Creating a

Holiday Gift Guide for your blog or site

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Contents

• What is a Holiday Gift Guide?

• Why you should create a Gift Guide?

• When you should start preparing your Gift Guide?

• Getting Started • Organize

• SEO Optimize

• Monetize

• Promote

• Pinterest

• Disclosure

• Examples of Gift Guides

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What is a Holiday Gift Guide?

As an online influencer your opinion matters.

Recommend your favourite gift ideas to your

readers, and provide links so that they can

purchase online.

Inspire your readers and earn benefits from

major brands and manufacturers.

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Why Should You Consider Adding a Holiday Gift Guide to Your Blog?

• Your readers will appreciate it.

• Brand incentives and rewards.

• Increased traffic to your blog or website.

• Increased growth of social network accounts such as Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter.

• Personally connect with your readership while celebrating the holidays.

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When should you start your Gift Guide?

• It is never too late to start a gift guide for your

blog – your readers will enjoy reading your great

content at any time

• If you are planning on getting products from

Brands you should start in August when they are

planning their seasonal promotion and

advertising

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Things to Consider

• Decide what products are a good fit for your blog.

• Be time cautious – Holiday gift guides take a lot of time and effort to arrange and execute. Be realistic.

• Consider which are the hottest products on the market this holiday season and target your audience.

• Consider which brands meet these goals. A good place to start, are the contacts you already have

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Create a draft plan

• Decide how the gift guide will look on your blog. Will it be a link off the menu?

• Create a sign up form for sponsors/brands.

• Organize your gift guide. Will you use categories?

• Create a sponsor pitch to email to brands, including prices and options.

• Create or locate royalty-free graphics you can use to make your gift guide more visually appealing. Remember to avoid any copyright infringements which can create not only legal issues but affect the SEO performance of your blog.

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Organize

• Use an easy use navigation for your holiday gift guide categories.

• Always use product images. Consumers buy or click-through on visual appeal alone sometimes and for others it is the last selling piece to the puzzle.

• Always link to a purchase point, like the product buy URL.

• Link to past reviews of holiday gift guide products, if applicable.

• Make it easy for readers to share to their social networks using social sharing buttons on your blog.

• Use popular keywords or phrases to optimize your holiday gift guide products in search engines. An easy way to do this is search for yourself or use Google Keyword Traffic estimator to research high traffic keywords.

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Monetize

• Many companies already offer affiliate programs. Check with the company for the product you are spotlighting in your holiday gift guide. You can usually find an affiliate link section off the bottom of the company page, if they do offer this option.

• You can also search affiliate program sites like shareasale.com to add affiliate links to your gift guide products and make a little more income over the holiday season.

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Promote

• Share your holiday as a whole, as categories and individual products via social networking like Twitter and Facebook.

• Be active networking – People are always curious what each other is buying for their children, their mothers and other family and friends. This is an easy way to promote your holiday gift guide.

• Schedule tweets using Twitter programs like Hootsuite to assist you in actively promoting throughout the holiday season.

• Use word of mouth with friends, family and out in your community to promote your gift guide.

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Create a Visual Component on Pinterest • Pinterest is one of the easiest ways to build quality backlinks to websites and

is an added marketing, monetizing, optimizing and promotion asset.

• Organize holiday gift guide products into categories using boards and pin product images to those Pinterest boards with optimized labels, similar to SEO keywords and phrases.

• Use boards to narrow down categories such as seasonal boards, price range boards, gender specific or if it’s a smaller holiday gift guide, you may consider an all-in-one holiday gift guide board.

• Examples: Gifts for Him, Gifts Under $25, Gourmet Gifts etc.

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Disclosure

It is important to add a disclosure statement to your Gift Guide. Here is an example of disclosure

• Disclosure: I received some of the products in exchange for reviews, but it was my choice to include in my Holiday Gift Guide. All opinions are my own.

examples

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Examples of Fabulous Gift Guides • http://lifesablog.ca/2012-holiday-gift-guide/

• http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/11/02/holiday-gift-guide-

2012_n_2065995.html#slide=1714788

• http://mommymandy.com/gift-guide/

• http://www.didyouknowcanada.ca/2012/09/2012-holiday-gift-guide.html

• http://mikesbloggityblog.com/my-holiday-gift-guide-10-or-less/

• http://www.flare.com/content/49783

• http://cottagelife.com/61158/blogs/2012-holiday-gift-guide

• http://www.torontolife.com/daily/style/buyers-market-

style/2011/11/21/holiday-gift-guide-2011-30-and-under/

• http://www.engadget.com/holidaygiftguide2012/

• http://www.ellecanada.com/fashion/holiday-gift-guide/s/3739/

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