Yes, that’s right, it’s time to get ready for the holidays! If you’re a blogger, you’re looking at what is possibly the most profitable time of year. Whether it be ads or affiliate sales, sponsored posts or sponsored reviews, the end of the year is a great time of year to make money … if you’re willing to put in the work. That’s why I suggest getting started now.
To that end, let’s talk about 12 simple ways for bloggers to get ready for the holidays.
This post contains affiliate links. Thank you for supporting Kate the (Almost) Great!
12 Simple Ways for Bloggers To Get Ready for the Holidays: Affiliates
Sign up for new affiliates
One of the reasons that the holiday season is a big time of year for bloggers is that it’s the time of year when many of us make the most money. And a big part of that? Affiliate income!
Affiliates are when you link to a product, someone clicks on the product, they buy it, and you get a commission. It’s a big part of why gift guides are so popular! (The other part is it’s really good traffic.) That means that you should sign up for new affiliates, whether you’re just starting out on your affiliate journey or you’re an old pro.
Not sure where to start? Here are some affiliate programs to check out and sign up for:
- Amazon
- Skimlinks
- Collective Voice (f.k.a. ShopStyle)
- Etsy (through Awin)
- Ultimate Bundles
- Tailwind (through Impact)
- Shopify
Some programs have assets for you to use, like banners advertising specific products, which can make your life a lot easier. Adding those to your post is an easy way to include affiliate links.
PS – If you’re new to affiliates, make sure you include a disclosure before any affiliate links. And, yes, that includes banners. It’s a US law.
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Review your existing affiliates
One reason you should review them is you want to remember what affiliates you have! Go through your records. What did you sign up for last year and forget? What have you signed up for since last holiday season?
Once you’ve reminded yourself what affiliates you have already signed up for, you should review their rules. For example, for some affiliates, you can only use that affiliate in a post.
You should also review the tools you have available. What banners, links, ads, widgets, etc. are available for you to add to your blog posts and social media?
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12 Simple Ways for Bloggers To Get Ready for the Holidays: Updates
Update older holiday posts (gift guides, etc.) with new/updated information
Make your old posts work for you!
Even if you have only been blogging for a year, it’s worth going back to older posts to see if they can be updated.
Have you learned more information about the topic since you published the post? Have you figured out SEO? Did you join Tailwind? Have you signed up for different affiliate programs since you first published the post?
Some of the things you can do include:
- removing out-of-date information
- removing links, HTML, or widgets that aren’t supported anymore
- integrating more SEO keywords
- adding more information in general
- adding links to relevant posts you’ve published since first publishing the post
- adding new affiliate links
- adding headers
- adding widgets
- adding calls to action
- adding new images
Basically, there are many ways to update old posts, which can depend on your blog and how long you’ve been blogging. These are just some ideas to get your wheels turning.
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Update broken links
There are a few reasons you should do this.
One reason is that having a number of broken links decreases your site’s standing in search engines (x). SEO is important in general, but that’s doubly so when it comes to a high-traffic and high-income time of year.
Another reason is you want to build trust with your audience so they’ll keep reading and make purchases through your affiliate links. It’s hard to do that if your links are broken, especially if you’re citing your sources like I do.
If you’re on self-hosted WordPress, I suggest getting the Broken Link Checker plugin. This widget automatically reviews links in old posts and pages and lets you know if they’re broken.
I hit 1,000 posts several years ago; I don’t have time to review all of the links that I’ve published in my 10 years of blogging. The fact that this plugin automatically checks them for me is a big relief.
It also makes it easy to update broken links that are in multiple places, which is a big plus. I link a lot to sources of facts that I state, and often I’ll use the same source in multiple posts. It’s a big weight off of my shoulders that I can update multiple posts at once this way.
If you’re not on self-hosted WordPress, you should check for broken links manually. I suggest starting with your older holiday posts, if you have them, as those will be the most time-sensitive. After you review those, I recommend you go with your most popular blog posts.
(Note: if your blog is on another place like Squarespace, there might be a plugin that checks for broken links, too. Since I’m on self-hosted WordPress, though, I don’t know if that’s the case.)
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Review and update old plugins
There are 2 parts to this: replace less-optimal plugins with better ones and remove plugins that just don’t work well anymore.
While broken links impact your SEO, less-optimal plugins impact the speed of your website. What is “less-optimal”? Well, some plugins take up more space on your website than others, some do an okay job doing what you want, and some are plugins that you installed but haven’t activated.
Go to your “Installed Plugins” view on your webiste. (Again, I’m on self-hosted WordPress.) Do you have any plugins that are installed but not activated? Are they worth keeping? If not, uninstall them.
You should also take a minute to review the plugins that you have and check out other available plugins that do what you want them to do, if possible. Are there any that are higher-rated than what you have? Are there any that are official plugins for a service or product that you could get to replace an unofficial plugin?
It’s also good just to review the settings of your installed plugins regularly. Sometimes, fiddling with settings can improve your site’s speed or SEO.
Regarding plugins that just don’t work any more, you definitely need to remove them. This could be because they’re older and not supported or because, well, they’re connected to The Site Formerly Known as Twitter (I will keep referring to it as that, FYI).
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A lot has changed with Twitter in the last year, and so if you had plugins connected to it, you will probably need to remove them. For example, I loved the Better Click to Twitter plugin. That made it really easy for you guys to share one of my posts on Twitter. But then Twitter stopped letting people connect other sites to Twitter, and the plugin didn’t work any more. I deactivated it for a few weeks, hoping The Owner would change his mind and I would be able to use the plugin again. When it didn’t change, I ended up uninstalling the plugin.
Finally, here are some helpful plugins to check out, in addition to Broken Link Checker:
- Cookie Notice & Compliance for GDPR / CCPA – Useful for following EU laws, which is important if you have readers in the EU
- Revive Old Posts – Useful for getting more traffic year-round
- WP Super Cache – Useful for speeding up your website
- Yoast SEO – Useful for getting your holiday posts in front of more eyes
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12 Simple Ways for Bloggers To Get Ready for the Holidays: Make New Content
Okay. We’ve talked about reviewing and updating things you already have. Let’s talk about new content, though, which you can start now!
Start one or two round-up posts
Round-up posts are a type of blog post that you can make ahead of time, and they’re really easy to make. This great for saving yourself stress later or just spreading our your blog work, which I am really a fan of.
A “round-up” means it’s a post fully made up of other posts. You can use your own posts as well as other people’s, but I really suggest that it be mostly other people’s posts.
I generally try to do at least 2 round-up posts every holiday season: 1 regarding food or another lifestyle topic and 1 gift guide. Technically, most gift guides are round-ups, but I like to do a round-up gift guide for last-minute or hand-made gift ideas, and it’s my last gift guide of the year. I generally do it the Friday before Christmas, or earlier than that if Christmas is on a weekend. In these, there aren’t a ton of affiliate links because I want it to be more for traffic than assuming people will want to spend more money for rush shipping.
This also means that I can start it earlier than I usually can. I’ll talk more about gift guides shortly, but a big problem with them is that you can’t start making them too early. The products you link to might not be available when the post is actually published, or they won’t be available for too long after you publish it. If you do a round-up gift guide, though, you can link to all the old posts you want. Sure, the original author might delete the post or the blog might go down, but it’s more likely to still be available than gathering links in August for a gift guide that goes up in December.
Some round-up posts I’ve made in the past include:
- 84 of the Best Gluten-Free Holiday Recipes
- Halloween Recipes for Common Food Sensitivities
- 56 Gluten-Free Holiday Recipes To Make This Year
- Homemade Gifts
- Holiday Gift Ideas: Holiday Gifts To Make
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Make new images for past holiday posts
We tend to think about SEO as a thing for traditional search engines like Google, but it does wonders for Pinterest, too. My blog traffic started rising when I started taking SEO for Pinterest seriously. And that’s because Pinterest is more of a visual search engine than it is a social media network.
That’s why you should make new images for older holiday posts, add them, and pin them. But not any images will do! You really want to make your images as Pinterest-friendly as possible. There are a couple of ways to do this.
1) Vertical over horizontal! Every time! Vertical images do SO much better on Pinterest than horizontal ones do.
2) Make sure your images are large enough. I’ve seen a variety of sizes put as “ideal,” but my go-to is making images for Pinterest that are 1500px tall. But that size is generally too big for my blog posts. This means that I save 2 different versions of each image for blog posts: a blog one and a Pinterest one. This is super easy because all I do is resize the image when I build it and it takes less than a minute.
3) You want to make sure you have an easy-pinning tool for your blog. This is frequently found with a plugin. People can’t share your blog posts if you don’t have an easy way to do it because humans (myself included) can be very lazy.
If you roll your mouse over any images in posts on my blog, you’ll see a “pin it” button appear. This is from the plugin jQuery Pin It Button for Images plugin.
Finally, the reason I connect this to Pinterest is that Pinterest likes when you pin new images over images you’ve already added. Updating your post with new images and then pinning them is good from a variety of points of view.
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Plan new gift guides
A gift guide is a blog post that provides gift ideas for people. Generally, they’re focused on a topic or theme, but that theme can be as general as “gifts for men.” I like to make mine a bit more focused than that, as they’re easier to make. Additionally, lots of bloggers and websites make gift guides, so by making really specific ones, you can hit what fewer people are doing.
One reason I say you should plan new ones now and don’t say make new ones is, like I said, products that are on websites in August might not be in November. But another is that this is a post about simple ways to get ready for the holidays, and that’s not necessarily simple ;).
BUT you can start planning, brainstorming, and researching now.
Learn more about making gift guides in this post.
For planning, decide when you’re going to start posting your gift guides and when you will end. If Hanukkah starts before Christmas, I try to start posting gift guides a month before the first night of Hanukkah. I like to post my last real gift guide 10+ days before Christmas, and I have a gift guide/round-up post the Friday or two before Christmas
For brainstorming, I figure out what topics or categories I want to make gift guides for. Since I’ve been blogging for a long time, I have the benefit of data to see what categories have been popular in the past. I also get ideas from SEO research!
The main research I do at this point is SEO research. What keywords are popular? What keywords are too popular? What keywords have I not used before? That sort of thing. I also look at Google and Pinterest trends for ideas.
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12 Simple Ways for Bloggers To Get Ready for the Holidays: Miscellaneous
Schedule promotions of older holiday posts with Missinglettr
Missinglettr is a tool that lets you set up an automated set of social media posts, and I learned about this resource from taking the Ramp up your visibility by getting your blog posts in front of waaaay more people course. The free plan gives you 1 social media network and 50 scheduled posts at any given time. The posts look like this:
These are the steps for creating a campaign in Missinglettr:
- Set up a campaign for a new blog post
- Accept or reject different quotes it pulls from the post
- Choose hashtags and images from the post
- Review the posts
- Decide if I want the posts to be scheduled over the course of an entire year or over less time
- Approve the campaign
- Don’t think about them!
I have gotten over 2,800 clicks from Missinglettr campaigns. That’s so little effort for nearly 3,000 clicks!
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Schedule promotions of older holiday posts manually
There are a variety of ways to do this.
One is to schedule pins of existing images. Since you already made them, and they likely haven’t been shared on Pinterest recently, why not share them again?
Another is to make new pins for older posts. Tailwind has a program called Tailwind Create. This is Tailwind’s smart tool for making new images. You add a link to a blog post, add the title or wait for it to populate from that link, choose some photos (including from stock images they have), and it makes a bunch of images. You choose the ones you like and download or schedule them!
You can also schedule quick promotional posts on Twitter and Facebook. I especially like to do this for old gift guides. Just because some links won’t work anymore doesn’t mean that most links won’t work anymore! Make your old content work for you.
Take holiday-specific courses
One of my favorite ones is Black Friday Affiliate Surge. This is, as you can probably guess, a course all about how to make the most amount of money possible on Black Friday through Cyber Monday.
This course includes:
- A free downloadable Elementor template for a Black Friday roundup page
- Email templates
- A cookie strategy (which I had never thought about before!)
- Dos and don’ts for your own Black Friday offer
- How to promote your Black Friday page
- A social media strategy for Black Friday/Cyber Week
- And more!
I found this course extremely helpful, and it completely changed how I did my Black Friday/Cyber Week promotions. These changes increased my Cyber Week income, of course, but also increased my Cyber Week blog traffic.
My blog traffic over Cyber Week increased by 19.45% in 2022 compared to 2021.
My email opens over Cyber Week increased by 36% and my email clicks over Cyber Week increased by 300% (not a typo!).
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This is something I’m working on right now! In addition to reviewing the courses themselves, I’m also reviewing the notes I took and the resources that came with the course. Sometimes, there are things that I didn’t do last time around because I was already doing so much. But now that they’re not brand new, there are fewer things I need to create from scratch, so it makes sense to do them.
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Like this post? Share it! Then check out:
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Kate Mitchell is a blogger, chronic illness patient, and advocate who helps people understand chronic illness and helps chronic illness patients live their best lives.
Wow! This was am awesome, comprehensive list of things to do! Thank you do much for all of the suggestions – it’ll be like a checklist for me!
Great post! Definitely going to start planning for those holiday posts now, and I’ll be saving this and checking back to it. Thanks!
Great advice! I can’t believe it’s already time to start thinking about the holidays!
You gave us some good tips.