Tweaking your Blog for Holiday Sales

Recent polls show that online shopping will soar this year with 80% of internet users buying gifts online ($33 billion in the fourth quarter of 2006). Traffic in some niches run 10x in December as compared to September. Is your blog ready? If you are an advertiser, publisher, or both (like me), you need to prepare your sites for the holiday rush.

Both advertisers and publishers should expect delays in getting updated stats as servers will be jammed. Get everything set by early December at the very latest. Then, sit back and relax!

Here are few tips:

For Advertisers:

• Get seasonal ads submitted and approved as soon as possible
• Tweak existing ads for seasonal messages and trends
• Increase your budget settings for weekends and off hours
• Use destination URLs that take shoppers directly to product pages
• Use the new AdWords tool to optimize landing pages
• Enter a back-up credit card in AdWords to prevent downtime

For Publishers:

• Use the maximum number of ads per page allow by your providers
• Write posts on seasonal topics using keywords that drive traffic
• Write a speedlinking post to highlight old posts with high conversion rates
• Embed text links in posts for products (mouseover AdWords link below)
• Use AdWords or low cost CPM ads to drive traffic to your site
• Check that your sitemaps are up-to-date

Reference:

Search Engine Marketing, Inc. by Mike Morgan and Bill Hunt