Should you spend your time writing a Holiday Gift Guide? [Become A Better Blogger]

Published: Tue, 11/10/15

It is so hard to get everything done!

As you can see, I'm late with this email today and I missed last week.

Which makes todays topic even more relevant...

Is it worth the time and effort it takes to create Holiday Gift Guides for your blog?

The short answer is... it depends. 

But let's dig into the longer answer. 

Holiday Gift Guides can be anything from a short blog post to a series of longer blog posts or a formatted pdf download or a guide your publish on a site like issuu.com.

And depending on how extensive you make your guides, they can take a looooong time to create.

We are currently in the process of writing our gift guides and should be publishing them over the next few days.

As we did last year, we are writing an 8-post series of gift guides and linking them together to form a gift guide post. But this year, we are NOT taking the extra step of formatting them into a downloadable pdf.

We also include a linky in our main gift guide post so that you and other bloggers can link up your own gift guides.

I know a few bloggers have mentioned to me that they aren't taking the time to make guides this year because it's so much work and doesn't bring in enough money to make it worth while. 

We monetize our guides by offering some spots to brands and businesses at a sponsored rate. Then we add various products with affiliate links and fill up the rest with editorial selections.

But I think the most important reason we create our holiday gift guides each year is for the traffic and for brands to notice our site.

We consistently get a good amount of traffic to the gift guides and lots of PR companies and brands find us through our guides and then reach out to us for various review and sponsored post opportunities.

So overall, I'd say that creating some form of Holiday Gift Guide is a good idea, but perhaps try to keep the size of it relative to the amount of benefit you expect to see.

For us, dropping the pdf version will save time and not significantly impact the traffic we receive on the posts.

If you do create a gift guide, keep an eye out for our link-up post and add yours. Also, feel free to email or DM me and I'll tweet your guide out for you.

Happy Gift Guide Writing!



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Susan (and Janice)
5 Minutes For Mom

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