A Holiday & Seasonal Event-Driven Link Building Primer

With the holiday season fast approaching, let’s run through a quick event-driven link marketing strategy primer, with a few examples. For this column, I’ll focus on the most basic of event-driven link marketing techniques. With this technique, you get out your calendar, look a few months ahead to see what’s coming, then look for ways […]

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With the holiday season fast approaching, let’s run through a quick event-driven link marketing strategy primer, with a few examples.

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Woody costume courtesy of https://www.justkidcostumes.com

For this column, I’ll focus on the most basic of event-driven link marketing techniques.

With this technique, you get out your calendar, look a few months ahead to see what’s coming, then look for ways to tweak your content in order to capitalize on the natural spike in interest, searches, and editorial coverage the holiday will bring with it.

With Halloween just 5 weeks away, it’s time you took a look at your site through a lens focused on Halloween, to see if there’s some aspect to what you do that would lend itself to new content devoted to Halloween.

As an example of what I mean, take a look a this page of costume ideas on the Disney Family Fun site. (Disclaimer: Disney is a client.)

Disney’s FamilyFun site technically has nothing to do with Halloween, but with their core content focus being on family fun, they do have a logical reason to create content for Halloween.

Here’s a few other examples.

There’s a gift basket for every season and holiday event it seems – just look at this page (not a client).

What exactly do gift baskets have to do with a holiday devoted to 8 year old’s ransacking of the neighborhood looking for skittles? Nothing. But Gourmet Gift Baskets is quite smart to create an opportunity where one might not traditionally think one exists.

And here’s one final example over at the Baby Center blog.

Now that’s adorable stuff. Halloween really has nothing to do with babies or toddlers, but nothing beats an 18 month old dressed as Woody from Toy Story. Hurry though, because the next 5 weeks will go by in a flash, and you need time to not just create content but also promote it.

The quick takeaway here is none of the above sites are about Halloween.

All of these sites would still exist if there was no such thing as Halloween, but…they were strategic and savvy about how to use Halloween as an event motivator to produce content that can inspire links.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Eric Ward
Contributor
Eric Ward founded the Web's first services for announcing, linking, and building buzz for Web sites, back in 1994. Ward is best known as the person behind the linking campaigns for Amazon.com Books, Weather.com, The Link Exchange, Rodney Dangerfield (Rodney.com), the AMA, and PBS.org. His services won the 1995 Award for Internet Marketing Excellence, and he was selected as one of the Web's 100 most influential people by Websight magazine. In 2009 Eric was one of 25 people profiled in the book Online Marketing Heroes. Eric has spoken at over 100 industry conferences and now publishes LinkMoses Private, a subscription based link opportunity and strategy service. Eric has written linking strategy and advice columns for SearchEngineLand, MarketingProfs, ClickZ, Search Marketing Standard, SearchEngineGuide, Web Marketing Today, and Ad Age magazine. Learn more about Eric and his content publicity and link building services at http://www.ericward.com

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