Website Traffic Series Part 20: Leveraging Holidays and Big Events

Christmas, thanksgiving, the summer Olympic games, the U.S. presidential elections, you name it. For most people those are holidays where they rest and hang out with family and friends, or big events that they watch on television. For website owners and Internet marketers, however, those are great traffic generation opportunities!

The concept: The Internet is already the main source of information around the world. Kids, teens, workers, and even grand parents now turn to the web when they need to find something. On big holidays and events those folks will concentrate their attention, and if you manage to get your website or blog aligned with what they are looking for you might end up receiving huge traffic.

Suppose you have a website about cooking and recipes. On thanksgiving you could publish a series of posts explaining how to cook a turkey on other recipes that people could make on their homes. Depending on the quality of the content and on your promotional efforts you could attract many visitors with such a series.

Does it work?: Yes, and many webmasters and marketers exploit this trend year after year. There are basically two channels that you might tap into: search engines and social media.

For the first one, you would need to perform some keyword research, and then publish targeted and optimized articles. The success of this route will depend on the overall authority of your website and on the backlinks that your articles will receive. If you manage to rank for a popular keyword on one of those events, however, the result would be a huge and profitable influx of traffic.

The second channel is social media, and in order to get exposure there you would need to get creative with your content. Lists and funny stuff always perform well on those sites.

How to get started: If you want to use this strategy, the first thing that you need to do is to create a list of holidays or events that are related to your niche. Here is a small list with some of them:

New Year’s Day (January 1st)
U.S. Independence Day (July 4th)
Thanksgiving (November 27th)
Christimas (December 25th)
Summer Olympic Games
Winter Olympic Games
FIFA World Cup
Presidential Elections

Once you know the holidays or events that you are going to target it is just a matter of preparing the content. You can get creative here and use articles, songs, quizzes, videos and so on.

Wait until a couple of days before the event and publish it. Know if your target is organic or social media traffic and promote it accordingly.

Gather the results, analyze what worked and what didn’t work, and repeat the next year (or after 4 years).

Over to the readers: Have you tried to leverage big holidays and events to generate traffic? How did it work out?

Website Traffic Series

Daniel Scocco on November 27, 2008 Subscribe to our RSS Feed

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13 Responses to “Website Traffic Series Part 20: Leveraging Holidays and Big Events”

SATISH -- Technotip.org on November 27th, 2008 4:42 pm

We are targeting Christmas (December 25th)..
As Christmas is famous for the gifts, we have also arranged some giveaway on our blog.
Hope we get some traffic..

I will have to monitor the traffic and know the results on my blog.

Nice Strategy..
Daniel Scocco on November 27th, 2008 5:13 pm

@Satish, let me know how it goes.
Matt Caldwell - 15 Minutes to Riches! on November 27th, 2008 11:39 pm

FIFA World Cup, hadn’t thought of that one… thanks.
GotFreeBusinessCards on November 28th, 2008 2:39 am

I noticed before Halloween and before Thanksgiving, Google Trends showed searches related to the Holidays being the biggest trends.
Ryan McLean on November 28th, 2008 3:00 am

Great idea. Thanks for the tip.
I might start a christmas blog or something next year
Ujank on November 28th, 2008 6:51 am

I agree with your idea. I think good day can be good moment for us to post information related to the moment.

By the way, today I have posted, list of web directory whose page ranks are very good. Please visit here : http://www.hol-service.com/200.....directory/

thank you.
Julius Kuhn-Regnier on November 28th, 2008 9:46 am

interesting idea! I have never tried it but I certainly will
Stu McLaren on November 28th, 2008 11:06 am

Retail stores use anything they can to create a “reason” for bringing people back into their store to buy and this article is a great example of the fact that website owners should be doing the same thing.

News Events, Holidays, Celebrations (Anniversary, Birthday etc) are all great ideas.

Heck, you can make up your own reason for doing a promotion around an event (Moving Sale, Inventory Clean out etc.)

Great post - it certainly gets the creative juices flowing
Destination Infinity on November 28th, 2008 2:22 pm

That’s right Daniel. There was one post of mine - The Longest Jump which I published around Olympics time. It is the second most viewed post in my blog - mostly through search. But for the last few months, there is hardly any traffic for that article.

Destination Infinity
Web Hosting Review on November 29th, 2008 9:30 am

This is a helpful, and comprehensive guide on doing Website Traffic Series.
Good writing. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed my Google News Reader..
Matt Hanson
Idaho SEO Expert on December 1st, 2008 2:36 am

Really informative article. You’ve just point out some useful tips here. Thanks for the info. Keep it up!
Pink Ink on December 1st, 2008 6:53 am

I posted about Twilight the day the movie came out, and got a lot of comments, especially when I linked to a popular comment blog.

It really works.

Sometimes I already have a timely post up, and I find a blog that is doing links on the same subject; I tweak the title or something, and presto, my traffic spikes.