Seasonal Affiliate Marketing Niches, Mistake or Advantage?

Most affiliate marketers recommend getting into niches that capture your personal interest and I absolutely agree with that statement, but as it happens most of my personal interests run on seasonal trends. There are obvious disadvantages to seasonal affiliate niches, and I think I’ll hash through a few of them and how to turn them to your advantage.

Things to hate about season affiliate niches.

You’re building momentum with exciting ideas and fresh content, you know this is going to be your biggest year ever,  then suddenly the niche season is nearly over and so is your Website traffic and conversions. You begin to experience” affiliate depression”. The wind has been sucked from your sails. At this point your affiliate work begins to lack focus because you begin to spend your time researching new keywords and affiliate opportunities to pull yourself out of the annual end-of-season doldrums. And when the new affiliate season has arrives you’re not prepared because for the past months you were too busy focusing on doing something new and different, and not so seasonal. You feel you are just spinning your wheels, again you experience that affiliate depression.   

But it doesn’t have to be this way for seasonal affiliates because there are ways to take advantage of the lulls that occur in these seasonal affiliate niches.

1. Your niche affiliate season is winding down, so now is your chance to evaluate the seasons success. What were your best and worst converting products and marketing methods, and why? The unstructured environment of the affiliate marketer often leads affiliates to abandon analysis and conclusion for a seat of the pants approach. So take advantage of this off season time to make campaign evaluations can lead to a more sustainable affiliate business.
2. You’ve analyzed the results of the last season so use this off season time to ramp up for your next affiliate marketing season. One of the most important things to do is to set new goals and create a plan to market your best converting products. So if your best product made you $x this season set a goal of $2x for next season. And if you made the conversions through PPC or another method, be prepared to launch that method earlier in the season. 
3. We tend to neglect “unfun” tasks like link building. Use this time to focus on the SEO you might have been procrastinating on for the past few months.
4. What marketing tactics can you improve on? Social media, PPC, email, newsletter marketing? Use this time to improve on these marketing methods and put them to strong use to reach your goal of $2x next season.   
5. Affiliates also need to be technical marketers so use this off season time to create that community forum, custom WordPress blog, or to challenge yourself on your CSS skills.

It doesn’t always make sense to focus all efforts on marketing an out-of-season niche, so do take some time during the off season to explore new niches, seasonal or annual. But if seasonal niches seem to be your thing then build on it because mastering a seasonal niche can be extremely lucrative in a very short period of time. But if you think you can do much better with an year-round niche then find one, and don’t feel bad using your seasonal niche as a supporting program.  

Notice the trend for the search term ”pajamas for women” peaks in December and slightly trends for the month of February. Seems there might be a great opportunity here but how could you take advantage of it?