Christmas and a Home Business

Don’t look now, but Christmas is only a few weeks away once again. It’s a time for families to get together, kids to open their presents, office workers to do lots of embarassing things at the office party…

Ok, we all know Christmas is a time of festivities and fun!

But for those of us trying to make a buck (or several) online, what does it mean for your home business? Well, it’s a pretty good time to roll out the seasonal affiliate sites, dust them off and put them to work for you. Don’t have anything suitable? Well, believe it or not there is still time to make new ones if you’re quick. But you have to act fast.

First of all you have to be able to put up a half decent site quickly, get enough original content on there with a liberal sprinkling of your keyword to satisfy the search engines that its legit, then be able to link to it fast and furiously. Then rinse and repeat with more sites.

Why more than one site?

You need to build in some redundancy as well as create an interlinking system. By building in redundancy, I mean you’ll need a few sites that all target exactly the same keyword because you’re probably going to have a fight on your hands with a certain search engine that is currently indexing and de-indexing new sites seemingly at random. Some will feature in the SERPs and some won’t. And you need search engine traffic for this to work.

Here’s how.

Say you want to target a fairly competitive seasonal keyword, such as Christmas tree decorations, Christmas gifts, artificial Christmas trees or something similar. You’ll need three or four blogs with that exact keyword in the url, the site title and the page headers as far as on-site SEO goes. Don’t waste time looking for domains, you probably won’t find any .com’s suitable. Use some of the many free blogging hosts available, but just make sure they allow you to put up affiliate ads before you start building.

Build your blogs with a simple template and write an intro post, then social bookmark them to as many places as you can. Meanwhile, find a good affiliate company that has Christmas tree decorations (or whatever your keywords are) vendors that you can sign up with. ShareASale is one pretty good one, but there are others too like CJ etc and don’t forget eBay. There is a killing to be made so spread your net as wide as possible.

Now you’ll also need some supporting sites that you control that cover topics broadly similar to your keywords, such as special occasions, gifts, or anything similar.

What, you don’t have any?

Sheesh! You want an online business but haven’t been building backup sites? What about Squidoo, Hub Pages, Blinkweb, Blogger, WordPress… the list is long and available so there is no excuse for not having the resources. They are there in abundance and if you’re not using them then don’t quit your day job just yet!

Ok, for those of you with plenty of sites, edit them all and add a link to each of your main Christmas keyword targeting sites with the keywords in your anchor text. I take it you know how to do that…

These links may or may not get counted in time, but do it anyway. The theory here is that if you throw enough mud, some of it will stick. Write some articles (also with your keyword anchored link) and submit them to a few top ezines (ezine articles etc). Get into some of the forums you are a member of and put a link in your sig to your sites and post something worthwhile. You are a member of some forums, aren’t you? Good!

The whole idea is to get your sites indexed fast and into the SERPs in the short term.

The next phase is to start writing as fast as you can. You want to hammer as many articles into your main blogs as you can. Don’t worry about them being perfect, just readable (the writer in me hates to say that, but needs must). Post as often as you can (daily or even twice a day) because the more you do it, the more often the Google bot will come visit your sites and give them the short term authority in the index that you need. Also, link the blogs to each other from within those posts. Normally this is not a good idea, but in this case in the short term you only care about creating authority fast.

In the meantime, you should have been accepted into some of the affiliate programs, so start creating pages in your blogs and fill them up with the products you want to sell.

Keep going like a mad person and some of the mud will stick. One or more of your blogs will appear in the SERPs for long enough to attract sufficient traffic to make some sales over the next few weeks. After that, Google will most likely sandbox your sites anyway, but who cares? You will have wrung out of them as much as you could while the going was good, which is all you wanted to do!

Of course, the sites will emerge from the sandbox in 6 months or so ready for an assault on next year’s festive season with the added bonus that they will have acquired more authority and will therefore do better next year!

That’s one way to make use of Christmas with your home business!