Website Traffic Series Part 20: Leveraging Holidays and Big Events

November 29th, 2008 · 3 Comments · Social Media

Welcome back!

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?