Blogging is a seasonal business and with that said there are specific times when we can earn money with gift guides as a blogger. In this post, I am going to talk about how to best make money with gift guides and how you can optimize this for your blog business!

1. Affiliates Networks + Sponsorships

The best way to make money with Gift Guides as a Blogger is through Sponsorship and Affiliate Marketing (with a focus on the later). The idea is to give your audience a selection of products they could gift to friends and family due to a specific occasion.

You as a blogger are either making money through sponsorship: A company is basically paying you to write about their product and present it to your audience. You will then be asked to write a dedicated post about this product which does not include other product in the same article. However, you could have a whole range of posts concerning the Best Gift Ideas for Him, Her or your Mom!

On the other hand (most part of us will focus on this) will be able to generate revenue by promoting affiliate products! Read all about “How to Make Money as a Blogger here” if you are new to Affiliate Marketing! Once someone clicks a product you promote (which includes your tracking affiliate link) and this person buys the product you promote, you receive a percentage of that sales commission! In this case, you can include several different gift ideas within one post and it’s basically the classic gift guide!

Two Affiliate Networks I recommend you to use if you are just starting out with are:

ShareASale: If you are looking for an amazing and easy to use Affiliate Network, I would recommend ShareASale! It is one of my top 3 Affiliate Networks I use and whether you are a beginner or an affiliate pro this Network is amazing for Bloggers, Beauty Gurus, Tech Nerds, Travel Vlogger you name it! I love how easy it is to navigate, join and create links with. ShareASale is all you need to start earning money from affiliate links!

Amazon Associates: If you are new to affiliate marketing I would suggest you start with Amazon Associates. It’s so simple to use.  Basically, you can get a short affiliate text link for most of the products on Amazon with just one click and start earning!!! The products available are obviously endless and I feel like even for Niche Blogs there are plenty of opportunities to earn affiliate money.

But how can you leverage this knowledge of “How to Earn Money with Gift Guides as a Blogger” and optimize this to increase sales and commissions for you?

2. Seasons

Seasonality plays an important role in understanding the purchase behavior of people. Now that e-commerce is taking up a huge part of sales in general, we can leverage this knowledge for our Blog as well! There are basically peaks in e-commerce sales following our general holiday calendar! Here are the most popular holiday seasons we can take advantage of to increase our affiliate and sponsorship sales and earn money with Gift Guides as a Blogger:

• January:
  • New Year Business
• February:
  • Super Bowl
  • Chinese New Year
  • Valentines Day
• March
  • Patricks Day
• April
  • Easter + Passover
• May
  • Mother’s Day
  • Memorial Day Weekend
• June
  • Father’s Day
• July
  • Independence Day
• September
  • Labour Day Weekend
• October
  • Halloween
• November
  • Thanksgiving
  • Black Friday
• December
  • Cyber Monday
  • Chanukah
  • Christmas
  • New Year’s Eve

Please note that this is obviously not at all an exhaustive list, but could give you an idea of what kind of gift guides you could create throughout the year and holiday calendar!

3. Timing

A very important point where I see a lot of Bloggers go wrong is timing their Gift Guides properly! As we have discussed the seasonal calendar, we now need to think about the perfect timing to publish our posts to increase our chances to earn Money with Gift Guides as a Blogger!

As it is often the case that it takes some time for our marketing and promotions efforts to kick in, we need to schedule out seasonal content way in advance to have the effect we want it to have.

Think about Christmas for example. Christmas is one of the perfect times to earn money with Gift Guides as a Blogger! However, if you publish your Gift Guide let’s say at the beginning of December and start promoting it over Pinterest you might see the effect only next year! It takes time to start the promotional engine and it can take up to three months to start noticing traffic to our blog post.

It’s very common to see for example Halloween Gift Guides pop up on peoples’ Blogs in late August. I know this sounds a little bit insane, but we do want to give the different Social Media Algorithms the time to index our content and distribute it to our followers at the right time!

4. Promotion

Promoting our guides the right way can be crucial in order to earn money with Gift Guides as a Blogger! Social Media can be a traffic goldmine but when it comes to selling gifts to your audience or new visitors to your blog, the one or the other strategy might be better to reach your income goals!

My favorite way of promoting my gift guides is through Pinterest. I love creating gorgeous looking Gift Guide Pins for different groups of people. It does take some time to select the right products, to include them in your post as well as to create a dedicated pin and to promote it. However, I believe this to be the best way to reach your target people.

This is a very interesting article I have found on the purchase intent of people searching for things on Pinterest! It says that “93% of Pinners use the platform to plan for or make purchases, while 52% have seen something on Pinterest and made a subsequent purchase online”!

Use this as an advantage to sell your Gift Guide Products to Pinterest users!

5. Products

Another great way to earn more money with Gift Guides as a Blogger is to create gender and segment related guides! Always keep in mind “what” people tend to search for on the internet and start modifying the search terms creatively! Great examples for this could be instead of a regular “Gift Guide for Her”:

• The Ultimate Gift Guide for fashionable Hobby Gardeners
• Gift Guide Ideas for your Best Friends Girl Boss Office
• Make you Bachelorette Weekend legendary! The ultimate list of Bachelorette party gifts, accessories, and gadgets!

Key is finding unique products and presenting them to your audience in a very creative and fun way!

6. Organization

You might want to start creating an Excel sheet you populate year around with products you like and come across while searching the web.

It’s super hard to find the best products all at once, meanwhile, if you constantly add your best finds throughout the year and categorize the products into sections, you will be much more efficient in creating Gift Guides.

In fact, I know that what holds back most bloggers in creating more Gift Guides throughout the year is because it tends to take them a long time to produce the content. However, if you just keep on populating your Excel or some kind of Spreadsheet with the products’ short description, link and price you will finish your Gift Guide in no time.

Also, by providing a ton of different Gift Guides on your Blog you are giving your audience more to choose and more to buy from, meaning a higher chance of you actually selling something to someone! Start organizing your finds and ideas!

Ps: How Do You Like This Post So Far? Would You Mind Sharing One Of The Pins Below On Social Media? You Rock!

7. Gift Guide Calendars

Another great way to earn money with Gift Guides as a Blogger is to create a monthly gift calendar. You can, for example, create 30 posts (one post every day) covering a certain topic such as your Christmas Gift Guide Calendar! Each day you post about a new product gift idea and you dedicate a single Blog Post to this Product.

This is particularly great in November or even October because people are already starting to look for Christmas Gift Ideas for friends and family. Other than just giving them all the products in a single post, you are taking the time to really go into the details of such product and its advantages and disadvantages!

On the other hand, you are increasing you Blog visitor retention because people know you are posting one new Gift Idea each day and are re-visiting your Blog to get more inspiration.

We again want to give our readers the chance to actually have the time to go and purchase the products so we want to launch a gift calendar way in advance of the actual holiday!

8. Evergreen vs. Seasonal Guides

A great way of increasing your overall income from Gift Guides is to create “evergreen” Gift Guides. We have been talking a lot about seasonal guides, however, once for example, Christmas is over it can become irrelevant for the rest of the year and may be outdated next Christmas. Evergreen Gift Guides, on the other hand, are Gift Ideas which are year-round applicable! This could be:

• The most romantic Gift Ideas which will leave your girlfriend in tears!
• Classic and elegant Birthday Gift Ideas which never go out of fashion!
• 10-anniversary Gift Ideas which will leave your partner speechless!

You want to have a good selection of Evergreen vs. Seasonal Guides on your Blog.

9. Maintenance

Once your Gift Guides are launched we need to perform maintenance work throughout the year. This is especially true if we want to earn money with Gift Guides as a Blogger throughout the year! Maybe the…

• price of a product you are promoting has changed and you need to adjust this in your Guide.
• product has sold out and people are looking for a similar product than this to buy.
• the link you included is not working any longer and needs replacement.

I know it’s work which is a little bit is tedious, however, every click is a potential sale for you as a Bloggers and if one of the above things is happening to one of your followers with a purchase intent you are simply missing out on cash baby!

10. Rinse and Repeat

Gift Guides are a great way to earn money as a Blogger. Yes, they are time intensive to create but once you land a hit Gift Guide which is bringing you a ton of traffic (this is especially true for evergreen guides) you are hitting the jackpot! So rinse and repeat step 1-9!

What was your favorite tip from the posts above and is there something which totally surprised you? LET ME KNOW IN THE COMMENTS RIGHT NOW!

Here is some follow up material which you might be interested as well:

How to make Money from your Blog

What the Heck is a Blog Sales Funnel

Self-Hosting your Blog – Beginners Guide

My signature E-Course “Bloggy Badass”

Love you all a lot and talk to you soon!

Xx Katie

Ps. Did you already grab your Free Self-Hosting Guide? Having a Self-Hosted Blog is one of the key factors to successful Blogging. Download it for free below 😉

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