EPP 138: Get Your Online Business Ready For Black Friday

In this week’s episode of the Extra Paycheck Podcast we’re talking about getting your online business ready for 2017 Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales events.

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Black Friday and Cyber Monday are coming soon which only means one thing for us marketing folks: huge income potential. Regardless if you are selling your own physical and/or digital products or if you’re promoting someone else’s product as an affiliate marketer, you must get ready for this crazy sales event in order to maximize your sales.

Consumers start researching Black Friday deals as early as October. This is why you should start getting ready for it early.

Re-visit Your Old Reviews

First thing first, you need to figure out what kind of promotions you will be running. If you run your own eCommerce store you should already know which products you will be discounting. If you’re an affiliate marketer, you should look into your favorite affiliate platform and try to figure out what kind of deals and discounts they will be offering. In some cases you might be able to get in touch with the seller directly or with your affiliate managers in order to get these details.

At this point you can re-visit your reviews and blog post and edit them in order to drop in some teasers about the upcoming discounts. Some affiliate networks will ask you to not reveal all the details too early in advance and you should respect that.

You can try to stay ahead of your competition by publishing a “Black-Friday-specific” blog post. If you publish such post a week before Black Friday you have a chance of getting in ranked high on search results. If this happens you’ll be getting a lot of sales once the black Friday weekend rolls in.  However, this is just a part of the strategy – don’t make it your whole strategy since search engine rankings are not guaranteed.

A few hours before the official Black Friday sales launch you should re-visit those old reviews again and update the pricing to the actual Black Friday pricing. By the way, don’t limit yourself to your blog reviews. You might have an old Youtube video on the subject that still gets views or an old podcast episode, update those descriptions with this year’s sales information.

Email Marketing

You have been building your email list since the day you started your online business, right? I talked a lot about it here and here and in many other podcast episodes and blog post. A warm email list is very valuable during events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Some go as far as calling an ATM because you could make thousands and thousands of dollars by simply sending an email.

I am recommending this strategy because it has worked for me in the past however you might need to adopt it to you audience as you see fit. You can send more or less emails – that’s your decision and something you should definitely test.

First email goes out about a week before Black Friday. In that email you’re simply warming your audience for the upcoming emails with discounts. I didn’t mention it in the podcast but I also often use this email to tell my email subscribers to unsubscribe. I tell them that the next few emails will be purely promotional (as they are used to getting value emails from me) and I tell them to feel free to unsubscribe if they don’t want to receive such emails. I know it might seem stupid but if people aren’t going to ever purchase anything I don’t want them on my list. And I’d rather have them unsubscribe than report my emails as spam.

The second email goes out 1 day before the sales begin. In that email I would normally reveal all the details and discounts. I would try to get the audience hyped up about the offers. I would also promise an awesome bonus that I am personally offering ONLY to my email subscribers and ONLY during the Black Friday weekend.

The email #3 is scheduled to go out right when the sale starts. In that email I explain what an amazing deal they are getting and I reveal my bonus.This email will probably bring the most sales on Friday and I suggest spending some time crafting a proper copy.

The fourth email is sent out about 24 hours before the sales end. Typically this means Cyber Monday but many online retailers extend the sales by 2-3 more days. This emails creates scarcity and reminds your audience that they wanted to take advantage of that amazing deal and now is their last chance. Many sales will also come from this 4th email simply because people push things to the last minute. Remind them that the time is running out and that your bonus will also be unavailable once this is over.

Social Media

This should be obvious but I thought I needed to mention it. Your social media channels are a great way to hype people up about the black Friday sales. You’ll see keyword phrases like “2017 Black Friday Deals” and “Cyber Monday 2017” trending on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

This is when you can come up with awesome creatives and videos and post them all over the social media. If you can’t Photoshop, hire someone to do it for you. There are also tools like Snappa that will help you easily create awesome images and Black Friday banners.

I’ve seen people in the online business industry create such awesome images that they went viral and resulted in thousands of purchases. It hasn’t happened to me (unfortunately) but it always is a possibility. Listen to the full episode for more details and ideas on how you can get your online business ready for the 2017 Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales events.

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If you do have any comments or question, please do use the comment form below! I will answer every single one

– Alex

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