How to Optimize Your Blog for Valentine’s Day

For a holiday like Valentine’s Day you can start optimizing your blog about 2 weeks in advance. What I mean by optimizing is you can take advantage of the public getting crazed over Valentine’s Day by blogging about holiday topics your readers may be interested in.

For example, if you’re a food blogger you can blog about Valentine’s Day recipes or what local restaurants to take your date to. If you’re a travel blogger you can blog about the top Valentine’s Day travel destinations. And lastly, as a fashion blogger, you will want to blog about what to wear for Valentine’s Day and other topics related to that.

When you optimize your blog for Valentine’s Day you have the chance to make extra money, gain new readers, get your content shared, and show up in Google search results. It’s small tweaks like this in your normal blogging schedule that will make a huge difference, especially if you’re just starting out. You could ultimately become the go-to blogger for holiday-related content. How cool would that be?!

include affiliate links

Since Valentine’s Day is such a Hallmark holiday, people eat it up. They get all warm and fuzzy inside and want to really make their loved one feel loved through gifts. Hate it or love it, everyone loves gifts. The standard chocolate, roses, and card scenario is overplayed. Your readers want unique gift ideas that will blow their significant others out of the water (and gain them major brownie points while doing so). It’s all about getting your special someone something special.

With that being said, no matter what industry you’re in, health, fitness, fashion, travel, you absolutely want to include as many affiliate links in your Valentine’s Day blog posts as possible.

For example, food bloggers can include affiliate link ingredients for their V-Day recipes. If you’re a fitness blogger you create a special partner workout that includes affiliate links to workout gear. Fashion bloggers can create Valentine’s Day gift guides like I did yesterday. And travel bloggers can create a Valentine’s Day travel essentials guide.

Whatever your niche, there a ton of ways you can incorporate affiliate links into every one of your blog posts. Think creatively and put yourself in the shoes of a consumer. What do consumers want to buy around Valentine’s Day? What are they looking to do on Valentine’s Day?

create content that solves a problem

Like I said before, Valentine’s Day is a Hallmark holiday and with that comes some issues like what to get your loved one, where to take your loved one, or what to cook for your loved one when the time comes. For me personally, I have no idea what the best restaurants are for Valentine’s Day in NYC (great topic for a travel or food blogger). So that’s one problem that needs to be solved, and I bet there are more people who feel the same way I do.

If you’re not sure what problem arises for your readers at Valentine’s Day, ask them! Say, “Hey guys, what type of content do you want to see from me around Valentine’s Day?”. Easy, peasy.  This question will not only engage your audience, but it will help you find the problem your followers are having.

Your goal as a blogger, Valentine’s Day or not, is to inspire people. If you can inspire people enough to take action, then you’re really winning. You want people to take action by sharing your content and saying, “Thanks to Brittany from Not Another Blonde, I optimized my blog for Valentine’s Day!”… no pressure but it would be pretty cool if you guys shared this article and said that. 🙂

All joking aside, it’s not just about getting shares, likes, comments, etc. it’s about making an impact and creating a legacy for yourself and your blog. Helping people solve a problem and influencing them to better their lives, careers, health, or style is the best reward you can get.

use seo to get more traffic

SEO is not my favorite blog topic and I don’t stress it too often because it changes so much that it’s almost impossible to keep up with. I think if people like your content they’re going to come to your blog and share your stuff regardless which inevitably drives more traffic. BUT I also think every blogger should know the basics of SEO, especially when optimizing your blog for Valentine’s Day, or any holiday for that matter.

So if you want to up your SEO for Valentine’s Day you should use keywords like love, Valentine’s Day, V-Day, valentine, romance, romantic, relationship, Valentine’s Day gifts, etc. However, you do not want to randomly plug these words throughout your blog post. Google will know and your blog will be marked as spam. You want to have a cohesive, free flowing blog post that relates to Valentine’s Day so the mention of love or relationships doesn’t seem random. (Comment below if you want more on SEO in general.)

Incorporating basic use of SEO will help in getting your blog discovered because every so often you’ll get a random person who happens to stumble upon your blog through a search in Google. When you’re first starting out, every little bit helps. SEO isn’t going to hurt you so I recommend putting in the extra 2 minutes it will take to optimize your blog.

What are you planning to blog about for Valentine’s Day? Tell me in the comments below!

xx

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