Valentines Day for Affiliates

Next to Christmas, Valentine's Day is one of the biggest shopping holidays of the year. Close to a billion dollars will be spent for Valentine's day, and affiliates are in an excellent position to grab a piece of the pie. Most of the shopping is done the week prior to the 14th of February, with another surge occurring just a couple days before the day as shoppers search for those last minute ideas and gifts.

The expected usual suspects: jewelry, flowers, chocolate and other gifts are the hottest items for the Valentine's Holiday.  Thankfully, most respective merchants have affiliate programs in all of these niches.  Men average over $100 spending for the holiday, with woman averaging just over $50. While it's true that many people are actually turned off by the commercialization of this day, 30% of people surveyed by the NPD Group appreciate the romance of the day, and 8% are pressured into making a purchase, "so they don't get into trouble."

Jewelry and the like will be the most promoted items, however do consider that women might also be making purchases for men. Also consider, once people are prompted into a "buying mood", anything might get purchased for anyone, including purchases for oneself!  According to Google checkout, 50% of people shopping for Valentine's Day make multiple purchases.  According to the National Retail Federation, 22.4 percent of men and 7.3 percent of women plan to purchase jewelry.

AMWSO runs several jewelry and fashion programs that are positioned well for the Valentine's holiday. We've set up a special Valentine's Day Affiliate Programs page to highlight the specials, deals and offers that are being promoted just for Valentine's Day.

This is really the last gift giving holiday until Mother's Day in the USA (although some people gift for Easter), so gear up, get those banners, links, promotions and coupons posted!

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A First for Affiliate Applications on Facebook

I've seen a lot of chatter around about, how will merchants use systems like Facebook for affiliate marketing, or even how will affiliates use it, lots of chatter, little action, until Scott sent me an application he has developed to look at, bingo!

Scott (aka Mallicious) has created a really cool, coupon sharing, snipping and commenting application for Facebook, that allows any user to plug in the coupon system to my profile, share it, share individual coupons, snip coupons for later use and comment them

We are the first social shopping engine to combine coupons, deals and price comparison to help consumers discover deals through their social graph.

Users can quickly and easily create their own deal feed that is automatically combined as "Social Deals" for each of their friends. Consumers can now get gift ideas, discounts and coupons from their personal social circle.

The main coupon system page shows lots of data for the individual coupons too, snipped how many times and community comments. Might be I've overlooked, or not been invited to use other Facebook applications that open the way to merchants to get involved, but this is the first affiliate marketing application on Facebook that I have seen that adds value and looks like it can succeed in leveraging a social network.

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