3 Tasks to Get Your Affiliate Sites Ready for Holiday Shopping
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are getting closer. It is already a record year for ecommerce with so many people turning to ecommerce to provide for them during the pandemic.
It is likely that this Holiday Shopping season will break records again for online sales… are your sites ready?
Here are the critical few things you should be doing to ensure your site is ready to make the most of the busy shopping season!
FIRST – Is Your Site Ready for More Traffic?
There are 3 steps we use to make sure a site is ready to handle an increase in traffic. This is not an exhaustive list and if your site has already handled spikes in traffic with no issues then you can skip this step.
Here are the 3 things our team led by Ahmed executes…
- Speed up the site
- Make sure the host is ready
- Use a CDN
The plan outlined below has been able to handle over 100,000 visits/day.
One – Make sure there are no issues with site speed/size which will make handling the traffic harder.
You can check the site’s speed with Google PageSpeed Insights.
If site speed isn’t where you want it then look to make sure some simple improvements are in place like a Cache plugin being enabled. This is the free one we use (enable page cache and adjust browser cache settings if needed). Finally, if that doesn’t bring the site speed down then check out some premium tools like a Site Speed Accelerator.
Two – Make sure the host can handle it.
If you haven’t yet had the site experience a sizeable traffic influx then make sure you are setup on a hosting plan that can handle it.
Our go-to hosting solutions when we need to handle some scale is WPX. Their plans are all cloud-based and can provide scalability if you underestimate the traffic.
Another hosting solution we use a lot is the SiteGround Cloud Plan due to it being very customizable.
Third – Enable a CDN for the site
WPEngine and WPX both have a built in CDN and are used if the site is hosted there.
If there is no built-in CDN with the hosting plan (such as siteground cloud hosting plan) we use Cloudflare free or paid plan.
Fortunately for me, Ahmed, who runs LightningRank, handles all the hosting needs for the various sites.
SECOND – Make Sure Your Affiliate Links Are Not Broken
This step can be the easiest and result in some significant gains.
What people don’t know is that many of their affiliate links on their site are either broken or linking to an out of stock product.
Fixing these issues is one click away with the Done For You service from SiteBuddy.io
Here is how to find and fix these yourself…
- Signup for a free account at SiteBuddy.io
- Enter your website to have it scan for ALL amazon affiliate links
- See a report showing all links that should be fixed
- Fix the issues yourself or have the team at SiteBuddy fix them for you
Get Your Free Scan at SiteBuddy.io
Example of Improvement Achieved – 30%+ Of Products Out of Stock and 7%+ Missing Tags!
- URL – hidden
- Affiliate Disclaimer – No Issues
- Affiliate Links – 592 Missing Tags
- Products – 285 Out of Stock and 84 Deleted
THIRD – Are Your Top Pages Optimized?
Often some of our top pages can be neglected.
“Best (insert product name) 2018”
I would lie if I said that title didn’t exist on some of my sites right now.
If it is a page that doesn’t get much Google love then no big deal but if it is one of your main pages then you are leaving money on the table!
If you have a page that is outdated as obviously as the wrong year in the title or are referencing some outdated information it can kill peoples trust in your article and therefore your recommendations/conversions.
Review all pages that are getting meaningful traffic (your top x # of posts an
- Here is a great guide on how to update your content – https://authoritywebsiteincome.com/the-value-of-content-upgrades/
- If you need help the team at ContentRefined can help upgrade your content using advanced content marketing tools like Market Muse.
I hope these 3 quick tips will have your site ready to crush Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales! Good luck and enjoy.
