If you’re like me, the approach of Christmas means that you’re already thinking about how to improve your Internet business next year.

And ‘improvement’ often means saving money on your business dealings.

To help you do just that, here are some pretty sweet deals that I’ve found that are just for Internet marketers.

1. BlueHost Web Hosting

Usually $6.95, Bluehost’s rate is down to $5.95 per month and here’s what you get:

• Unlimited Domain Hosting
• Unlimited GB Hosting Space
• Unlimited GB File Transfer
• Unlimited E-mail Accounts
• Free Domain
• Free Site Builder w/ templates
• Secure Shell, SSL, FTP, Stats
• CGI, Ruby (RoR), Perl, PHP, MySQL
• $75 Free Google Credit
• 99.9% Network Uptime Guarantee

Seriously, if you don’t have your own domain name and hosting yet, get it NOW with this incredible deal. INCLUDES a FREE domain registration.

Or, buy someone else a domain name and hosting for a year or two, i.e. your nephew… which is what I did for our godson when he was born.

2. Wishlist Member

Thinking of starting a membership site in 2012? Look no farther than Wishlist Member — which is what I use at Affiliate Blogger PRO. For a limited time, the WishList team is
giving away over $400+ in gifts to their customers. The offer ends December 31st, 2011 @ 11pm PST. So if you order WishList Member, you’ll get a bunch of very cool “extras” – including custom drawn icons, graphics, plugins and
more.

3. SBI! Site Build it!

SBI! is an all-in-1 step-by-step system of process-and-software that builds thriving businesses. Their new Blockbuilder (BB2) and Site Designer (a 3.5 million dollar upgrade to SBI!), is a slick, seriously advanced site designer and builder.

Their Christmas deal is a Buy one, get one free holiday special that ends December 25th, 2011 at midnight. Includes a 90 Day Money-Back Satisfaction & Success Guarantee. If you want all the bells and whistles included (not a DIY project), SBI! is the way to go.)

4. Trend Micro

Protect your business / computer investments!! Get savings of 40% off on all of Trend Micro’s best-selling products until January 5, 2011. Includes Trend Micro Antivirus +, Trend Micro Titanium Internet Security and Trend Micro Titanium Maximum Security. NOTE: Trend Micro is the antivirus service that I use personally.

5. Underground Seminar

Give yourself the gift of a great Internet marketing conference this year. Yanik Silver is hosting his 8th Underground Seminar and this year will be no less dazzling than the rest. Previous speakers include Bob Parsons (CEO of GoDaddy), Tony Hsieh (CEO of http://netprofitstoday.com/go/zappos), Tim Ferris (Tim Ferris – Multiple New York Times Best-Selling author including the The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich), Gary Vaynerchuk (New York Times and Wall Street Journal Best-Selling author) and yours truly.

The event is ALWAYS sold out, and getting in early gets you a discount and extra bonuses. This is one conference I do recommend for those who want to make the most of their Internet marketing businesses. Order NOW and you’ll save 40% … The Regular Price $3495, Today it’s $1995.

Oh and don’t forget, I’m keeping my Academy / Affiliate Blogger PRO pricing down at a ridiculously all-time low until the New Year as well. So if you want to get in on that deal, sign up before it goes away forever!

Comments, questions or suggestions? Please leave a comment below!

Cheers,

Cyber Monday (see Affiliate Marketing in November) sales in 2011 were up 20 percent from a year earlier as of noon Eastern time according to International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) According to ComScore,online purchasing was forecast to rise to $1.2 billion from $1.03 billion last year.

And it’s not just the Americans who made online sales records during the Christmas shopping frenzy. Folks all around the world seem to be happy to open their wallets during the festive season, even during a recession!

Offerings are as varied as the individual recipients, but there are definitely ‘staples’ in the realm of gift-giving.

Think electronics, clothing, toys & games, books, jewelry, food & beverages, personalized items and keepsakes…. and oh, just go take a look at what’s trending at Gifts.com Top Picks for Christmas to get very specific ideas.

And as is the case every other month of the year, December includes a number of holidays and unique special event days that you can tie into your affiliate marketing promotions.

Month-long celebrations:

• Hi Neighbor Month
• National Stress Free Family Holiday Month
• Read A New Book Month
• Safe Toy and Gift Month
• Universal Human Rights Month
• Write to a Friend Month

Most notable special days in December 2011:

• December 11, Rosalind Gardner’s birthday (I stopped counting at 50.)
• December 20, Hanukkah (begins at sundown the previous day)
• December 25, Christmas
• December 26, Kwanzaa
• December 26, Boxing Day (UK, Canada, Ireland)
• December 31, New Year’s Eve

Celebrations by Day in December 2011:

• 1 Eat a Red Apple Day
• 1 World Aids Awareness Day
• 2 National Fritters Day
• 3 National Roof over Your Head Day
• 4 Santas’ List Day
• 4 Wear Brown Shoes Day
• 5 Bathtub Party Day
• 5 Repeal Day
• 6 St. Nicholas Day
• 6 Mitten Tree Day
• 6 Put on your own Shoes Day
• 7 International Civil Aviation Day
• 7 Letter Writing Day
• 7 National Cotton Candy Day
• 7 Pearl Harbor Day
• 8 National Brownie Day
• 8 Take it in the Ear Day
• 9 Christmas Card Day
• 9 National Pastry Day
• 10 Human Rights Day
• 11 International Children’s Day
• 11 National Noodle Ring Day
• 12 National Ding-a-Ling Day
• 12 Poinsettia Day
• 13 Ice Cream Day
• 13 Violin Day
• 14 National Bouillabaisse Day
• 15 Bill of Rights Day
• 15 National Lemon Cupcake Day
• 16 National Chocolate Covered Anything Day
• 17 National Maple Syrup Day
• 18 Bake Cookies Day
• 18 National Roast Suckling Pig Day
• 19 Look for an Evergreen Day
• 19 Oatmeal Muffin Day
• 20 Go Caroling Day
• 21 Forefather’s Day
• 21 Humbug Day
• 21 National Flashlight Day
• 21 Look on the Bright Side Day
• 22 National Date Nut Bread Day
• 22 Winter Solstice
• 23 Festivus
• 23 Roots Day
• 24 National Chocolate Day
• 24 National Egg Nog Day
• 25 Christmas Day
• 25 National Pumpkin Pie Day
• 26 Boxing Day
• 27 Make Cut Out Snowflakes Day
• 27 National Fruitcake Day
• 28 Card Playing Day
• 29 Pepper Pot Day
• 30 National Bicarbonate of Soda Day
• 31 Make Up Your Mind Day
• 31 New Year’s Eve
• 31 Unlucky Day

My favorites (in addition to my birthday) are St. Nicholas Day (SinterKlaas in Dutch), the solstice, Festivus and Christmas. LOTS and LOTS of gift-exchanging to be done.

What are your plans for the festive season?

With Christmas and New Year’s nigh, it is time again to reflect on what has been a most incredible and rewarding journey.

It’s almost hard to believe that I am about to start my 14th year as an online entrepreneur, affiliate marketer and coach.

But that achievement would have been impossible without you — my readers, students, clients and customers.

So, to all those who have followed me throughout the years, asking questions that inspired me to persue greater knowledge to share, I say a great big THANK YOU!

With heartfelt gratitude, I wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas and a Happy, Healthy and Prosperous New Year.

Cheers,
Ros

Well, it’s now mid-July which of course got me to thinking about Christmas… because summer heat is always such a gift.

Ho, ho, ho.

Actually, I was musing about a ‘Christmas in July’ party that I and my friends had a very long time ago. We roasted a turkey, decorated the rental and strayed from tradition a bit by dining on the boathouse roof.

After entertaining myself with those delightful memories for awhile, I wondered if other people were contemplating Christmas in July.

Finding out was easy enough. I went to Google Insights for Search and searched for the term “Christmas” with results filtered over the last 30 days.

And it looks like I’m not the only one thinking of Christmas in July.

However, I certainly hope that those who were searching for “Christmas tree” in July were thinking about the artificial variety.

To the right of the most prevalent searches related to “Christmas”, Insights reports rising searches.

What is most notable perhaps are the returns for “Christmas holidays”. This is a term that travel bloggers might want to concentrate some effort on over the next couple of months as people plan their visits to (or away from) the relatives.

The rise of ‘Gifts’ and ‘stocking’ are good signs.

Recalling the elbow-to-rib hits I’ve taken in malls on Boxing Day, I know I’m not the only one who starts shopping early for Christmas. And let’s not forget the ‘nuts about Christmas’ types, who keep the brick-and-mortar “Christmas Store” viable all year long.

After seeing those results, I was getting really curious, and had to see if anyone was capitilizing on the term “christmas holidays 2010″ during the merry month of July.

The search returned 20 results and no advertisers.

Broadening the search to “Christmas 2010″ returned tons of results (mostly related to toys to be marketed this year) and only 1 advertiser.

So, it you want to get in there – now is a great time.

Remember — Christmas is ‘evergreen’, and I’m not talking about the trees.

The holiday happens every 365 days (which all those frantic last-minute shoppers seem to forget until December 24th), so there’s always a market, and that market is huge, even in July.

If you’re nuts about Christmas (or any other holiday), you may want to consider taking advantage of the opportunity to get ahead of the pack now.

There are so many different ways you could approach the niche. Create a content-rich site about Christmas traditions, crafts, or fill it with holiday recipes. How about sharing tips for Christmas decorating schemes or tips for surviving the holidays?

Monetizing the site will be easy. Find merchants at affiliate networks that offer exceptionally unique gifts, toys, ornaments and/or books to sell on your site.

Advertise using PPC, and keep your Google Adwords bids low until December, when your sales will soar.

Last, but certainly not least, build and work your list. Share some Christmas in July spirit with your subscribers and you’ll take your place at the top of the tree as a *star* affiliate by the time December rolls around.

Ho, Ho, HO. Merry (July) Christmas!

Well, I just finished prepping the house and there’s still 24 hours left before my friends start arriving for our Christmas dinner festivities. Somewhere in between polishing the stemware and washing the kitchen floor, I realized that I already have almost everything I wanted for Christmas.

Snow (and lots of it).

The safe return of my good friend from north of 60 (that’s the 60th parallel where it’s minus 42 degrees celsius at the moment).

Plans with loved ones (in other words, the people who know you best but like you anyway).

The arrival of my Amazon order of 12 old Meryl Streep movies that I either didn’t have or hadn’t seen.

Fully functional servers (thank you, Steve!).

A definite plan to work directly with you in 2009 (one-on-one coaching, phone number & all) to help you get your Internet business off the ground… details of which whill be released just as soon as I’ve got a functional desktop* again (* Christmas wish #7 yet to be realized), most likely shortly after I get back from Affiliate Summit (if it’s the motherboard as Ori suspects).

Six out of 7 realized wishes is pretty remarkable. Only slightly less if you count the usual ‘peace on earth’.

And this one I fervently hope comes true… a wish for you and yours to enjoy all the very best of the season – a happy and safe holiday, good times with family and friends, prosperity in the New Year and the ability to share generously with those less fortunate.

So, what are/were you Christmas wishes? Care to share? Please leave a comment below.

In a December 3rd press release, Comscore resported that Cyber Monday saw $846 million in online spending. Although spending over the holiday season to date ($12.03 billion) is down by 2% from last year, Cyber Monday’s online sales were up by a whopping 15% over 2007 sales. Take a look at the following screenshot where you’ll note that the preceding weekend also saw a jump in online sales by 19% over last year.

With online sales up marginally on Black Friday and significantly on Cyber Monday, analysts are still predicting a decline in the months to come. Considering that the job loss stats out today report 533,000 more jobs in the U.S. were lost in November – the biggest decline since 1974 – the outlook could look pretty grim.

HOWEVER, that depends entirely on what you are selling. For example, this is probably not the best time to start a new jewelry site. Want to know what you should sell? Read 8 Recession-Proof Product & Service Ideas for Affiliates… and stay tuned for more great recession-proof niches and product ideas. Let’s prove the analysts wrong!

Although it was suggested that my rosey outlook for online spending this holiday season was overly optimistic and perhaps even quite naive, early results indicate that Black Friday shoppers have seen the light – opting to stay home and shop online instead.

(Not to mention that they also saved time, energy, verhicle wear & tear, shipping costs and a whole lot of stress!)

In a press release this morning, comScore, a leader in measuring the digital world, reported its tracking of holiday season retail e-commerce spending for the first 28 days of the November – December 2008 holiday season.

For the holiday season-to-date, $10.41 billion has been spent online, marking a 4-percent decline versus the corresponding days last year, while Black Friday saw $534 million in online spending, up 1 percent. For the combination of Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday, online sales were up 2 percent relative to last year.

So much for the meltdown. Now bring on Cyber Monday!

The (Canadian Thanksgiving) turkey has barely been digested and the Halloween candy hasn’t yet been shelled out, but it’s beginning to look a LOT like Christmas online.

According to Advertising.com’s second annual Holiday Shopping Study conducted to analyze consumer shopping behavior and expectations for the 2007 holiday season, results indicated that 2007 will be strong for online shopping, with 84 percent of respondents planning to spend as much as or more online than they did during the 2006 holiday season.

Also according to the survey, consumers plan to start their holiday shopping earlier this year than in 2006.

Fifty percent of survey respondents indicated that they plan to start shopping for holiday gifts in October or earlier. In 2006, 44% said they would start shopping after Thanksgiving, and 15% said they would wait until the last two weeks of December. (Perhaps the latter 15% wised up when they missed retailers’ cut-off dates and their gifts didn’t arrive in time for Christmas last year?)

Although they may start comparing products and searching for gift ideas earlier, the study indicated that most consumers will wait until November or December to make their purchases.

Advertising.com’s research supports this, with data showing that conversion rates increase from about 10% in the third week in November to almost 20% one month later. At 20%, December 15 was the highest conversion day during the 2006 season.

When asked “What are your top three reasons for going online during the holiday season?”, 54% of participants responded that deals and discounts were their primary reason, closely followed by ‘save time/convenience’ and ‘compare product prices’ at 51% and 50% respectively.

When asked what types of online holiday offers/promotions survey participants found most enticing, free shipping led the pack followed by sales, coupons, rebates and special gift packages.

With these survey results in mind, please take a look at my article, ‘10 Ways to Get Your Affiliate Site Ready for Christmas‘.

The (Canadian Thanksgiving) turkey has barely been digested and the Halloween candy hasn’t yet been shelled out, but it’s beginning to look a LOT like Christmas online.

According to Advertising.com’s second annual Holiday Shopping Study conducted to analyze consumer shopping behavior and expectations for the 2007 holiday season, results indicated that 2007 will be strong for online shopping, with 84 percent of respondents planning to spend as much as or more online than they did during the 2006 holiday season.

That’s GREAT news for affiliate marketers and the good news doesn’t stop there.

To read the rest of the forecast and get access to my article, ’10 Ways to Get Your Affiliate Site Ready for Christmas’ please see Christmas 2007: Holiday Shopping Forecast.

To help affiliates get their sites ready for Christmas, Jeremy Palmer and I have made our webinar recording from last Black Friday available to anyone who missed the original call. The recording is 1 hour 18 minutes in length and covers everything you need to know about making the most of the holiday shopping season.

The webinar is being offered for a nominal fee of $9.99 through PayPal. Go to the PayPal order page and your download will be available immediately after purchase.

In other news, we had lots of positive response to last week’s Revolution News theme discussion.

And lastly, good news for those who signed up for PPC Classroom, Wordtracker has its first-ever promo going on. Get the coupon codes here.

Til next time — work on those Holiday promos and Prosper!

First there’s Black Friday, then Cyber Monday and on Linda Buquet’s blog today, I learned about yet another day in the holiday season: eDay.

eDay is a term coined by Coremetrics™ as the top sales day of the Christmas season.

San Mateo, Calif.—November 6 , 2006—Coremetrics™, the leading provider of on-demand web analytics and precision marketing solutions, today released data dispelling the marketing myth that “Cyber Monday,” the Monday after Thanksgiving, is the largest online shopping day of the holiday season. With 2006 U.S. holiday eCommerce forecast data from its LIVEmark benchmarking service, Coremetrics advises retailers to expect their highest traffic day to be Cyber Monday, and the top sales day one week after Cyber Monday, which falls this year on December 4th. Coremetrics predicts that sales on this date, which it has coined “eDay,” will be 19% higher than “Cyber Monday,” and that 2006 overall holiday retail sales will increase 16% over last year’s holiday season.

Read the rest of the press release.

And let’s not forget that there’s RosDay coming on December 11th… but more about that tomorrow.

Whatever the day, every day during the holiday season is a great day for affiliate marketing.