Black Friday & Cyber Monday Postmortem

After a 16 hour detox we are baaaaack with a Black Friday – Cyber Monday post-mortem post before we return to our regularly scheduled programming.

We posted a record-breaking 272 individual deal posts here during the last seven days (ending Cyber Monday night)! The high was 50 on Thanksgiving Day. It averages to around 39 posts per day for the last seven days. This was made possible because I fell behind on updating the “Situation Room” deals summary that I used to do in previous years. Then the waves and waves of deals hit and I simply didn’t have time to post all the new deals, let alone maintain the rolling summary of the latest deals. So the Situation Room was not updated since before Thanksgiving Day. And that allowed for a lot more individual deal-posts to be posted.

So what do you think for next year’s Black Friday / Cyber Monday coverage? Do you prefer the way of this year with even more individual deal posts without a rolling summary? Or the other way around? Please leave a comment or use the online contact form to opine!

One developing item is how to deal with the daily Amazon Gold Box lightning deals. During the Black-Cyber week, they reduced the “visibility window” from the usual 20+ hours to just 4. When I checked during lunch today (yes, I’m even blog-working during lunch) the visibility window was seven hours. So before I make any further decisions, I’ll wait for a couple of days to see where things settle.

In the next few hours I will go through the various posts and try to update / (ENDED) any of the expired offers, but given the volume and chaos, there are reasonable chances I may miss some of the expired deals or expire some still running deals.

This is also a good time for general purpose blog-related feedback! Please leave a comment or use the online contact form to opine!

Comments

  1. S. W. Anderson says

    Bravo for a virtuoso performance. I think the approach used this year was especially easy to follow and helpful. I recognize, though, that it was an incredible amount of work for you. So, I think you should get to make the call. Thanksgiving as a holiday, a time for family and friends, should belong to you, too.
    BTW, thanks for the pointer to a fine deal on the Olympus FL600R flash. It’s something I had considered in the past but decided I didn’t need enough to justify its price. At the refurb price, I could see it. So, I clicked through and got it. I hope that logging in at getolympus didn’t do anything to cause you to lose credit for the sale. I’m not clear on the details of how it works. I also bought a memory card from Adorama off one of you links. Nothing like snapping up a new Canon 5D, or something equally grand, but I hope my clicks and buys were helpful. You’ve earned a lot of clicks and buys. Again, thanks.

    • thanks for the feedback and support! Yes, this year’s approach was more free-flowing. It turns out, having to go back and update the summary repeatedly sort of broke my momentum in previous years. So for next year, in terms of a summary, I’ll just do quick roundups or use special blog-tags to string together “hot deals of the day”. Much faster than maintaining a separate running summary!

      I almost didn’t post the FL600R until I realized that it wasn’t part of the new condition Olympus Black Friday sales. Then the coupon made it a great deal compared to the new condition. All purchases help (thanks!), big and small, memory cards and camera bags and 99c ebooks too! I’m using two affiliate service networks (Viglink and Skimlinks) that make creating affiliate links easier and faster (I don’t have to sign up for each individual affiliate program individually), I’m interchanging between those two for GetOlympus and some other retailers.