There are 82 Days until Christmas.
Christmas is one of the busiest times of the year for many ProBloggers – especially those with product related sites. The number of people searching for information on products that are given as gifts as well as the numbers of people actually buying presents online leap in the lead up to Christmas – the question is – ‘Are you Ready?’
If you start preparing your blog for Christmas in December you’re probably too late. The Christmas rush starts late in November and escalates right through until the big day.
Bloggers need to take account for the fact that if they want Search Engine traffic to bring Christmas traffic that you need to think ahead. It takes day, weeks and even longer to get posts ranking in SE’s.
So how are you preparing your blog for Christmas?
Here are five areas I’ve been working on:
- Deep link Affiliate links – I actually did a lot of work on my blogs in preparation for December a month or two back. In addition to my normal blogging I’ve added hundreds of individualized and relevant Amazon text affiliate links to individual posts on some of my blogs. You can add links to affiliate programs in your sidebars – but the most effective affiliates actually add links to actual articles and posts (hence the name ‘deep linking’). I found last year that my Amazon earnings for November and December were triple my normal levels – so this year will be watching for similar or even better results.
- SEO – I’ve also been going through a lot of older posts and each of my blogs and have been tweaking them on an SEO front in the hope that it will help increase my rankings in Google and the other SE’s. Search Engines like fresh content – so consider adding new information and updating some of your older posts to give them some freshness.
- eMiniMall Optimization – I’ve so happy to have found the eMiniMalls – they are almost the perfect type of ad for the Christmas rush as they give readers a picture, price and comparative options for making a purchase. I’ve spent the last couple of days adding them to most of my blogs and working on their integration into the blogs in terms of positioning and design. I have a feeling that they will be my big winner this year. In terms of optimization tips for eMiniMalls – I’ll write about this later in the week – but I’m finding that the best positions so far similar positions to clever Adsense positioning and design.
- Adsense Optimization – Similarly I’ve been casting a critical eye over my blogs and their Adsense ads in terms of design and positioning. Sometimes things get a bit stale over time if you leave them in the one spot and its worth doing some review in this area and experimenting with new ways of configuring them so that in the last month or so you can have them fine tuned.
- Christmas Posts and Suggested Gifts – I generally don’t target specific ‘Christmas Words’ (there is so much competition) but I will be running a few posts over the coming weeks on a few of my blogs witch suggested Gift items which I’ll link prominently in my sidebars and menus. Of course these posts will have affiliate links embedded into them as well as the normal Amazon ads.
So on a blogging front – what are you doing to prepare yourself for Christmas this year? Are you thinking ahead about positioning yourself to be a part of the increased traffic and earnings that it generally brings?
