Are Your Christmas Gift Listicles Ready?

Tomorrow is October 1st. If you’re curious why that’s significant for you as an affiliate marketer take a look at the image below:

In the United States last December, over 30 million Americans searched for “Christmas Gift Ideas” on Google. That’s over 30 million Americans with their credit card sitting next to their computer, ready to buy.

If you’re not taking advantage of this gargantuan search volume of motivated buyers, you’re literally leaving tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table.

Those search queries for “Christmas Gift Ideas” started in October and increased daily as Christmas approached.

A shift happens when October 1st rolls around. Even though Halloween is still 30 days away, people start to think about the holidays.

Thanksgiving is on their minds. Black Friday is on their minds. Christmas shopping is certainly on their minds. And millions of people want to get their Christmas shopping done. They’re hunting for deals, cool products, and fun gift ideas.

Your only goal is to get your ad in front of them while they’re searching.

Every day that inches closer to Christmas there are more and more customers ready to spend money, and your goal is to get them to spend their money with you.

The Best Way To Catch & Convert Christmas Shoppers Into Paying Customers

There is really only one best way to make money during the holidays that I’ve experienced over the last 6 years and that’s with gift listicles.

A gift listicle is an article that’s just a giant list of gift ideas. Sometimes they reach over 100 products long. Here’s a good example of one.

But customers LOVE scrolling through them and to this day Christmas listicles have made me the most amount of money in affiliate marketing than any other campaign - $800,000 in profit in 3 weeks.

We’re entering the time of year where customers, despite a bad economy, are going to spend money. They want something for their friends, family, and co-workers. They want to be the “holiday hero.”

How To Create A Successful Holiday Listicle Campaign

Get your list set up with offers.

Creating a successful gift listicle during the holidays is pretty straight forward. The first thing you have to do, obviously, is have your gift listicle set up. Whether you use lstly.com or decide to build and host your own, you’ll need a gift list with at least 25 to 30 offers on it.

So make sure you’re on some good affiliate networks with good ecom offers. Or, if you’re a dropshipper or ecommerce storefront, you can add all of your ecom products to the list.

Decide where you’re going to run your ads

Yes, hate to break it to you but you will have to spend money on ads. If you don’t want to spend money on advertising your list, this strategy isn’t for you.

Before you get started media buying it might be worth running some numbers through the media buy calculator we talked about in last week’s newsletter. You can re-read it at commissioncrew.co/archive.

I have personally found the most success running gift lists on the following ad platforms:

1. Facebook

2. Google Ads

3. Taboola/Outbrain

What your ads should look like

Your ads should speak to exactly what people are looking for this time of year. Christmas gift ideas. Your headlines should be something like:

“25+ Best Stocking Stuffers 2024”
“27 Hot Xmas Gifts That’re Selling Out Fast For The Holidays”
“31 5-Star Christmas Gifts That Will Make Them Smile”
“25+ Unique Xmas Gifts That Will Make You The Holiday Hero”

And your ad images should be cool gadget looking images that make people curious and want to click. Images like:

Pair images like this, with the headlines like the ones above and you get an ad that looks like this (going to your gift listicle):

How to structure your list

When you’re making your list, you’re going to want the top converting offers in descending position from top to bottom. Meaning the best converting offer is #1, second best converting offer is #2, and so on.

It shouldn’t take too long to figure out which ones are converting the best. When you see an offer starting to convert a lot more than the others, or bringing in more revenue, immediately move it to #1.

I added a feature to lstly.com where you can choose to randomly sort your offers on every page load to get a fair analysis of which offers do the best, and then you can order them accordingly. I also made it so you can drag and drop offers so there’s no hassle moving offers around. It’s all very easy.

When to scale

Now that you have your list set up with over 25 offers, you’ve made your ads and they’re getting traffic, you need to start optimizing towards profitability… assuming you’re not profitable yet.

Make sure you’re using a tracking platform like Voluum or Anytrack to attribute sales back to your ad platform, so you can make the necessary optimizations to scale.

Once you’ve been profitable for a few days in a row, increase your budget. If you’re still profitable, increase again. And again. And keep scaling until your total daily profit starts to fall off.

This is what I did in 2018 on facebook. And I was at one point spending $100k/day to make $150k per day. It was nuts. I haven’t re-achieved that level of success, but every holiday season my list makes me at least $100k in profit.

Conclusion

With the holidays right around the corner, people are starting to search for Christmas gifts. You have at least 3 to 4 weeks from receiving this email to get your list together before the big November/ December push.

I’m trying to give you a little head start. Of the tens or hundreds of thousands of internet marketers out there, there are just over 1,000 of you Crew members reading this email right now. So you have a good advantage.

Get onto some good networks that have great e-commerce offers. Make a list. Start running some paid ads like the one I showed you above. And hopefully you can capitalize on the crazy spending that happens this time of year.

Comment or reply if you have any questions.

Until next week!
Cheers,
Matt