If you own a website selling your own products or affiliate products, you can boost your sales with seasonal marketing campaigns. Even if you don't have a website, you can still sell affiliate products that have seasonal appeal. One of the best ways to do this is through search engine pay-per-click (PPC) programs and my favorite among them is Google Adwords.

The great thing about Adwords is that you can measure the results from your marketing efforts in a very short amount of time. We're not talking weeks or days but literally minutes after setting up your ad campaign.

One of the ideas I had when I started using Adwords was to promote something seasonal. So at the end of January, I opened an Adwords account and created an ad campaign. It was related to a major sports event in American life - The Super Bowl.

I signed up as an Amazon affiliate and looked through the Amazon site for Patriots and Panthers apparel. Then I searched on Google for "superbowl" and found only one Adwords ad.

"Great!" I thought, "What an opportunity!"

By the way, if you're not familiar with Adwords, each Google search page contains only 8 paid ads on the right-hand side. This means that if there are only 7 ads showing, you can get the 8th position by paying just 5 cents per click.

So I set up an Adwords campaign with the following keywords: superbowl shirt, superbowl hat, superbowl cap and related variations with a space between "super" and "bowl" as well as using plural nouns. I let the ad campaign run for 5 days starting from Super Bowl Sunday. I paid 6 cents per click for all my clicks.

After 5 days, I had the following results:

Keyword -------- Clicks ------ Impressions ----- CTR
------------------------------------------------------------------
superbowl shirts......63... ................575..............10.9%
"superbowl hat".......59....................445..............13.2%
super bowl caps......16....................289................5.5%
superbowl shirt..........7....................899................0.7%
superbowl cap...........3....................329................0.9%
super bowl hats.........0......................25................0.0%
super bowl shirts.......0......................10............... 0.0%
super bowl hat...........0........................5................0.0%
super bowl cap..........0........................0................0.0%

plus a few deleted keywords.

The top two key phrases had click through ratios (CTRs) of 13.2% and 10.9%, respectively. Those were very decent CTRs. The keywords that contain the words "shirts", "hat" and "caps" did better than "hats" or "cap". Why is that? I don't really know. That's just what people were searching for and clicking on. Another lesson to be learned - sometimes what you think are the best search keyword(s) aren't necessarily the ones that people are searching for. You have to test everything to find out which ones work best.

What about sales? After all that's the bottom line - whether you can convert your traffic into sales. I had 10 sales and 1 returned item. The total commissions was $19.09. My Adwords cost totalled $9.24. The cost was slightly inflated due to the fact that I started off the campaign using broad terms such as "superbowl" and "super bowl". In general, the more targeted your keywords, the better your CTR and return on investment will be. Since Amazon only pays 5% commission on sales, the numbers here are low. However, you can run more campaigns and sell other affiliate products with higher commissions. You get the idea.

Here's an analysis of the performance of the campaign:

Total clicks: 163
Average cost per click: $0.06
Total revenue: $19.09
Total cost: $9.24
Revenue/cost: 1.07
Return on investment (ROI): 107%
No. of sales: 10
Sales/Clicks: 0.06 (6% conversion rate or roughly 1 sale for every 17 visitors)

That's not a lot of money but for the sake of an illustration, this shows that seasonal campaigns can work very well. Of course, you would need more data in order to generate better statistics. Sales started slowing down about 3 days after the Super Bowl, so I stopped the campaign after 5 days.

There are many other seasonal campaigns you can run. With a bit of brainstorming I'm sure you can come up with some otherfantastic ideas. Read the newspapers and magazines and keep an eye out for the next major event or holiday. Then put these techniques to work for you.

"The choice is yours. You hold the tiller.  You can steer the course you choose in the direction of where you want to be - today, tomorrow, or in a distant time to come."
-- W. Clement Stone