When it comes to affiliate marketing, the purchasing habits of consumers massively impact the sales of many types of products and services at different points throughout the year. Given this when considering what products/service categories you should focus on for your affiliate marketing activities at any point of the year, you should use seasonality as a critical factor to judge what to promote (taking advantage of prevailing trends in consumer spending).

If you focus your marketing and resources on the right product/service categories at the right times of the year, you’ll significantly increase the profitableness and return from your affiliate marketing activities. You will also avoid the significant drops in sales for many different product/services during a different part of the year).

In order to help you maxmise your efforts and return, here are four key points of the year when certain product/service categories see massive increases in sales.

Before Christmas

The time just before Christmas sees a massive surge in consumer purchasing across the board, but specific categories excel way past others at this time of the year. One of the main product categories that does particularly well before Christmas is beauty.

The sale of beauty products including makeup, fragrance, skincare and hair ranges spike just before Christmas as many consumers scramble to buy Christmas presents for their loved ones (fragrance does particularly well at this time of year, with 40%+ of total fragrance sales taking place at this time).

After Christmas

After Christmas is not a time of year many people associate with any significant increase in consumer purchasing, in fact, it’s the time of the year when the least is spent across most categories, except for a few exceptions.

One of these exceptions to is due to many people drinking and overeating during over this holiday period. This results after Christmas in many consumers gaining or feeling they’ve gained weight and seeing deterioration in their health, leading many to seek to alleviate these perceived problems by purchasing products/services to help improve their situation.

This leads to a boom in sales of weight loss and health products. In this period services like gyms do particularly well alongside nutrition-based products and weight loss programs (if your looking moreniche.com is an affiliate platform that focuses in this area).

Before & during summer

Summer is an exciting time of year when consumers seek to look their best (as consumers spend a significant amount more time outside due to the usual hot weather).

A few months before the summer and throughout the summer, this obsession with body image causes sales of self-improvement products related to body improvement to increase massively. This spike is primarily due to 2 psychological factors:

• Consumers seek to look and feel good during a part of the year they feel more exposed;
• Consumers are scared of looking and feeling bad during a part of the year they feel more exposed.

This spike in sales also includes product categories such as bodybuilding products, tanning products, weight loss products and more.

Commercial holidays

In the last decade American culture has permeated the worlds shopping habits and with it has come many types of commercial holidays, offering discounts designed to get consumers to massively increase their spending at certain times of the year (usually on a specific day).

These types of holiday can be an excellent opportunity to carry out intensive affiliate marketing activities, as many brands/retailers are typically offering substantial discounts to stimulate sales. This means there is a much larger incentive for consumers to buy at a discount, this is coupled with the limited time element of a commercial holiday inducing consumers to make a quick purchase and impulse purchase. Examples of these type of holidays include:

• Black Friday (produces a massive surge in the sale of most product categories, mainly home and electronics, also, there is a significant increase in the number of larger purchases, i.e. TV’s, Computers…)
• Cyber Monday (induces a massive surge in the sale of electronics products)
• Valentines days (stimulates an enormous increase in restaurant reservations, romantically linked gifts, experience days and yes although cynical this holiday was invented to sell products not love).

Even Halloween at this point has been converted into a largely commercial holiday and the only point of the year consumers buy pumpkins en-masse. These commercial holidays, unfortunately, don’t offer time off work for consumers to shop but have proven to generate significant high street and eCommerce sales in the UK, UK and beyond. It is well worth investing resources into a particular commercial holiday if you’re promoting a product typically bought (you could do up to 30% of your annual commissions in one day).

Take advantage of seasonality & diversify

It makes sense to take advantage of the sales spikes during different seasons and on various products/service categories to maximise your affiliate revenue.

However, you also need to diversify and build a stable and consistent base of revenue to see a steady income from your affiliate marketing efforts. Fortunately, some categories sell mostly consistently throughout most of the year, this includes:

• B2B (company creation services, intellectual property work…)
• Utilities (phone, internet, water, electricity…)
• Books & eBooks

The above offer some areas to build content resources in that can become a sustainable revenue source; there are many more and it’s worth researching to find what categories work best for you. Finally remember, focus your attention at different times of the year to more seasonal products when it makes the most sense for sales and profitability.