a single source, nothing corroborates it

Point everything at the window when they buy

Find out when your buyers actually do the task, then aim the year's promotion into that window: schedule the biggest content piece to land during the sale, submit to deal aggregators whose audience is there for offers anyway, and time other pushes so the incoming visitor arrives while conversion is peaking.

The method

1. 01

   Sites that aggregate deals are safe to submit to during a sale because their audience is there for offers and cannot be annoyed by yours.

2. 02

   Schedule your biggest content piece of the year to publish in the same window as your sale, so the incoming traffic hits a page that is already discounted.

3. 03

   Time your other marketing pushes to land inside the sale window, because a visitor arriving while conversion is peaking is worth more than the same visitor on a normal day.

4. 04

   Learn when your buyers do the task: for wedding purchases the sales land on Sunday nights, when people are planning.

5. 05

   A discount event can outperform every feature you might have shipped instead, so treat the choice of what to work on as the real lever rather than execution speed.

What it returned

• 2021

  Zue deliberately timed part five of his Django JavaScript series to overlap Black Friday 2021; Pegasus took about $32,000 in ten days, half his target for the whole year, and finished the month at $31,253.54, up 223%.

• Zue limited outside promotion to Black Friday deal aggregators.

• Zue promoted a newly released conference talk aimed at Python developers during his sale; it reached number one on the Django subreddit for that month, got reshared elsewhere, and he estimates it earned hundreds to thousands of dollars.

• Two of Zue's sales came in overnight on a Sunday, which he identified as a popular wedding-planning time

Sources

• Lessons from Running a Sale that Earned 3 Month's Profit in a WeekCory Zue · coryzue.com · Where to promote your sale · 2020-12-09
• Holy Crap!Cory Zue · coryzue.com · Last Month’s Profit · 2021-12-02
• Week 27 RetrospectiveCory Zue · coryzue.com · 2017-09-25