I wanted to put together some useful tips and strategies for generating more traffic and affiliate commissions during the busy holiday shopping season so you can maximize your affiliate marketing earnings. More people are shopping online this year than ever before, so it’s must to take advantage of that with your affiliate marketing. Here are some online marketing tips you can use to maximize your online marketing efforts this holiday shopping season:

1. Post About Hot Gift Items - posting about the hottest holiday gift items is a great way to build your site or blog with content people are actually searching for during the holidays, ex. “10 hottest gift ideas for 2016? or “What are the top gadget gifts for 2016?” Do your research and depending on your niche there will be a set of hot products that are in-demand this holiday season. Then, create pages on your site or blog with good content write-ups about these hot products and use “lists” as well because they tend to be read and shared, such as: Top 11 Tech Gadget Gifts for 2016, 6 Must-have Corporate Gifts Ideas to Impress Your Clients, 8 Innovative Gifts for Your Children. Titles like that can really pull in the traffic and are more likely to be commented on, liked and shared. Remember, the more content you post the more search rankings you can garner with each page of your site, so post a lot of pages and fill them with great, keyword-rich content and titles to maximize your SEO benefits. Gear your December promotions towards holiday savings, coupons, and great shopping deals, which a lot of people will be searching those keywords for various merchants, so make sure to weave that content into your postings and pages. Great deals for the holidays that can be promoted all month long every day. Finally, you have your after-Christmas sales that can promoted from every merchant you affiliate with starting the day after Christmas.

Tip: Keep an eye on Google Trends to see what people are searching for currently.

2. Ask for Special Coupons or Promos - asking your affiliate managers and advertisers for special deals, coupon promotions, or vanity coupon codes (coupon code word matching your site) are great ways to leverage your site’s branding to market exclusive deals to your traffic, subscribers, fans, and followers. Not all advertisers will be able to provide this because they can’t do it for everyone or may not at all due to lack of resources, but you can get lucky with a great promotion sometimes and really kill it. Make sure to get the current month’s deals from the advertisers you are promoting so the offers in the posts you write will be compelling and convert higher with your visitors. Make sure to keep your deals current and timely, otherwise visitors will hit brick walls when trying shop using the codes, which isn’t ideal at all. Just keep posting those great deals as you get them from your affiliate advertisers and then share the posts/pages on Facebook and Twitter. Also, make sure you are emailing your database weekly with all the latest and greatest promotions.

3. Ramp-Up Your Social Networking - Make sure you are adding Facebook friends, Facebook fans to your Facebook Page from your site traffic, and Twitter followers on a constant basis so you have more people to expose your offers, promotions, and pages to during the holidays. However, don’t crush people with too many offers in a short span or they may get turned off from your frequency. Don’t personally recommend something you haven’t tried yourself, however you can make product suggestions and promote really good deals and coupons from merchants you are affiliated with. If you always have fresh content and promotions your audience will really appreciate that and you will be building website branding with your traffic which is good for repeat traffic. Check out Facebook Boosted Posts which allow you to advertise your fan page wall posts to a larger amount of your fans and their friends (or to your targeted demographic), it really spurs engagement and clicks! One of my $200 boosted posts got 3000 likes and a ton of comments, so the exposure can be huge. Facebook lets you boost a post from $10 on up depending on how many fans you have. Also, Facebook allows you to promote a post on your personal profile, which can get you some extra exposure for cheap on Facebook.

Tip: Ask your Advertisers if they would like to sponsor one of your boosted posts on Facebook. They would get a good amount of targeted exposure and make sure to track the results with subid tracking, so they know if it worked. You can mark it up a little and make some money that way plus your usual commission.

4. Post Your Butt Off - Posting tons of original articles to your site or blog, then sharing it all socially, are the best ways to ramp up your traffic in advance of the holidays. Adding frequent posts of fresh content to your site can really expand the number of pages you have indexed in Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Bing which increases the chances your site will rank under a larger variety of search phrases and bring in more free traffic to your site. Once you make a new post on your site you can immediately share the title and page url on Facebook, Twitter, and your fan page. Make sure to add something like, “Isn’t this a wonderful deal?” to your postings to increase interaction and response especially on Facebook. Make sure to use hashtags on Twitter posts. Your goal is to get as make Likes, Comments, and Shares on Facebook as you possibly can to gain the most exposure and traffic. Post other versions of your articles and posts to 3rd party article directories, like ezinearticles.com, with rewrites of your articles and titles to maximize your organic rankings. I recommend 1-10 posts a day to your site to increase your frequency and page count. But you can never post too much to your site as long as it’s all unique content. Over time, you can build your page count into the thousands of pages which will bring your site more free “organic” search traffic. Make sure you have the Sharethis.com social buttons at the top of each post and your Facebook fan page widget at the top of the right column of your site or blog. Check out aweber.com to implement a pop-up to gain the visitor’s name and email in exchange for your helpful guide or newsletter subscription. This can really maximize the number of people you can remarket to via email and send back to your site, fan page or directly to the advertiser's site from the links in the newsletter.

Tip: If you are using a blogging platform like WordPress to power your site, make sure to use "tags" on all your posts which helps to multiple your overall page count and can increase traffic in some instances.

5. Ask for Higher Commissions - asking your affiliate advertisers for better commission rates during the holidays is a great way to ensure you will maximize your earnings. Some advertisers may only do this if you have produced a good amount of sales volume in the past, but it never hurts to ask…they can only say no. Most advertisers have some room to increase affiliate commissions so you need to ask for a higher payout whenever possible. If they say no or are rude, tell them you will go and promote their competitor, which will change their attitude quickly. You can also offer paid placements on your website, blog, newsletter, or social networks. If you have a decent amount of traffic, fans and followers, there are advertisers that will pay an additional paid placement fee in addition to your affiliate commissions, so that’s a great reason to try to expand your audience steadily over time and build the relationship with your advertisers. Here is a list of the types of paid placements you can potentially charge for:

Solo email blast to an opt-in list
Homepage banner placement in the header or side bar
Newsletter include of a banner
Featured merchant on a main category page
Boosted post on Facebook
Boosted post on Twitter

All of these types of paid placements will have a fee associated with it based on how big the potential exposure is. However, if you are too small traffic or audience-wise they may not even consider it.

6. Email Your List - if you maintain a database of email addresses as you should, make sure you are messaging your database at least weekly with the newest offers from your affiliate advertisers and your latest content posts. Make sure you are growing your list with email opt-in plug-ins on your site like aweber.com. Take growing your email list seriously as it will pay dividends the larger a list it is. You can use services like icontact, constantcontact, or mailchimp to blast your email list. Or just use aweber.com to handle it all. Make the investment in Dreamveaver to edit your HTML, and have a nice HTML newsletter designed which you can use as a template for all your future blasts. This time of year you can email your database daily if you have new stuff to share every day. Emailing is still the #1 revenue producer for merchants in digital marketing.

7. Run Sweepstakes and Contests - running sweepstakes and contests on your website during the holiday time-frame is a great idea because you will gain more fans, emails, wall postings, and user data from your existing website traffic. Using a platform like Woobox.com or Raffelcopter is a great way to inexpensively run an exciting sweepstakes or contest on your site, fan page, email list, and on Twitter. If you can get your affiliate advertisers to supply the prizes even better! You can do anything from giving away a $100 gift card to a multi-prize, mega-contest! This is the best ways to really maximize your traffic, fans, and followers. It’s my #1 recommendation to basically everyone, so make sure to implement a sweepstakes or contest during the busy holiday shopping season where your traffic will be up. Let me know if you need any ideas about how to run your sweepstakes promotion effectively!

8. Turn on Paid Search - Pay-per-click search is still the #1 way to obtain targeted traffic, so why not turn on some traffic to your site for the holidays! The only issue is keeping the cost in check. Check out BingAds for less expensive clicks under your popular keyword phrases. They are running a free $100 in clicks promotion when you spend $25 right now. One great technique is to purchase keywords based on a merchant’s name with coupon code attached to it. Only certain companies even allow this and it can get quite competitive, but if you can drop your cookie on those types of searches it should have a nice profit level, since those searchers are likely in the buying process. But check with your advertisers before starting. Similarly you can target more general keyword phrases like “auto parts coupon codes” (and even more product-specific searches with coupon code) and then link to a page of deals and coupons from advertisers selling auto parts. You could test that out to 100′s search phrases and see which convert and had a return on investment. The ones that do you let run and the ones that don't you turn off or down. There are many angles to pursue with paid search, however since there is cost associated you have to tread extremely lightly with your keyword bids otherwise you will lose money and have nothing to show for it but some clicks. It's also really important to prominently advertise your Facebook page, twitter account, and email list sign-up on your site if you are paying to get traffic there.

9. Advertise for Fans on Facebook - The beautiful thing about Facebook advertising is the targeting! You can really drill down to the types of people you want to see your ads and gain just those people as fan to your company/website page. For instance you can target based on: age, location, sex, education, and “likes and interests” which ensures you will gain fans that are into the kinds of things that pertain to your niche or products/services you promote. There is a cost associated with this type of advertising, so you have to attempt to measure the amount of revenue your new fans are generating for you. If you can estimate your average per fan revenue you can determine how much you can afford to pay for fans and proceed to advertise each month for new fans. Then, you can do Boosted Posts to get them clicking and buying from the great deals you are sharing on your site! There’s your social media-based affiliate formula in a nutshell.

10. Build Your LinkedIn - LinkedIn is really coming on as a great social network to spend time on. I’ve been using it for years, but only recently have they made it more interactive and improved the usability so people will even spend time there. I absolutely love the new functionality. You can even share your affiliate deals on LinkedIn and your connections will see it. You can use it just like Facebook now. You can start a group about any niche or industry and people will just join it, which is cool. You can really build up your connections by doing a “mass friend invite” from your email contacts. LinkedIn has fabulous tools for inviting everyone you know to get connected to you on LinkedIn. Once you have a decent amount of connections you can use LinkedIn to share your postings from your site, including your affiliate deals. In my opinion, LinkedIn is a valuable place to spend those precious online marketing hours, I would suggest an hour or so per day to really work LinkedIn and get some value out of it. Also, you never know who you can meet on LinkedIn professionally via the groups you may join, so always keep your eyes open and be proactive! I would recommend keeping the posting of affiliate deals to a minimum on LinkedIn though because people are there for professional reasons and not looking for deals, but 1 here and there is ok.

11. Launch a Free Cash-back Shopping Mall Portal - people love shopping with cash back involved. There is a 100% free tool that will build you an auto-updating, cash-back shopping mall that you can link to right from your website, i.e. "Cash-back Shopping Mall." You can funnel your visitors and audience to your cash-back portal and earn a % of any transactions they do. Here is an article about how it works. You can also just go onto your cash-back portal and share deals to Facebook or Twitter. People will join the site to get their cash-back when shopping, so it will create residual revenue for you as the site owner on all their future purchases. The sites also include coupon code deals for all the best merchants, so they will get a great deal and cash-back. Pretty awesome stuff!