The Black Friday Niche Blueprint

Black Friday, one of America’s largest shopping days, happens on November 29^th.

Last year, an estimated $59 billion was spent which can tell you that this is a prime opportunity to earn some big affiliate wins.

Creating a niche affiliate site centered around Black Friday is a little difficult considering the steep competition but thanks to niching you can find great opportunities and success if you position yourself as the expert and put in the time to get it ranked.

You still have plenty of time to get things started but the sooner, the better.

The following will provide you with a blueprint for developing a Black Friday niche website.

Step 1: The Site Setup

This has been a running series (take a look through the archives) but we’re still going to mention our guide to building a profitable website since it gives you the details of setting up a website.

Let’s focus on the main items for this post, though …

Domain

Most of the best names related to Black Friday have been taken because of their value but that doesn’t mean that you can’t find a good mix of play-on-words or use your creativity to find one of your own.

For example, you could try something like:

BlackFridayDealPicks.com
BestBFAds.com
BlackFridayInsider.com

I’m not sure if those are already taken but you get the drift.

Associate ‘Black Friday’ with a sense of urgency since it is just one day of the year so perhaps go with words like ‘sale’, ‘hot’, or ‘limited’.

Themes

I would recommend two different types of themes for this niche site (depending on your commitment):

A shop-front which acts like an ecommerce store but uses affiliate links, instead
A blog/magazine style that has built-in support for featuring large pictures, videos, and ratings

The shop-style site will take the longest and will be very tedious because you’ll need to create individual listings for the products that are going on sale. However, having it setup like an eCommerce site will let you show off comparison pricing from multiple retailers (that you’re affiliated with) and it gives you the chance to keep the site running, stand-alone, once Black Friday is over with a switch of the price listings.

The blog/magazine style will work the best if you really want to push the list and round-up posts especially if you want to have big features like video, photos, and utilize reviews to encourage clicks.

Here are a few resources for you:

Structure

The structure is fairly simple and I would just say to take a look at the major Black Friday sales sites and go off what they’re doing since they’ve already put the research and development into it.

Personally, I’d go with:

Home
Ads
Deals
Stores
Guides

Keep it as simple as possible because you want someone to have the ability to get in, see the deal, and get on over to the page as fast as possible because the items sell out, fast.

Step 2: General and Niche Affiliate Offers

What can I say about items and offers for Black Friday?

People buy basically anything and everything because it’s at such a cheap price.

The big items people generally look for are:

Clothes
Electronics
Promo codes
Toys
Gadgets

These are broad items but you can always go deeper depending on your niche website.

For example: you could create a small Black Friday niche site around offering the best deals on bicycles and then cater to all kinds of makes and model.

The stores to promote? The main retailers because that’s where people are looking.

You can figure: Walmart, Target, Staples, Best Buy, Amazon, and more.

Just look at which of the main retailers are hosting the deals, hop over to their site, become an affiliate, and you’re good to go.

Step 3: Content Ideas and Affiliate Promotions

What I would recommend doing, first, is to take a look at the content being created by the existing Black Friday niche websites, such as:

BlackFriday.com
TheBlackFriday.com
BFAds.net

Then, I would take a look at the most frequently purchased items from the past years (which you can find in this Huffington Post article).

This will give you an idea of what you can begin creating content around.

With these in mind, I would suggest:

A complete guide to Black Friday
List posts of individual product categories
List posts of niche product categories
Black Friday tips
Reviews

For example: you could do a variety of posts such as “Our Top 10 Picks of the Best LCD TV’s to Buy during Black Friday”.

As for promotional efforts go – the oldies still work the best:

Create an email list to keep individuals updated with new deals coming up
Develop a live blog feature for new announcements
Work hard on social media linking over to specific pages of your site (that are affiliated)

Get a jump start on these items by creating boilerplate list and round-up posts, now, and then once you know the deals start pushing it hard through these channels – especially if you have a budget and can conduct paid advertising.

Earn Big on Black Friday

Despite dips in the economy, Americans continue to go out and purchase like crazy during Black Friday.

The competition may be high due to websites that have been able to dominate the holiday for years in a row but there’s always wiggle room for niche websites. Hell, even if you just link over deals to friends and family that have intent to purchase you’re likely to earn a quick bump in affiliate revenue.

Just remember to evergreen the site so you can use it again, next year.