Holiday season is when everyone tends to enjoy themselves more but it’s also the time when they’re running around buying gifts, organizing dinners and trying to wrap up left over work. This means that they tend to spend less time online and thus, bloggers have a tough time reaching out to their audience. If you are a blogger then you might have figured out that the number of readers have reduced and thus you have to make an instant impact to keep your readers loyal. You also have to manage your blogging schedule and make sure that your blog isn’t deserted during the holidays. Here are 7 tips to help you with both your content and the way you manage it:
- Plan Everything
By everything, I mean EVERYTHING! From you holiday topics, the image you need, the number of blogs you’re going to do, when each post is going out and how you’re going to handle comments/replies. A great way to do this is to build a blogging calendar. Blogging calendars are useful for all times of the year but they become an essential during the holiday season. Planning your work also gives you the opportunity to test out topics beforehand and see what your audience responds to best. It gives you the space to create quality content in the minimum amount of time. You don’t have to postpone or shift your holiday plans to accommodate for writing, posting or responding to comments. If it seems like an impossible task, you can hire external blogging services to write and post for you.
- Create Holiday Gift Guides
Holiday gift guides are a good way to connect with your audience. Everyone’s looking for ideas to get the perfect gift and woo their families and friends. This is the perfect time to advertise your blog or affiliated products to your audience, without being too upfront about it. Reach out to brands in your niche and form partnerships. This allows you to increase your revenue while being helpful to your audience. You can create numerous gift guides to target all the verticals in your blog or make just one gift guide for a specific target audience.
- Have Events and Offers
Everyone is more willing to spend during the holidays. It’s a great idea to have special events and offers that will help your audience. Work with your partners/affiliates to provide an exclusive offer for just your readers. Make sure the offers have expiry dates to create a sense of urgency amongst readers. Host giveaways, where lucky winners get a special prize for performing a desired action – this could be subscribing to your blog, sharing your blog posts on social media or buying gated content. The action could be anything that is relevant to your niche and can be monetized. The prize/gift for the giveaway must also be related to your niche. For example, if you have sports blog, you could giveaway match tickets to a local match.
- Maximize your Social Media Efforts
Since most people take a little time off during the holidays, they’re more likely to browse on the web. As a blogger, you have the chance to bring in new readers and remind old readers about your blog. Also, if you decide to slow down on your blog during the holiday season, staying active on social media is a must. You cannot give your audience the chance to forget about you and move on to competitors’ blogs. Post constant social media updates and squeeze a few links in there. Twitter is great for this – you can tweet about anything you want and give out links once in a while to keep your audience up to date. DrumUp is a great tool for this as you can schedule posts on multiple accounts.
- Give Back
Holidays are all about giving back to the community. As I mentioned before, you can host events, offers or giveaways with affiliated brands and products. However, if you want to give back to the less fortunate, you can host all these offers and giveaways in partnership with a charity or non-profit organization. Choose a cause that you’re passionate about and connect with organizations that fight for the same cause. You can then host campaigns where you giveaway something to this charity in return for your audience’s performing actions. For example, you could create gated content where a part of the fee goes to a charity. You can urge audience to join the campaign and donate individually as well.
- Curate Content from Other Sources
Content curation is the easiest way to be engaged with your audience. Curating content from other sources allows to cut down time on original content creation, during the holiday season. Curating content from top sources gets you recognized and the audience will perceive you to be knowledgeable. It may also get recognized by the sources and you might get a shout out in return. You get more time to focus on life rather than writing and posting. Curated content can be scheduled days/weeks ahead of time using tools like DrumUp.
- Recycle Old Content
Creating fresh content can be a hassle when you’re running around trying to please everyone. It is a good idea to re-use and modify old content. You could add more points to previously created lists or do a follow up piece in relation to an older posts. You might not think a certain post has gotten enough views, this would be a good time to republish it with slight modifications. Evergreen content is very helpful for this, these content pieces are easy to rehash and republish. You can recycle content in different formats be it videos, image posts, or maybe even eBooks.
A general rule for creating holiday content is to keep it short, especially if you’re blogging for your business, as people don’t have the time to read long posts. You can split up long posts into 2 or 3 parts and post accordingly. Use these 7 tips wisely to get the most out of your blog this holiday season. If you’re still having trouble handling your blog, consider hiring blog writing services.
Happy Holidays!