Even though we’re MONTHS out from Christmas and other big holidays, for bloggers, we all know holidays start EARLY.
In fact, yesterday and today I have a Christmas-theme post going viral on Pinterest. I’m not the one who pinned it. Some one else did and it’s more than doubled my normal daily traffic from Pinterest.
Holidays start on Pinterest EARLY. You don’t want to miss out.
But also, let’s be real. It’s August. People are looking to Facebook and a blog’s home page for Fall and back-to-school content, not Rudolf or Elf on the Shelf ideas.
So how do you balance the need for holiday content to be up on Pinterest gaining traction before December hits, with also wanting to keep your home page always relevant to your readers?
Simple, start creating your holiday content, and instead of saving it to publish months from now, or even putting it up on your home page, back date the content.
In wordpress, this is quite simple. In the “publish” area of your wordpress draft, instead of clicking “publish immediately” or scheduling the post for sometime in the future, enter a date near the holidays of last year and click publish.
The post will then be live on your site, but not on the home page. It will be safely nestled in last year’s content, where you can begin to promote it on Pinterest.
If you have the date in your URLs you’ll need to leave it there forever. If, however you don’t have the date in your URLs, when it comes closer to the holidays, you can re-publish the content by editing the post, and going to the same spot that you used to back-date the content and updating it to today’s date.
At that time, it would show up on your home page.
This is also a great way to save yourself time during the busy holiday season because you’ll already have content written out that you can use.
Do you have any out-of-season content that’s already doing well? Have you thought about how to leverage that old content into something fresh for this year?
Great idea to “back date” posts. I started what I thought was a really great post on Lent, but mothballed it when it wasn’t finished before Ash Wednesday. You’ve motivated me to go ahead and finish it NOW rather than stressing again in January!
I really appreciate this tip. It’s hard to do crafty posts quickly so this will really help my schedule.
So simple it’s brilliant. Reminds me to always think outside the box.
I was thinking that I’d like to have a post up by the beginning of November because I didn’t want to be too off season, but this is a great idea. Do you suggest doing the same thing if I just launched in June of this year (so don’t have that much content or any from last year)?