, don't hesitate to keep an eye on the competition. If you have a loyal audience with whom you often exchange views on certain topics, an offer spotted on a generalist medium may work better for you, as it targets more suitable customers. So don't shy away from picking up offers seen elsewhere and generating your own affiliate links for them.

Finally, searching for offers can be time-consuming, but it can also pay off. If you're not afraid to rummage through merchants' product category pages, you'll discover nuggets no one has noticed before.

Logistics preparation as an affiliate

In theory, Black Friday lasts just one day. In practice, it's preceded by a week of Black Friday starting on Monday, followed by Cyber Monday. So you need to be prepared for an eight-day event. During this period, there are several strategies available to you, depending on your type of media and your human resources.

For influencers, it's essential to multiply the publications for each offer unearthed, as social networks don't always make it easy to share links. Present the product, indicate the percentage discount and the final price offered, then invite your followers to click on your affiliate link , remembering its location (video description, in Instagram story, in your bio...).

Communicating with your community is relatively simple. Let your audience know that you'll be offering exceptional deals, and arrange a date for the big day so they don't miss out.

For websites, on the other hand, the strategy is much more laborious. You need to show the various search engines, and above all Google, that you're relevant to the keywords of good deals and Black Friday, in order to generate traffic on the day. To achieve this, a few months before the event, publish articles on good deals that mention Black Friday (while avoiding keyword stuffing).

Many sites also publish articles on the event itself, its origins, its figures, as in this example on the Les Numériques site. In the week leading up to Black Friday, numerous dedicated pages appear on websites preparing to communicate during the week. These pages can be a network of thematic pages, always linking to a main page, or to a single, highly detailed page.

During the event, it's essential to continue publishing content on a regular basis. There are several possible strategies:

• Frequently update product offers on a dedicated page, where some appear while others are no longer valid.
• Offer special deals on individual products.
• Organize offers by product category (such as video games, TVs, smartphones), on thematic pages.

💡Not all readers consume content in the same way. Some prefer themed pages, others have keyword-based alerts in your RSS feed, while others want to see everything. These strategies complement each other, so don't hesitate to create links to a main page from single-product coupons or theme pages.

Finally, depending on the immediate results of your actions, don't hesitate to change the title of certain articles, change the main image or even publish links to this page several times from social networks, focusing your communication on the most recent offer you're relaying.

What are the best times and days to publish your Black Friday-related affiliate content?

How can you organize your schedule as an affiliate during Black Friday? Here are the essential times:

• On Thursday evening, the eve of Black Friday, remind people of the event and provide affiliate links to the pages of the main brands, to the categories you consider most important.
• Friday before 8am: you need to be on deck ideally by 7am at the latest. Usually, offers come out during the night, starting as early as midnight for the first ones.
• Friday from 8am to 11am: this is the peak, when you need to be the most productive. It's complicated, because you have to publish content and keep an eye on new offers at the same time.
• Friday after 7pm: it's tempting to let our guard down, but there's a new peak here, linked to the practice of dual-screening at home: one eye on the TV, the other on the smartphone, on the lookout for the best deals.
• The weekend: bring up the best offers that are still current, and ideally add the new ones. Brands always have a few cartridges in reserve for this huge weekend.
• The following Monday to Thursday: it's Cyber Week. There will be a little less activity, but still more than the rest of the year. It's essential to be present every day, to check which offers to bring up, and which to remove, because there's no stock left.

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