Every single year, online retailers experience a surge of traffic in the months leading up to Christmas. Many businesses can make up to 50% of their annual profit in the last three months of the year, making the aspects of marketing, advertising and competition all that much more important. For those seeking to get in on the action through search engine optimization and affiliate marketing, the time to start is never too soon. Let’s outline the main benefits and reasons you should be involved in these endeavors – and why you must start now if you want to be successful.

Market Research

The most important part of seizing upon opportunities such as these is to know your market, niche and the popular products within it. Finding what is currently trending in terms of purchases can be done through a variety of sites, such as Amazon.com. Amazon also offers a great affiliate marketing program and is considered one of the best overall search engine optimization add-ons for those seeking to capitalize on the Christmas spirit. Make sure you have affiliated with Amazon and also, investigate other affiliate programs that cater to the items related to your niche. Opening every door leads you to greater opportunities.

Keyword Investigation

Once you have compared the sales trends of the items in which you are interested, it then becomes important to focus upon how you will attract people to your website or affiliate page. The best way to do this is to find keywords and search terms that are not heavily competitive. For example, Store A wants to sell green Converse high-top sneakers. A generic search for ‘Converse sneakers’ may yield 100,000,000 search results, whereas ‘Green hightop Converse sneakers’ may only yield a 1,000,000 results. Add in the term ‘2012’ and the search result number drops to 500,000. The more targeted your search query, the better chance you have of an interested buyer finding your page.

Keep An Eye on Your Traffic

Most successful entrepreneurs will notice an increase in their sales around the holidays, but this is not the only indicator to which you need to pay attention. There could be tons of valuable traffic finding its way to your website, but the people in question may not be buying anything. If you notice rapid increases in traffic but no increase in sales, you will want to reconsider your approach – as well as determine where the extra traffic originated. Pingler’s Link Analyzer tool allows you to determine and analyze all incoming and outgoing links to your site, making it easier to see from where traffic is being directed and to where it is going from links currently placed on your site.

Stay Organized

Keeping track of sales, clicks and traffic makes it easier for you to determine which actions are working and which ones are not. You will also be able to plot and determine expected profits, giving you additional motivation to keep up the good work. There are free and paid services available that help you organize your web and sales data into easy-to-read formats; these should be considered by any entrepreneur seeking to cash in on this holiday season’s “money bomb”.