Comments on: Positioning Your Blog for a Profitable Christmas

By: Virtual Christmas Elf

Virtual Christmas Elf — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 22:52:28 +0000

Hey everyone,

Theres a blog out there thats trying to keep alive the Holiday happiness and keeping it affordable!

http://thevirtualchristmaself.blogspot.com/

Happy Holidays!

By: Dr. BLT

Dr. BLT — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 06:40:23 +0000

I had a profitable Christmas last year when I discovered this song hit the top 30 mp3 downloads on the internet, landing at #21:

Black Santa
Dr. BLT
words and music by Dr. BLT (c) 2005, 2006
http://www.drblt.net/music/BLKSanta.mp3

This year, I’m that Black Santa will become a seasonal classic, and I’m hoping to score with this one:

You’re Not the Kind of Ho (That Santa Had in Mind)
Dr. BLT
words and music by Dr. BLT (c) 2006
http://www.drblt.net/music/hosong.mp3

By: Christmas Breaks

Christmas Breaks — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 18:58:16 +0000

This information was very useful indeed, i have been coming to this for a while now and the articles are very intereting even thou i do not do any of this work just good to read.

By: Preparing For The Shopping Season - OptiNiche: WordPress Optimization Blog

Preparing For The Shopping Season - OptiNiche: WordPress Optimization Blog — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 17:10:15 +0000

[...] Darren Rowse has stolen the words right out of my mouth by writing “Positioning Your Blog For a Profitable Christmas“. [...]

By: OptiNiche: WordPress Optimization Blog

OptiNiche: WordPress Optimization Blog — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 17:10:13 +0000

Preparing For The Shopping Season

The holiday season is quickly approaching, now is a wise time to start getting your blog and websites ready for the increased surge of online shoppers.

…

By: Darren Rowse

Darren Rowse — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 21:52:25 +0000

Search Engine Optimization – or working on getting your site ranked as highly as possible in Search Engines

By: gerkhis

gerkhis — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 21:35:19 +0000

Hi Darren,

Could you tell me what is “SEO”?

thanks,
gerkhis

By: Matt

Matt — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 21:06:26 +0000

I decided to throw a minimall up on top of the blog, underneath the blog name banner and see what it does. Maybe I’ll have another 2 digit month! (another $10!!! WOOHOO!)

By: Dee

Dee — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 14:03:29 +0000

Since I have a kindergartner at home I’ve been surfing for the new christmas toys. She’s been helping me. :) So I went into my chitika minimall and added some new item that she likes. My blog subscribers are mostly young mothers, so I hope something good will come of it.

By: Matt

Matt — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 13:59:12 +0000

I thought I’d put the minimalls into my blog, but since it is on blogger.com, it won’t accept java script inside the posts, which would be the best place for a minimall on a product specific blog. Soooo…. I guess it’s just me, AdSense, some other affilliate programs, and a prayer, this holiday season! LOL

By: Mariano

Mariano — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 13:52:51 +0000

Is it a good strategy to review adsense configuration in such days? I mean, if your new approach doesn’t work for any reason, you’ll be losing more money and you’ll miss a great chance…In fact, I wonder how much time would have to pass to know if adsense changes are worth?

By: Brandon

Brandon — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 13:48:18 +0000

Great Advice.

i’ve also started a few projects on my own, and doing some of the things you mentioned in preparation for Christmas.

After all, who doesnt want a fat juicy turkey for Christmas?

By: x74

x74 — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 11:34:35 +0000

> eMiniMalls – I’ll write about this later in the week – but I’m
> finding that the best positions so far similar positions to
> clever Adsense positioning and design.

With regards to integration– I found that I have the best luck integrating eMiniMalls right into a post relating to the product displayed. I’ve seen (fairly consistently) that this increases my eMiniMall CTR.

To make this integration easier, I developed a plugin that lets you put an eMiniMall right into your post, using WordPress’ Quicktags Toolbar. The plugin lets you insert an eMiniMall into your post by clicking a button.

Visit this post for more information on my eMiniMall Plugin for WordPress.

By: Adam Christie

Adam Christie — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 09:43:09 +0000

This will be my first Christmas as a blogger. My outdoors blog is an off-shoot of my outdoors gear store and as such I’m going to be attempting to write a blog piece about each product I sell in order to freshen up the link to that item in search engines, perhaps gain an extra set of search engine results for each product, and hopefully direct extra traffic to it.

In the past, with just the store, my increase in traffic has always been people searching for individual products rather than any Christmas or Gift related pages I had posted.

Most of my readers come directly from Google anyway, though i do have some regular subscribers and I’ll have to be careful not to offend them by constant product plugging. I’ll need to include a bit of industry news in between each product post I think.

By: Andy Merrett

Andy Merrett — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 08:44:11 +0000

Yes, I’m just getting into “Christmas mode” and will be adding stuff to my product blogs in preparation. Thanks for the kick though, I need to get it sorted in the next week or two.

I’ll be writing or adapting some articles to make them seasonal – ie “What’s the best first keyboard / piano / synth to buy [relative] at Christmas?” – and looking around to see if the major manufacturers will be doing any special deals.

On a less product-related note, my family relationships blog is a prime one to add seasonal articles, given how stressful Christmas often is. Even on this blog, I find that AdSense performs fairly well.

Just on a definition note, I thought ‘deep linking’ meant linking to specific products within an affiliate program (ie Amazon) rather than just the home page. Not that it matters much, but you use the term to mean ‘embedding the links in your own page’.

However it’s defined, the most effective method, as you say, must be linking to specific products from within specific relevant articles.

By: Darren Rowse

Darren Rowse — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 07:39:47 +0000

Jacob you’re right. Affiliate programs might pay more – depending what they are for.

Here’s my experience so far though:

Amazon affiliateships are earning me less than 10% of what the eMiniMalls are earning me and they have not decreased since I started adding the MiniMalls to my sites.

In my mind – the MiniMalls are much better performing than any affiliate program I’ve ever used.

By: Dave

Dave — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 07:39:20 +0000

Christmas creates a great surge towards my sites for an altogether different reason than seasonal purchasing – its all those families getting a new computer and an internet connection – I tend to get an increase in visitors between Christmas Day and New Years Day.

I’m going to have a think about how I can associate some of my sites with a Christmas theme.

By: World Cup Corner

World Cup Corner — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 07:34:49 +0000

Thanks Darren, for reminding us on Christmas. Like you said, December is closer than we think.

By: Danger Stevens

Danger Stevens — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 06:24:17 +0000

Last I checked MyBlogLog didn’t have the right javascript to capture Adsense clicks, but that was a couple months ago.

By: Jacob

Jacob — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 03:15:38 +0000

I’m not so sure that Chitika eMiniMalls are (almost) the perfect type of ad for the Christmas rush. While in the two days that I’ve tested them on one site, they’ve performed admirably, there’s no indication of whether those clicks have become sales for the merchants. If they are not, the eMiniMalls are monetizing what normal affiliate programs would not monetize, as no sale results. But if a sale results, one would likely be better off with their own affiliate link to that merchant or product.

eMiniMalls would be infinitely more profitable if they integrated Amazon Associate, Commission Junction, and other affiliate IDs.

Adsense has third party trackers, (which I’ve yet to test), that say which ads are being clicked. An eMiniMall tracker would be remarkably helpful if it could identify which products are showing up and which are being clicked. That way, a person could also link directly to that product through an affiliate merchant. I wonder, though, if MyBlogLog currently catches those clicks out? Can someone confirm?