#092: How to Boost Your Blog Income During the Holidays
Are you ready to boost your blog income during the holidays, because it is not too late!
This post will help you put a plan in place to increase your revenue in Q4 before the year is over.
Most businesses generate the bulk of their revenue in Q4, so if you’re not sure what to do first, listen to my newest podcast episode where Paula Rollo and I share our best tips for how to have a successful Q4 and grow your income!
We will also be giving tips for the beginning of the year when Q1 hits and we all have some fun new gadgets to play with.
Before we dive into today’s topic, I want to encourage you to head over to my Facebook group, The MiloTree Mastermind group, where I am going live every Monday to discuss my biggest takeaways from the podcast.
I’m focusing on building our community and would love to have you join in! So, head over to Facebook and I’ll see you there!
Table of Contents
Creating Gift Guides for the Holidays
Gift guides are huge. I know you’ve seen your favorite bloggers sharing gift guides throughout the year and you can create one for your audience.
The thing to remember is that your gift guides need to be niched down to match your blog content.
Brands are great at the more generic types of gift guides, like, “The Top 10 Gifts for Foodies.”
Don’t try to compete with the brands on the generic guides. Instead, make your guides niched and unique. Really narrow down the focus of your guides.
Think about your blog content and which posts are super successful for you, and build your gift guides off of that content.
Listeners, Paula shared some truly genius ideas for content that maybe isn’t a traditional gift guide but brings in tons of affiliate sales. Listen in starting at the 5:10 mark to have your mind blown in the best way!
Optimizing Existing Content for the Holidays
Okay, so you want to increase your affiliate sales during Q4 but you really and truly don’t have time to put together any gift guides.
Is there any other way to beef up your affiliate income without creating a bunch of new content?
You better believe it!
One easy way to boost those affiliate sales is to have a few evergreen pieces that you can switch around seasonally.
Paula has an evergreen post titled “Best Gift Ideas For Grandparents.” This post has a generic, evergreen, pinnable image.
But when Q4 comes around, Paula simply switches out that image for a more seasonal image, and changes the title to say, “Best Christmas Gift Ideas for Grandparents.”
The titles of your posts can be changed to fit any holiday that the content fits with. Change out your image and update the post and you’re good to go!
IMPORTANT: Check Your Blog Links
One of the worst things to happen is for a reader to click on an affiliate link on your blog and find a broken link.
You can’t earn money on links that don’t work. And if you have one broken link, your reader may not bother checking any others.
Take the time now to go through your top posts and make sure that all your links are not only working, but leading your audience to the sites you want them to go to.
You don’t need to do this for every post on your site, but you definitely should check your most popular posts and those that already bring in some revenue.
Update Your Pins for the Holidays
On Pinterest, if you update the photo of an old pin, it will automatically be viewed as new content.
You can add the new image to your blog posts if you like, but just creating those new pins will bring fresh traffic to your evergreen posts.
And here’s a nifty tip — if you tap the price tag icon on Pinterest, you can add your affiliate link to that photo.
*Note: not all affiliates allow this so check your specific affiliate programs to see if you can use your link on pins.
Use All Social Media Channels
Once you’ve updated your content or created some guides, checked your most important links, and pinned new images to Pinterest, it’s time to use the power of social media.
Think about how to use each of the platforms to drive traffic to the sites you have affiliate links for.
You could put together a series on Instagram showing your “Top 10 Sensory Products for Kids,” and then promote this series on your other channels to get people to come over and watch.
You could do a series on Instagram stories; you could do it through a series of emails to your subscribers; you could do a series of Facebook Lives.
Create a sense of excitement around the content you’re going to be sharing so that your audience will share it with their friends.
Selling Products During the Holidays
Have you ever thought about designing your own products? Does that sound crazy?
It’s not as crazy as you think when you use sites like Zazzle, where you can create t-shirts, mugs, stickers, etc.
You can sell other people’s creations or you can design and sell your own.
Creating your own products doesn’t have to be a huge, all-consuming affair. It can be simple. Take advantage of the technology available to find new ways of creating products.
SEO Tips for Christmas and Q4
Go into your Google Search Console, look at your performance, and search “holiday,” “Christmas,” or any holiday-type search word.
If you enter the word “Christmas,” it will show you how many times you pop up in Google when someone searches the term “Christmas.”
This can show you opportunities you didn’t know were there. Find out where Google is already ranking you and what your readers are looking to you for. Then create more content in that vein.
Scroll through your results and see what you could take advantage of for the holidays.
Here’s an example of Paula’s Google Search Console so you can see where to find the query information.
It’s hard to believe that Q4 is here already, so we need to dive in. If you’re not sure where to start, take one of the tips we shared today and start there. Pick the lowest hanging fruit and see what you can get done this week.
And be sure to come over to my Facebook group so we can discuss this episode together. I can’t wait to chat with you!
TIMESTAMP
- 2:46 Gift Guides
- 11:45 Optimize Your Existing Content
- 16:39 Check Your Links
- 17:00 Update Your Pins
- 20:56 Use All Social Media Channels
- 22:42 Selling Products
- 23:55 SEO Tips
TOP 4 TAKEAWAYS
- If you’re creating gift guides, make them niched and unique; they should mesh with your most popular content.
- Optimize your evergreen content with affiliate links and updated information. (Make sure every affiliate link on your most popular posts still works.)
- Create new images for your evergreen posts and make new pins from them.
- Consider creating a series to share on Instagram, Facebook, or even to your email subscribers.
Read the podcast transcript for “How to Boost Your Online Income in Q4”
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