David Fiske Affiliate Marketing & Web Development

It’s no secret I’m both a fan of the Red Letter Day affiliate program and a fan of incentives :-) The Red Letter Day Christmas Incentive 2011 therefore is a marriage made in heaven.

Whilst the sales element of the incentives are based solely on your traffic, conversion rate and content, there are other ways you can gain entries in the main competition as well as the smaller ones.
 
For the main prize of a holiday to Beijing, you can get 5 entries just be adding a festive banner to your experience day website. It takes a couple of minutes to do and gives you more entries than generating £4,500 in sales in the 3 month period.

Top tip – use the rotating banners on offer and the festive banner automatically appears on your site without you needing to change banner codes in the future. That’s what I use on my experience days website and the banners automatically change regularly every couple of months or so to reflect seasonal events such as Valentine’s Day, Easter, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Christmas, etc.

The iPad competition is the other one where you don’t need to be an experience day affiliate tycoon to get entries. All you need is a bit of creativity.

The winner is to be chosen from submissions for the best Landing Page/ Blog promoting Red Letter Days, the best Landing Page/ Blog promoting the Red Letter Days Affiliate Programme or the best use of social media promoting Red Letter Days.

As such, I thought it might be useful to put together a list of ideas of things you can do for each category.

Best Landing Page or Blog Post Promoting Red Letter Days

• First and foremost you could set up a website promoting experience days – from the very niche such as JCB Digger Racing (yes it exists and yes it's great fun!) to the very broad such as Proper Presents.
• Remember that a banner doesn’t have to reside in a set 468 x 60 space – skin your website background to be red.
• Be creative when it comes to adding banners – they can be integrated very smartly rather than plonked at the top and/or bottom of the page.
• Put together a top 5 experiences list – perhaps ‘the top 5 cheapest experiences’, ‘the top 5 driving experiences’ or the ‘top 5 experiences for kids’. The Red Letter Days website lets you filter experiences and sort by price. You can find bestsellers here.
• Keep an eye out on the Special offers and write a blog post or create a landing page promoting these. Special offers are often great value for money so this might be worthwhile
• This year the focus of Christmas is bound to be on cost due to the global economic crisis. As such people will yet again be looking for value for money so articles on getting the most out of an experience day would be useful and relevant.
• Sell an experience day – hopefully literally but by this I mean write about an experience day in excessive detail. Find out where it is and suggest local hotels to stay in. Find out what else there is to be done either at the location or near to it. You may well be able to sell further products as a result.
• Try themed posts where you cross sell experiences. If you are writing about Thames Dinner Cruises, why not add a bit about London Duck Tours or Sightseeing trips?
• Write a short biography on Red Letter Days with reasons on why your visitors should shop with them.
• How about a random gift idea generator using the datafeed?

Best Landing Page or Blog Post Promoting Red Letter Days Affiliate Program

• You could write a post about the Christmas incentive or ways to boost your entries ;-)

Best use of social media promoting Red Letter Days

• Set up a Facebook and/or Twitter profile for your experience day website (no matter how big or small it is) and post a comment or tweet about Red Letter Days
• Create a group or hashtag around a relevant experience day and create a group of followers, pushing them towards RLD of course
• Promote RLD special offer experience days via social media
• Post the URLs to your content posts or landing pages on your profile

Use Your Imagination

This is by no means a comprehensive list, it’s just a bit of brainstorming. There’s plenty of content that can be written about Red Letter Days as well as the experiences they offer. The more creative or wacky the idea the more chances you’ll have at winning an iPad 2!

The Red Letter Days Affiliate Program

Red Letter Days can be found on Affiliate Window and Affilinet. Experience Day gifts are very popular at Christmas as they make perfect gifts for people who are awkward to buy for!