Experienced affiliate marketers who rely on organic search know that they have to build Christmas sites in the summer. That way the spiders have plenty of time to visit their site, SEO can be tweaked, and getting indexed is a done deal.

But even if you’ve missed out on building a winter holiday site this year, here are a few ways you can still cash in on the annual shopping feeding frenzy.

Idea #1 – Try PPC
For this to work, you need a subscription to Wordtracker (don’t even bother with Overture’s free tool), some creativity, the willingness to invest some money, and a little bit of luck. Even though PPC competition is fierce during the holidays, using Wordtracker can help you target opportunities outside of Google’s Adwords.

Believe it or not, good keyword opportunities can still be found in Yahoo! Search Marketing, LookSmart, and other PPC engines, but only if you’re willing to dig and think outside the box. Instead of focusing on the obvious — like keyphrases with “gift” in them — do some deep research into generic terms with qualifying phrases.

For example, we recently found some interesting opportunities while looking for “funny gifts for senior citizens” and “fun gifts for seniors.” “Senior,” “gift,” and “fun” are all pretty generic, but combining them and using Wordtracker’s Thesaurus generated plenty of terms for potentially profitable campaigns.

Idea #2 – Use EBay
You may not be able to promote affiliate products on EBay, but why not use it to grab some holiday traffic. Offer inexpensive loss leaders, viral reports, Christmas screensavers… anything that you can brand or that will drive traffic to your site.

Idea #3 – Paid Inclusion
This can get your web site indexed FAST, often in less than a week. Just remember that paying to get into a search engine doesn’t guarantee a higher rank. You’ll still need to optimize, and possibly add some PPC to drive quality traffic. To give this a try, investigate Positiontech.com and InfoSpider.com, two of the most popular and speedy services.

Idea #4 – Add Content!
If you’ve already got a site with some decent traffic, can you find a way to spin some holiday content onto your most popular pages? Or can you figure out a way to “Christmas-ize” your site by adding 3-5 targeted pages offering gift ideas? If spiders regularly visit your site, those pages will get indexed fast.

Idea #5 – Don’t Forget Your Opt-In List
Now’s the time to offer creative upsells and cross-sells to your mailing list. Brainstorm some lowcost “Christmas bonuses,” discounts, free gifts, or personalized holiday messages. Send your subscribers to a special pages that also include content like gift-wrapping ideas, holiday poems and quotes, and royalty free holiday clip art.

Idea #6 – Offer A Shopping Service
How about this for an instant consulting business? Start an “online shopping service.” You’ll need to target people who are so busy they don’t even have time to search for merchandise online, let alone fight crowds at the mall. Your service will be locating unusual, hard to find, or specialized items, possibly offering comparisons of several products or merchants, and sending your recommendations to your clients… for a fee, of course.

First, do some creative brainstorming about the products you know best, particularly hard goods. Since you won’t actually be making purchases, you’ll need to decide what the hot niches are, as well as HOW you’ll actually find people interested in your service.

Second, look for niche markets of harried people you can target. PPC, joint ventures, or forum marketing will probably be your best bets, but don’t rule out offline marketing.
For example, if you live in a busy high rise, you might be able to bring in several thousand dollars over the holidays simply by distributing business cards to your neighbors. Or if you’re in a small town, $100 worth of flyers might keep you busy all season.

Finally, decide on a pricing model. You might charge a flat, per search fee, in which you locate a particular type of item online and send a report about availability, prices, shipping, etc. Or, you could offer an upscale, exclusive, and yes, expensive service in which you provide detailed product information, comparison charts, and URLs. In this case, you’d charge by the hour or a flat fee “for the season.”

Whichever model you choose, make sure you set up a detailed web site which outlines the terms and conditions of your service, as well as a PayPal button or other credit card acceptance mechanism. And don’t forget to sell all the BENEFITS of this service — the time, hassle, and money your clients are bound to save!

Mistake #1 – Irrelevant products.

Are we stating the obvious? Sure. But too many marketers devote valuable time to finding a good niche and terrific keywords, then blow valuable web site real estate on the same banner ads for mortgages or debt consolidation.

If your site is financial, those banners are fine. But if it’s about parent-child relationships, why would you choose a product that fights against the theme of your site?

How to avoid this mistake? Choose your merchants BEFORE you build your site. Then do everything you can to match your target market to your chosen products. This way you’ll always be selling something RELEVANT to your niche.

Mistake #2 – No niche.

It’s amazing how many niche marketing sites don’t have a REAL niche! Just to make sure the concept of a niche is crystal clear, let’s look at an example:

“Home buyers” is NOT a niche – it’s a HUGE mass market audience.

“Home buyers with credit problems” is a niche, though it’s going to be way too large and competitive.

“First time home buyers with no credit history” is much, much better – with a niche like that you’d have a lot of work ahead of you, but you’d also have a fighting chance.

If you’re stuck with a site that doesn’t have a real niche, you can do one of three things.

1. Get rid of it – either by selling it or abandoning it.

2. Revamp it by choosing a tighter focus, splitting it into smaller sites, or paring away what doesn’t belong.

3. Forget about niche marketing, and go for quantity – not quality – traffic.

Mistake #3 – No opt-in mechanism.

Niche markets tend to be members of a community. They share the same interests and passions. And the more targeted your site, the more likely your visitors will be to sign up for your newsletter or updates list. So why would you pass up this chance to collect their email addresses and other contact information?

Correcting this is easy. It costs almost nothing these days to get an outstanding autoresponder service. Sign up, then spend a few hours getting an ezine, mini-course, or update list sign up box on every page of your site.

Mistake #4 – No virals or follow up.

Know what’s worse than not having an opt-in list? Having one, and not doing anything with it!

If you’ve got a tightly focused niche site, it’s not difficult to create a set of follow-ups. The more narrow the niche, the more hungry your subscribers will be for any kind of news or updates. So once you’ve followed our advice in #4 above, write up a series of 50 short follow-ups.

Now don’t run away screaming! Sure, 50 messages of 300-400 words each will take you a few days. But they don’t have to be elaborate. Each one can be a brief hello, followed by a simple link to some content or a free download on your site.

In the case of an updates list, all you need is a template where you can fill in a URL or two every time you update something on your site.

No matter what kind of content you send, “train” your subscribers to accept advertising messages. Include a line or two of promotional language for your affiliate products in every mailing, no matter how brief.

Mistake #5 – Site design mistakes that no visitor will tolerate.

All sites – whether they’re targeted to a micro-niche or meant for a mass market – should follow the rules of usability.

That means your site should load fast (even on a slow dial-up connection), have logical navigation, and be easy to read. And any niche site that doesn’t pay attention to SEO is making a big mistake.

Keywords are the primary way your niche is going to find you. If your niche site isn’t performing as well as you think it should, take a long hard look at its design and your SEO strategy. If either are lacking, it’s time for a redesign.