2. 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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3. 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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4. 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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5. 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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6. 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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7. 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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8. 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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9. 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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10. 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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11. 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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12. 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.
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15. Be sure to list your blog for FREE on
ShesConnected.com
#ShesChat via @shesconnected
on Twitter every Monday 1 & 9 pm ET
to discuss and learn about more
great subjects like this.
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