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How to prepare for running ads in Q4? Creative resources cheat sheet.
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The eventful and exciting Q4 is here. With Black Friday and Christmas shopping frenzy on the horizon, both beginner and experienced affiliates are scrambling to get their campaigns ready.
Preparing for such a busy season requires good planning and organization skills. But that’s not all. Above everything else, you need creative resources to catch people’s attention and drive internet traffic to your ads and products.
If you’re looking for inspiration, new angles, and tool recommendations, then you’ve come to the right place! Take a look below to fill your head with ideas and find the creative resources that will help you scale your campaigns.
Affiliate Marketing Trends for Q4 & the Holiday Season
Before you get down to reading the article, you might want to think about what kind of ads you’re planning to run. Even though there are plenty of verticals that are green all year round, it’s worth reading up on Q4 trends to make sure you’re not missing any money-making opportunities.
It just so happens that we’ve recently released the guide to Affiliate Marketing Trends in Q4 2020. We’ve covered the most profitable niches and we’ve shared some ideas as to where you should put your focus if you want to make the most of the rest of 2020.
Don’t worry if you’re just a beginner, though. Although everyone is talking about e-commerce and Christmas shopping, you can do equally well sticking to something simpler. Like sweepstakes, for example. While some affiliates advertise products and stores, others advertise gift cards, vouchers, and a chance to win gifts (which sells like hot cakes during the holiday gift craze)!
All in all, it’s important to focus on a particular niche and stick to it.
Where to get inspiration from?
If you want to be fully ready to take on this crazy season and cash in on as many trends as possible, you’re going to need some inspiration. Whether it comes to the angles, creatives, copies, or whole landing pages, you need to remember about the competition. Q4 is a very busy season and a lot of affiliates strive to make a killing. Here are some places, where you should look for inspiration:
Affiliate Marketing Blogs
Affiliate marketing blogs are the first place you should look at. Despite last year’s shopping season being somewhat different, a lot of content with useful tips and tricks remains relevant. And that’s exactly what you should read up on.
Affiliate networks, ad trackers, and traffic sources all produce relevant content to make sure their clients are always caught up with the newest trends and hypes. Besides tutorials and guides, these blogs are full of recommendations, suggestions, and advice based on historical network data. In short, they know what niches are in season and what is most likely to bring profits.
Since you’re reading this blog right now, you are already in the right place. You can start by looking at Zeropark’s Push Ads: Copy That Converts article. That’s where you’ll learn how to write good push ads copy, push ads title, what power words to use, and how to enhance the message with emojis.
Black Friday and Affiliate Marketing: How to Make the Most of It? should be an obligatory read. Not only does it explain how to go about advertising Black Friday offers but it also explains how to set up the campaign to ensure the highest success. Need to see what last year’s Black Friday hype was all about? We got you. We’ve updated our last year’s blogs to keep them relevant. Read and learn – All you need to maximize your profits with Zeropark this Black Friday.
And if you’re looking to make the most out of the holiday season you will need to know when every big holiday is. For that, you will need to check out the detailed promotional calendar available in this article which lays out all of the holidays you can make money with as an affiliate marketer every year.
Lastly, you can visit one of our last year’s holiday blogs. The Holiday Week Hustle is Here! will introduce you to the best advertising strategies that worked flawlessly in 2019 (and still work in 2020). In Profit from the Holiday Season with Push Notification Ads, you will learn how to pick your offer and craft the perfect push creatives. Oh, but don’t forget about the creative fatigue, which becomes especially problematic during the holiday season. To keep your ads converting for as long as possible, you should take a look at Push Ads in Holiday Season 2020 – fighting creative fatigue.
That reading material should give you plenty of ideas and some good creative resources!
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Affiliate Marketing Forums
As we’ve mentioned countless times before, joining an affiliate marketing forum is just about the best thing you can do as a beginner. Forums are full of free creative resources, guides, tutorials, and, most importantly, experienced affiliates ready to help.
If you join an affiliate marketing forum, you’ll gain access to ongoing follow-alongs, competitions, and discussions regarding fresh issues. But besides the obvious, you can learn a whole lot from other affiliates’ mistakes.
Are you thinking about trying out an interesting, never-before-seen angle? Well, it would be worth checking the forum and seeing if anyone’s ever tried that before. For example, have you ever wondered whether red borders or green borders would increase the CTR of a push notification? So did the affLIFT creator Luke. If you do happen to be a member of this forum you can take a look at his experiment here.
Speaking of forums and angles… here’s another interesting post. If you’ve ever had a problem coming up with additional angles for your offer, you might find this post – Create 21 Angles for any offer in under an hour – very interesting. Of course, you won’t be able to see it if you aren’t a member of the forum yet. Just remember, affiliate marketing communities are very useful and you should consider joining one!
Are you thinking of joining an affiliate marketing community?
Click here to check out our recommendations!
Spy tools
Here comes the obvious – spy tools! Of course, spy tools are the best source of inspiration. These tools allow you to up your competitive strategy, as you can play at the digital advertising agency level, by spying on your competition. Their main purpose is to spy on other affiliates and show you what works and what doesn’t. They are supposed to give you an insight into the whole market and into the ideas of people who run ads like yours.
Subscribing to a spy tool is a must if you want to stay on top of the game. It allows you to take a peek at what’s going on from various angles. You can check how others run a particular offer, you can check what kind of offers are hot in a certain GEO or you can see what angles people use to generate the highest revenue.
They are also a good way to check your Facebook ads or even your Facebook advertising strategy hasn’t been copied by your competitors. But this isn’t limited to Facebook ads, nearly any online ad will be able to be spied on. So you will be able to save on advertising costs by stopping or updating ads that are already saturated in the market.
It’s good to have your own, novel ideas. But sometimes, tried and tested solutions will turn out to be the best. It’s your job to check all the possibilities and choose which route you want to take. Usually, the best option is to do a bit of everything. Split testing is always the way to go.
Not using a spy tool yet?
Check out this article and find out everything you need to know!
Useful creative resources for affiliate marketers
If you want to make your ad campaigns pop, you need a lot more than just a campaign and a tracker. As much as offers tend to be of the utmost importance, people won’t get to the offer page if you don’t attract them with your creatives.
Once you get inspiration from spy tools, blogs, forums, and anything else that comes to your mind, it’s time to think about giving yourself a creative outlet. You’ll surely need some extra tools to design a high-converting landing page.
Besides designing the page itself, you need to choose appropriate, eye-catching pictures, you need to create a grammatically correct copy without any types and quite often you’ll need to have it translated into the language of your ad recipients. Regardless of what ad format you choose to go with, you might find these recommendations useful.
Copywriting
Copywriting skills needed in affiliate marketing depend entirely on what kind of ad you’ll be running. If you’re going with something simple like sweepstakes, lead gen, and vouchers, it’s usually enough to check the spelling and grammar and use the commonly present formulas.
Take a look at your chosen spy tool and see what CTAs are commonly used by other affiliates. Want to create your own and need some tips? You can check out our article on 7 Winning CTA & Headline Formulas For Affiliate Marketers and learn how to create your unique call to action! As a bonus, there’s a list of 100 ready-made CTA examples waiting for you inside!
If you’re running finance, nutra, or gambling offers, your potential clients might need some more convincing. In that case, advertorials are the way to go. They generally require a lot more copywriting skills than push notifications.
As much as writing skills are not something you gain overnight, you can help yourself by using Grammarly. Making sure your copy is error-free raises the credibility of your text, which is of the utmost importance in advertorials.
If you’re struggling with the headline, we’ve got you covered. You can use Sharethrough’s headline analyzer to see if there are any quick improvements to be made. A strong headline is essential to introduce the topic in an attention-grabbing manner.
Lastly, the content of the advertorial should appeal to the needs and worries of the public. You can choose to research on your own, or you can let us help you. We’ve recently gathered valuable resources that can be used for keyword research, which, as you should already know can significantly improve the performance of your ad campaigns. You can read about it in this article.
Do you know how keyword research can improve your campaign performance?
Click here to find out!
Ad creatives
When it comes to creatives, there isn’t much to talk about here. All you need is a general idea, a photo, and a basic resizing/cropping tool. We can, of course, drop some suggestions.
Here are tried and tested tips on what works best in push ads creatives:
- Always use simple images.
- Choose icons whenever possible.
- Include the color green.
- Keep your images clean.
- Use cute images that evoke warm feelings.
And here’s a couple of things you should avoid:
- Don’t use cluttered images.
- Never put text in your icons.
- Avoid using suggestive images with partial nudity.
- Stay away from the color red.
- Don’t try to fit too many details into small pictures.
Luckily for affiliate marketers, there are plenty of free stock image websites with thousands of photos up for grabs. Whether you need a good resolution image of a lady drinking tea for your nutra advertorial, or a small push ad that will make everyone look forward to Christmas, we’ve got you covered.
Take a look at this list of websites offering free downloadable images:
All you need to do now, is make the right choice, crop it, and pair it with a good copy. Speaking of cropping… the image editing tools available these days can be really powerful. You don’t need Photoshop to make your images look good. It’s enough if you use a basic online tool such as PicResize to meet the upload requirements and have a crisp-looking push image.
Translation services
Sooner or later in your affiliate marketing career, you will need translation services. At first, Google Translate might be enough. But as soon as you find that one offer with great potential and you want to expand it to more countries, you might look for professional translating services. After all, you don’t want to limit your target audience to just one country. You never know you might find out that your most valuable audiences speak different languages to your mother tongue.
Alternatively, you might just want to make sure that your proven offer has a top-quality lander to maximize your profits. Either way, here is a list of community-approved translation services:
Landing page builders
Is your ad copy written, translated, proofread, and ready to grab attention? Good! Now it’s time to make use of everything you’ve found and put it together to create a compelling landing page.
If you take the easy road (even though you shouldn’t) and rip a landing page from a spy tool, the least you can do is edit it so that it matches the offer page and utilizes some of the seasonal trends. Using consistent design throughout the funnel makes your ads look significantly more professional which, in turn, raises their credibility. After all, more trustworthy ads will reduce your ad spend, as they will get better conversion rates.
There are a lot of different options when it comes to landing page builders. There are more and less advanced choices, suited for affiliates specializing in different niches. We’ve covered the basics and the recommendations in our recent article on How to combat creative fatigue in affiliate marketing – Top 9 Landing Page Builders.
Lastly, let’s not forget about those with a technical background or a particular interest in the more advanced aspects of landing page building. After all, there are plenty of ways you can build a lander and there are many useful scripts to add.
If you are a member of the affLIFT community forum, you might want to take a look at affLIFT’s MEGA Thread of Useful Landing Page Scripts. Exit pop-ups and timers surely seem like good additions to your landers.
If you feel up to the challenge of learning the basics of coding, just to be able to take better control of your landers, you can use popular free learning websites. They are highly recommended for beginners and are bound to add plenty of new possibilities to your campaign creation process. Check them out:
Lander builders can be a powerful tool!
Click here to find out how to make the most of them.
Conclusions
Yes, the holiday shopping season is coming and there are a lot of smaller holidays on the way. You still have plenty of time to prepare and launch the most lucrative ad campaigns of your career.
Don’t wait too long! You have all the creative resources you need now. You know where to look for inspiration and how to make your ads pop with a long list of creative resources.
It’s time to ride that wave and make some money!
Ready to make money on the Q4 shopping frenzy?
Launch your Campaigns Now!
Magdalena Bober
