All about Black Friday

We have all heard about Black Friday and the craziness that comes with it, but what is Black Friday? Where did it come from? Why is it named “Black Friday”? How can I make money from Black Friday? When does it start? These are some of the things we will talk about in this article. 

Black Friday occurs during the day after the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States, it’s usually the busiest and most profitable shopping day of the year for retailers as it’s the unofficial kickoff of the holiday season. On this day major retailers offer deep discounts that are only available for that day leading to a huge boost in the demand for the best deals available. 

The term “Black Friday” was first coined by police officers in the city of Philadelphia, referring to the traffic chaos that resulted from when large numbers of people flocked to the city to begin their holiday shopping. Throughout the years the phrase “Black Friday” began to be described in other ways, such as businesses turning a profit for the year starting with the biggest shopping day in the US, thus going from “red” (working at a loss) to “black” (earning profit). 

When does Black Friday 2022 start? Getting ready for the deals by planning early

This year Black Friday will happen on the 25th of November, it might seem a little far away but it’s never too late to prepare for such an important and popular sales event. Being well prepared for Black Friday takes time, and a well thought out plan will significantly pay off in the long run. 

One way of driving your brand forward regarding Black Friday is by building awareness in the weeks leading up to November 25th, whether you are an ecommerce platform, an online business, content creator, affiliate network, major retailer or even a small business. Retargeting and remarketing emails designed to drive attention to your Black Friday offers are a surefire way of bringing awareness and driving sign-ups on your websites. Another way of gaining costumers attention is by offering little teasers of upcoming offers you might have in stock, when you do this, you must keep in mind to always display the deal details and highlight the discount you are offering. 

Here's a quick example of a teaser promo by Walmart:

When getting ready for an event as big as Black Friday it is very important you make sure that your website is able to handle all the incoming visitor traffic that comes with the start of holiday shopping season. One way of ensuring that is to put backup servers in place that can handle traffic surges without decreasing the user experience. Making sure you have a high-performing website is crucial to avoid a massive loss of revenue. 

It’s also essential to review and refresh the most relevant pages on your website, these include your homepage, any product category pages, the individual product page and any pages that might have been created specifically for Black Friday promotions. Every element from these pages needs to be on point so there are no setbacks when it comes to increasing interest in your pages, businesses should develop engaging and enticing content and create product pages that attract people to visit online stores.

In the last few years there has been a surge in the importance of social media promotion regarding Black Friday, this means that keeping your social media platforms up to date and using them to either sell directly from those platforms or just promoting the sales redirecting to your website’s content is vital to successfully navigate the Black Friday storm. In this instance having a tool such as our Little Squirrel on your side might be a helpful solution.

How can I make money from Black Friday?

Black Friday is a golden opportunity for businesses to earn a significant profit, to accomplish this there are some proven paths to follow that can guarantee those profits. 

One of the best ways to make money from Black Friday is through affiliate partners, this is a simple and efficient process, you register on an affiliate marketing program (such as Amazon, Awin or Impact), start promoting the products you wish to display on your online content and get a percentage of the sales made through your website. The key here is to find the right products to promote and that will result in the most significant profits, if you hit on the products that are more in vogue your chances to create a hefty income will grow exponentially. 

This is a perfect fit for Squirrel as it helps you promote the products you intend to use on your platforms and enables you to partner with the most well-known affiliate partners in the world, allowing you to use your affiliate network is one of Squirrel’s biggest advantages. 

Another proven way of turning a profit with Black Friday is the use of coupons, research shows that 19% of shoppers always use coupons when shopping, which means that coupons are a great way of attracting more customers to your store during this Black Friday and earn money.

Black Friday is usually the start point of the holiday shopping spree and with that in mind you can start working on marketing campaigns relating to the Christmas season, 43% of people start their holiday shopping in October with Black Friday being the pinnacle of the shopping season. Whether being a content creator and elaborating your own Christmas products or promoting gift ideas from your affiliate partners to earn commissions, mixing Christmas with Black Friday is a recipe for success. 

It is essential, in order to triumphantly navigate the Black Friday waters, to offer the most intriguing deals that can engage your customers, people go into Black Friday with the mindset of finding the most outstanding deals. So, a useful tip for any publishers and retailers, is to offer customers big discounts on your products which will help gain the public’s attention and eventually lead to large profits down the line. This tactic is already employed by many big-name companies as you can see below: 

There are other kinds of offers that can be made such as product bundling offers, product bundling is a technique in which several products are grouped together and sold as a single unit for one price. This strategy is used to encourage customers to buy more products, this can also increase your average order value. Here is an example of a product bundling offer: 

Black Friday affiliate marketing: Why it’s important and how to win this holiday season

Black Friday and Cyber Monday (the marketing term referring to the Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday, it is a day dedicated to e-commerce where people are encouraged to do their shopping online, it’s regarded as an extension of Black Friday) are the most profitable times of the year for businesses, and if you are an affiliate marketer you should really take notice. This is the time of year where affiliate partners make the most money so you should start promoting affiliate offers and affiliate products as quickly as you can because it is never too early when it comes to this time of year. 

To explain how important Black Friday affiliate marketing really is we just have to show you the numbers, the holiday season sales account for 20% of the annual retail income, which means that this short period of time plays a large role in the yearly financial success of businesses, just last year there were over 10 billion US dollars spent on Cyber Monday. Do you think that’s reason enough to get started on your affiliate marketing efforts? 

So, how do you achieve the goal of reaching the maximum exposure for you and your affiliate partners during this time of year? 

First off, you should prepare yourself as early as possible for your Black Friday affiliate marketing, finding the best deals and offers in advance of this period is the best practice, leaving things for the last minute will probably lead to you not having enough time to have everything ready to go when the day comes. Putting together a list of the product promotions you wish to display is a sensible idea and will help keep things organized, you can also get in touch with any affiliate programs that you might not be working with at the time and ascertain whether or not they are planning any offers that you could be interested in promoting.

Another important step in getting ready for Black Friday is gathering leads, there is no way to guarantee that your promotions and landing pages will have lots of traffic, so it is best to try and get your promotions out there in many forms, get together a mailing list so you can run an email campaign or start engaging customers through your social media channels, this way you can launch your marketing campaigns when Black Friday rolls around.

It is paramount for your Black Friday success to keep an eye on your competitors, after all you will be fighting with them for the public’s attention, and if your offers do not stand out you will be forgotten. If you can find out what your rivals sales approaches will be it can give you an advantage so you can supplant said approach and rise above your competitors, an effective market search is a great tool to have at this time of year. The marketing promotions you make must be irrefutable, doing so you can outperform the competition and guarantee that costumers choose your products.

Before going ahead with your Black Friday marketing campaigns, you should evaluate where you fit within the marketplace, to do this you must spend some time running some tests, like the content type you wish to promote, doing some trial offers or checking what your best traffic sources will be, with this information in hand it will be easier for you to apply the correct strategy to succeed during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday periods. 

When it comes to the type of ads to use you should keep the process simple. There are plenty of ad formats to pick from and newer versions are being implemented every year. With that being said, Black Friday isn’t a time for trying out new stuff, if you run that risk it can create lost opportunities if the new formats don’t work. Instead of trying out new types of ads, you should just use the foolproof options that have been relied upon such as push notifications, floating push ads, pop ads, and domain redirects. 

When it comes time to post your BF/CM content, you must rely on what has already sold in the past, to drive your affiliate sales you can use the steadiest content pieces to promote your products, gift lists, top 10 lists, product reviews and comparisons are some of the more tried-and-true ways of promoting your content. This method can generate lots of articles for your webpages as you can elaborate on and spread your product offers through the various pieces you will be publishing, for example: a top 10 list can be transformed into many things, “Top 10 gifts for men” or “Top 10 items for women under 30”. 

Lastly, when creating your holiday posts keep in mind that they can be used for the future, write the content for your pages without ever mentioning specific dates and format the product listings in a way that they can be easily replaced to use next year, this practice enables you to be a step ahead of the competition with a quick update, changing a few keywords and fine-tuning the products. Recycling your old content can be a way of turning around the problem of not having enough traffic in a specific year, updating an old post yearly can leverage the page’s existing stats, meaning that you won’t be starting from zero this time. 

As it has been pointed out the importance of Black Friday can’t be understated, it’s one of the most decisive days in the calendar for any affiliate marketer and ecommerce platform, hopefully this article can be helpful in assisting you with your Black Friday affiliate marketing and guide you to a successful holiday shopping season.