The leaves are falling and so are the prices of your favorite items. Black Friday is back and it’s going to be as exciting and chaotic as ever. Are you ready to make some profits? Here’s our guide to cashing in on Black Friday chaos!   

Black Friday is just around the corner and it’s time to get prepared. You can follow our step-by-step guide to get ready for the biggest sale season of the year.

Plan Ahead

To maximise your earnings for Black Friday, it is important to prepare early. Don’t worry, you haven’t missed out yet. Sales are on for the whole month, and you can keep running into December!  

When it comes to doing research, take a look at what promotions you can offer and get to know them. Get your flows and creatives lined up and run some preliminary tests. You can do this by using ‘pre-season offers’, playing on the emotion of “increased demand for goods or services in your vertical.

Study consumer behaviour

Alongside planning, it’s important to analyze how consumers behave during sale seasons. What is most relevant to them this year and what was relevant in previous years? Timely analysis of your target audience’s behavior in previous years, as well as understanding current trends, will help you develop the best strategy for promoting your offers. 

Pay attention to past metrics. Analyze click-through rates and visitor behavior on targeted sites. Find your overall conversion rate for last year’s selling season and use it as a starting point to improve your professional effectiveness. Also, see what mistakes you can correct and how you can reduce your bounce rate and increase demand and conversions. 

It’s also important to consider all the external factors of the GEO you are going to promote your offers in. What has changed in the country’s economy, politics and regulations since last year? What is the situation with current restrictions? What is the purchasing power of the audience in this region? 

All these factors will help you to adequately assess the market and offer your audience exactly what they want and what they are capable of buying on Black Friday.

Improve landing pages

Based on your analysis and planning, you will be ready to take the next steps to improving your creatives. Here are some things to look out for when assessing your landing pages: 

• What’s superfluous and what’s missing.
• How user-friendly is the site? 
• What are the possible payment types and how do visitors achieve the targeted action? 
• How clear is the offer demonstrated? 
• Does the page have a clear USP (Unique Selling Point), consumer feedback, screenshots from social networks, live photos of products or happy users of your offer etv.  
• Do your creatives comply with the rules of the advertising policy of the site where you are going to receive traffic. 
• What needs to be added or removed so that your creatives can be safely perceived by artificial intelligence algorithms. You can check your advertising images with Google Visual AI service.
• Lastly, try using bold font to highlight promotional offers. Use the colors and national preferences of the GEO on which you will be testing and launching the offer.

Focus on the most effective traffic channels

During the selling season, it’s best to use proven traffic channels that you feel comfortable with. Tests are great, but when there’s a special season to capitalise on it’s best to play to your strengths. 

Know how to set up your Facebook ads in a cool way? Great! Remember, you should start promoting offers now to get people as prepared as possible to shop during the main purchasing period.

Here are some ideas to get you started: 

• Make a mailing list, showing your target audience what promotions and discounts you are willing to offer them on Black Friday. 
• Prepare articles, videos, reviews, testimonials and other materials. 
• Write about how limited the offer is and how important it is to get what you want. 

With verified traffic sources, you’ll have an easier time collecting and analyzing pre-launch results. This will also require a budget, but it will more than pay for itself if you do it right. 

Remember, users will respond better to creatives that are familiar. When they see offers a second time they will usually have more confidence. Don’t forget to analyze statistics, in time to optimize ad settings, choose the audience that responded positively to the first views of the offer.

Highlight your top offers and promotions

Based on all of the above, you understand that it will be a little difficult for a complete novice to break into the hot season without the necessary skills, analysis, and experience. However, Black Friday is also an affiliate goldmine.  

If you are a beginner, it is extremely important to start working only with the simplest and most understandable offers from your partner network. Choose simple cooperation and payment schemes. Make an analysis of consumer trends in advance and find the most relevant offers for the season. Maybe their profit will be a bit lower than that of newer and more complex offers, but the risks will also be minimized. It’s also a good idea to request a few creatives at once.

Constantly monitor your stats. During the selling season, affiliates literally turn into sleepwalkers to improve their chances of maximizing their earnings. You’ll have to put in the effort, accumulate the experience and knowledge that will help you improve your professional skills. Black Friday is a great learning curve for newbies.

The Bottom Line

For Black Friday and the sale season, you need to prepare in advance. Time is running out, so if you haven’t already started planning and analyzing, now is the time. 

Analyze the hottest trends of the year. Do an analysis of the popularity of the offers in your vertical. Prepare as much as possible for the tests, check all the creatives and allocate an up-to-date budget for launching ads. Inform your target audience about all the possible discounts in advance, giving them the opportunity to sign up and buy.

It is important to choose an affiliate network with which you will be confident in the relevance of the offers and creatives, as well as in the fact that all your earned commission will be credited to your account.