Every year around Thanksgiving, I think about trying out new holiday recipes to post on my content-related site. Then I realized I should have been thinking about that as far back as June or July. The estimated value of social commerce sales in 2022 was $958 billion. Most online business owners want to take advantage of that kind of expenditure.
No one wants to think about Christmas during the summer but having a schedule for content creation is key, especially for businesses that rely heavily on holiday traffic and income every year. Not every business is seasonal, but for owners who have learned to harness that sometimes big boost in income every year, the payoff can be well worth the effort of learning to create and schedule holiday content throughout the year.
Christmas the Day After Halloween
It makes sense to start working on and posting holiday content during the summer. Stores start putting out Christmas merchandise the day after Halloween. That’s barely two months after summer ends. Due to rising inflation last year, retailers rolled out Black Friday deals well in advance of Thanksgiving. And by early, I mean mid-October.
Although Christmas is the biggest holiday for many businesses, any holiday can provide a boost in traffic and in sales, particularly in the world of cooking and recipes. It may seem like there’s not much income to be made from sharing popular recipes, yet clever content creators like The Pioneer Woman are earning a lot of money creating cooking videos and selling cooking- and baking-related accessories through their own brand or through Amazon’s affiliate program.
When Should You Pin?
Research from social media management software provider Sprout Social revealed last year that 93% of business executives are increasingly moving ecommerce to social media, because that’s increasingly where their target customers are hanging out.
More than 400 million people have saved over 240 billion pins on Pinterest. Owners of content-related sites are ideally either making pins for Pinterest (or outsourcing the task) almost daily. Many content-related sites rely on Pinterest for much of their traffic, and it’s important to keep making pins. Lots and lots of pins.
I created my account in 2010, when Pinterest first rolled out. I placed links to many of my Pinterest boards on my site, slowly growing my following. My account now has over 100k followers as I have continued to create more and more pins for new and existing content.
For people who have already built up a lot of great content over the years, it’s not always necessary to reinvent the wheel. Make multiple pins and images for existing posts. During the holidays, put a spin on an evergreen article by making a new pin for it. “How to Keep Baked Potatoes Warm” can easily become “How to Keep Baked Potatoes Warm for Holiday Potlucks.” Although it’s the same article with a new pin, it is new traffic. When strategically planned out, one blog post can result in dozens of Pinterest images with many or even hundreds of keywords driving traffic throughout the year.
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Users make an estimated 1 million searches on Pinterest on Black Friday. Holiday content can be posted on Pinterest as early as June and as late as December. Even if a creator is late to the game and starts posting in December, they may still have a chance for some of their holiday pins to gain traction before Christmas. Holiday pins posted this year also have the chance of doing well next year, so these efforts are never wasted.
It is so important to post pins several months before an upcoming holiday because sometimes Pinterest takes several months to “understand” and distribute your pin so that users can find it when they are searching Pinterest. For people who don’t have time to post pins daily, they can consider doing batches and scheduling ahead of time directly on Pinterest.
How Long Does It Take to Rank on Google?
According to SEO.co, it can take anywhere from three to six months for a page to rank on the first page of Google. That’s if you are writing great content and optimizing your pages for search engines. When asked the best time to post new holiday content, Jason Moore of Compulse Integrated Marketing explained:
“In truth, it all depends on the kind of company you are running. A toy company operates much differently than, say, a coffee company selling a specific fall- or winter-related brew. Know your business, your competition, your audience, and when they’re going to start searching for your content. If you understand those specifics, you should have a good understanding of when you need to start putting out content for specific holidays and events.”
Moore suggests that holiday posts be published around the time that people first start talking about and planning for that holiday — a month or two or advance. It is often a good idea to have a content-planning calendar in place to make sure the content is ready when it’s time to publish.
Creating a Holiday Content Strategy is Key
The more people plan ahead, the more traffic they will drive to their site. My advice is to plan a variety of types of holiday content. Ideas might include holiday recipes, gift guides, product reviews, ‘how-to’s, and more. Dig through site stats to see what did well last year and use that data to help plan this year’s content. Consider creating videos for new and existing content, and plan social media posts in advance so that you’re not scrambling for content at the last minute or figuring out what to post or where to post it.
Don’t forget to go through existing holiday content and make sure that product descriptions and prices are up to date and that you won’t lose any sales due to broken links. Once content creators lay out a strategy that works for them, creating holiday content in July will become second-nature.
