So how’s your holiday shopping going? No, I’m not talking about getting gifts for all your nieces and nephews, I’m talking about your holiday marketing efforts! Things look pretty good on my end – there really is an big uptick in online shopping so far this year. But what about Black Friday vs Cyber Monday?
Black Friday at Amazon:
Clicks: 1558
Orders: 267
Cyber Monday at Amazon:
Clicks: 860
Orders: 156
That isn’t an apples/apples comparison, as a decent percentage of my Amazon sales are through PPC. But I still didn’t realize the disparity. What about traffic?
Black Friday Traffic:
Uniques: 5413
Pages: 12215
Cyber Monday Traffic:
Uniques: 6716
Pages: 13482
Well that’s interesting, and unexpected. Cyber Monday traffic was about 25% higher, but sales were about 40% lower. I wonder what that’s about – I’ll have to do some more research on that. I could come up with some theory about on Black Friday people were ready to buy, and the deals were Black Friday only deals, so people didn’t shop around as much… But I don’t know.
What did you see on Black Friday and Cyber Monday? The same thing?
Welcome to Week Two of Weird Amazon Purchase of the Week. I know you’re all as excited as I am about this, so let’s get going. The odd item from this week is:
Spam Musubi Rice Press
I had to do some research to figure out what the heck Spam Musabi Sushi is, and apparently it’s a fairly popular snack food in Hawaii and a few other places – it’s rice and fried spam tied together with seaweed. I’m not a huge fan of spam, but this looks pretty tasty. And I guess you need a sushi rice press if you want to make perfectly formed rice for your spam.
So, there you go! It makes perfect sense!
So one of my fun little hobbies is looking through all my Amazon affiliate accounts and finding the strangest thing that someone bought and I got affiliate credit for it. The winner this month is…
A bucket of 72 ping pong balls!
I love playing ping pong, but 72? What the hell are you going to do with 72 ping pong balls? Or maybe I don’t want to know?
Anyway, thanks for buying them. I made roughly $2.24 from your purchase.
Yeah, so I sent out my first press release ever yesterday, through PR.com. It’s actually fairly lame. They market themselves as free, but the free product kind of sucks. If you want to add a picture, that’s $30. If you want to add a link, that’s $30. Per link. And so on… I’ll try PRWeb or PRNewsWire next, and post a review of those. I’m confident the price is worth it.
My least favorite task is coming up with domain names. I do way too much of it, and it always infuriates me. I come up with the perfect, clever name and some squatter already owns it and is charging far too much for it. Really, you think $4000 is a fair price for filereportdinosaur.com? (That’s a terrible name, btw.) Argh.
Edit: I met a guy that sold me a domain for a very fair price. So maybe domainers aren’t all bad.
This is going to sound obvious (perhaps), but my favorite SEO trick is to target the right keywords in the first place. I can do all the SEO in the world on the phrase “travel deals”, but I’m never going to outrank Expedia, Travelocity and Priceline. But what about the phrase “best sites for travel deals”. Low competition, plenty of searches… Give yourself a fighting chance to win in the SEO war!
Other than the somewhat obvious reference to the Simpsons, at Monkey Knife Fight I’m going to post about affiliate marketing, writing code, search engine optimization, pay-per-click marketing, and all the fun things I do all day. I’ve been doing this for about ten years now, and I’ve learned a lot (and I still have a lot to learn). If you have any questions for me I’ll answer them here, if I can!
Now let’s go make some money!
