Because I own Christmas Corner, I was asked to judge a Christmas-related contest. As one of the official judges, I wanted to make sure to let my visitors know about the contest. It is described as the Coolest Christmas Pictures Contest. The idea is that you submit your coolest Christmas photos and how-to tips. You can win a cool prize and get the chance to showcase your holiday creativity and passion on the coolest Christmas website for others to enjoy and learn from.

So turn CyberMonday into a day for entering a contest for a chance to win some money instead of spending it. There are always cool contests online so take some time to find others that you can enter as well. I’ve won several contests over the years, including some that offered cash or prizes worth several hundred dollars. Make today the day you enter the one I’m judging, and as many other contests as you find online that look interesting to you.

While you’re rummaging around the net for contests to enter, stop by my Christmas site and see if anything strikes your fancy. Grab some Christmas wallpaper for your desktop (Melvin Moose is the star of this year’s wallpaper), personalize a children’s Christmas story, written by me, to print out and read to your little one (your kid is the star of the story), or download some Christmas printables that I made. It’s all free, so enjoy without spending a dime.

Happy CyberMonday!

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2011. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Christmas, contest
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For about two years I taught an English class to a group of International students at my University, but most of the time they were teaching me. They taught me about their languages, customs, and food, but their questions often taught me things about my own culture I had never realized. One day I asked my students what surprised them most about the US, and one of my students from Korea said “holidays.” It was at this moment that I really and truly realized Americans love their holidays.

I proceeded to write down every holiday that we feel warrants some sort of party or celebration:

• The Super Bowl (and every other championship game for every other sport)
• 4th of July
• Labor Day
• The big ones such as Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving
• Birthdays (which of course you must have a separate kids party and family party)
• Graduation from middle school, high school, and college
• Halloween
• Valentine’s Day
• April Fool’s Day
• Anniversaries, etc.

This led me to wonder: It is worth the time for a company to create a marketing campaign for every single holiday?

Marketing for specific holidays can be tough because a lot goes into a campaign. With all of the new mediums and platforms available to send out information to the public, marketing a product or service has become expensive and time consuming. Most companies want all of their efforts to stand the test of time for this very reason, but holiday marketing tactics simply cannot offer this long-term satisfaction. Consider a few of the reasons it is, however, worth a company’s time and energy:

To Market or Not to Market for the Holidays

Aside from just the time commitment involved, marketing for the holidays can become stressful. It is difficult to know when to start these campaigns (after all, everyone makes fun of those shops ready for Christmas before Thanksgiving), and it’s difficult to know whether or not your holiday tactics have made a difference. For this reason, some companies pass on the holiday marketing festivities. Unfortunately, this is a terrible mistake for a few reasons:

According to Media Post, in 2010 the top five days by sales conversion volume included Black Friday at 23% (the day after Thanksgiving), Nov. 28 and 30 at 17%, Dec. 6 at 17%, and Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving) at 16%. In other words, marketing during the holidays is a great idea. Furthermore, the holidays are on the minds of these buyers, and your company should capitalize on that by getting into the holiday spirit.

5 Tremendous Thanksgiving Marketing Tactics

Although Thanksgiving is coming up quickly, it isn’t too late to create a marketing campaign for the holiday. The general rule of thumb is to start marketing for Thanksgiving just after Halloween (and Christmas just after Thanksgiving), but as the statistics show above, there is still plenty of time. Consider a few of the things you can try to help jumpstart your holiday efforts:

• Greeting Cards – Send Thanksgiving themed greeting cards to your customers thanking them for being loyal. Consider giving out a coupon in the spirit of the holiday.
• Newsletters – The holidays are a great way to jumpstart that newsletter you’ve always wanted to offer. Customers and clients will be more apt to join during the holidays in the hopes that your company will help them know what to buy their friends for the holidays!
• Thanksgiving Deals – If you offer a deal specifically around Thanksgiving, consumers will certainly pay attention. While Christmas promotions are common, Thanksgiving deals are still a hidden secret.
• Fall Occasions – Creating a fall event is a great way to get consumers interested in your company. Consider setting up a corn maze, fall festival, or pie eating contest to help draw in new customers. This may be a bit on the expensive side, but it should be a very positive way to get people noticing your business.
• Volunteer – Thanksgiving time offers many opportunities to get involved with other companies. This will help you not only network and spread the word about your company, but you’ll be doing something that really matters (ex: work at a food shelter, donate toys for children, etc.).

In the end, marketing for a specific holiday is a fun experience. Do not worry about having to pull the marketing tactic after the holiday because it should give you what you need for the short time it’s up and running. Many companies also recycle holiday commercials or materials each year to help make it even more worthwhile.

Author Bio:

Amanda DiSilvestro is an expert writer on VoIP business phone systems based in San Diego, California. She writes extensively for an online resource that provides expert advice on purchasing and outsourcing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs such as document management. You can find more of her articles as well as vendors comparisons for your small business needs at Business.com.

© guestposter for DazzlinDonna, 2011. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: black friday, Christmas, Holiday, Marketing, Thanksgiving
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Gather Relevant Special Search Phrases

The first thing I would do is run a search on your own site for any of the one-word holiday-related words you may have already used in your content. Start with the obvious: Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. If you don’t have your own search form on your site, you can always just go to Google and search for:

halloween site:www.yoursite.com

Promote The Strongest Pages

That Google search will give you a list of all your pages that have the word “halloween” in them. Choose one or two of the strongest pages and do a little promotion for them. Throw some social love at them, get a link or two to them, and just do some general marketing for them that goes beyond what you might normally do for a page of content. While you’re doing this, of course, you’re going to want to try to tie the holiday or special event into your niche in some way. This may be as simple as getting a link with the anchor text of “My Niche Loves Halloween”. Example? Let’s say your niche is golf. If you did some promotion to one of your golf-related content pages that mentions Halloween, you could promote it by saying “Golfers Love Halloween”. You didn’t have to do much to come up with that tie-in, did you?

Buy Why?

The key here is grabbing new traffic that you might not get otherwise. People are doing special searches at this time of year, and they are including the holiday and special event phrases within them. There’s much less competition for the longer-tail phrases that include your niche and the holiday, so be one of the few that dares to compete for it. If you already have some content that uses the phrase (and very likely you do, even if you only wished everyone a Merry Christmas last year), then most of the work is already done. You just have to do a little extra work to get it a little more attention, which gives it a better chance of ranking.

But, I Don’t Have That Kind of Content!

If you’ve never written any content that includes some special holiday wording, now’s the time to create some. This takes a little more work, but it also allows you to get much more creative. You don’t have to adjust to what you’ve already written. You can go in any direction now! Let’s take some examples for our fictional niche of golf. Create content that refers to:

Halloween costume ideas for golfers
Haunted hotels with nearby or onsite golf courses
Using a turkey calculator to make sure you don’t miss tee off time.
Placing Christmas wallpaper on your golfing hubby’s computer so he remembers to shop!

Creativity, People, Creativity!

If you’ve followed me over the years, you know that I love getting creative. I even have an entire Creativity Exercises category here, if you don’t believe me. My point, in all of these posts, is to help you expand your thought process outwards. Don’t limit yourself. Find connections that will inspire you to create new content, or make creative use of old content, to attract more search traffic. This kind of idea can be expanded upon, but this should be enough to get you started. Take this thread of creative thinking and follow it. Let it lead you to more and more ideas. Run with it and capture your share of the traffic that is buzzing at this time of year.

Final Word of Advice

Make sure that once you’ve successfully piggybacked off of the holiday search traffic, that you’ve got something in store for your new visitors to appreciate. When they get to your page, make sure to hit them with something useful. Make that visit count. Convert if at all possible. Now, go! These three months will be gone very soon. Don’t miss out.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2010. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Christmas, Holiday, Irish culture, niche marketing
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© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2008. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Christmas
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So, without further ado, here it is (try not to cover your ears through the entire thing, k?)

(Or you can download it by right clicking and saving from this link: DazzlinDonna Sings Santa Baby)

Lyrics:

santa baby, a PR9 would be … so fine
so hurry down the chimney tonight.

santa baby, top 10 rankings for all…my keywords
and no more penalties or bans … would be grand
so hurry down the chimney tonight.

santa baby, it’d be a kick if you brought
adsense clicks
so hurry down the chimney tonight.

santa baby, fill my stocking with backlinks
don’t ya think?
and hurry down the chimney tonight.

santa cutie, bring a little bribe to matt cutts
but keep it hush hush
so hurry down the chimney tonight.

santa baby, if you really want my luv
link to me from a dot guv!
and hurry down the chimney tonight.

santa baby, 90% conversion rates
would be really great!
and hurry down the chimney tonight.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2008. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Christmas, Santa Baby
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Let’s say you are an expert in mountain biking. No, you didn’t take courses in biking, and you never owned a bicycle factory. You simply have been an avid mountain biker over the last 10 years, and that experience has led you to an understanding of the sport that enables you to be considered an expert. You know much about great trails, bike safety, which bikes are best under which conditions, etc. You get questioned often about the topic, as young enthusiasts want your advice.

Now, you decide you want to spread your knowledge worldwide, so you set up a web site to do so. You’ve done your homework, you’ve made the site search engine friendly, you’ve obtained some nice backlinks to the site, and you’ve begun to see some traffic trickling in. You’ve decided that what you really need is to be recognized as an expert, so you tackle the following tasks:

• The “be everywhere” task, in which you participate in as many relevant online mountain biking communities as possible. During this task, you strive to be as helpful as possible, answering questions freely, and being generous with your time in giving advice and tips.
• The “get published” task, in which you write articles for syndication, write guest posts on outdoor enthusiasts blogs, blog frequently on your own blog, and even get published in a few offline publications, such as local newspapers and magazines.
• The “have your voice heard” task, in which you become a guest on podcast stations, and eventually even do guest spots at your local radio station.
• The “have your face seen” task, in which your head shot is your avatar, and that avatar becomes associated with your name in all the places you visit.

After a few months, you realize that you’ve got a pretty solid base of “proof” that you are indeed an expert in mountain biking. You’ve built up a nice collection of articles, blog posts, podcast interviews, etc. that all point to you as being an authority in the topic. The only people who haven’t yet heard of you are the ones you want recognition from the most – the Influencers.

The Influencers are the A-list bloggers, the well-known journalists, and the highly respected publications that reach the masses. If even one Influencer claims you are one of the world’s foremost mountain biking authorities, you can rest assured that it won’t be long before EVERYONE thinks that of you. At that point, every journalist and blogger who has a story about mountain biking will be wanting your comments, your opinions, and your quotes for their stories. And each of those influencers will likely call you an expert, or an authority, or a guru as well. But what if you haven’t been able to get that one Influencer to get the ball rolling? What do you do?

Get their attention (which doesn’t translate into becoming a pest, btw). You can make contact with them, offering your assistance to them in some way. (By giving of yourself to them, rather than asking something OF them, you become an asset and not a liability). You should be doing this whenever it makes sense to do so (again, always keeping in mind that you do NOT want to be a pest or a stalker). There are probably hundreds of influencers you can contact, so you don’t need to make a pest of yourself with any particular one. Make sure that a link to your site or blog is always in your email correspondence with these Influencers. They are curious just like you and I. At least a few of them will certainly click your link just to find out more about you. Simple curiosity can bring you right smack onto their radar. If your correspondence was helpful to them in any way, rather than asking something from them, there’s a very good chance that they will be drawn towards wanting to know more about you.

While you are attempting to get someone’s attention, you should be creating a path that leads straight to you. You see, when a journalist has a story to write about mountain biking, he will probably do the same thing you or I would do if we needed information about a topic we were not already knowledgeable about. We would google it. That journalist might even go so far as to search for “mountain biking expert”, or “mountain biking authority” or “mountain biking guru”. What if your name showed up in the top 10 search results for any of those phrases? How much would you bet that journalist would be trying to find a way to contact you to get your thoughts on his story angle?

You see, you can begin working towards being recognized as a guru in the search results long before the Influencers recognize it. Did your cousin win the local bike rally after you gave him a few pointers? How many social networks does your cousin spend his time in every day? What if he were to link to your site in each of those communities, using “Mountain Biking Guru” as the link text? Did you help your boss decide which bike to buy for his kid for Christmas? Could you persuade your boss to have his kid mention your name when he blogs about how cool his new bike is … using “Dave is an expert in mountain biking” as the link text perhaps? See where I’m going with this? In many areas, it wouldn’t take much to turn a few links into a top 10 ranking for “your specialty guru”.

Now, whether you’ve managed to get the attention of an Influencer or not, you’ll at least get their attention when they google for the experts in your field.

Let’s sum this up:

1. Recognize that you are an expert in whatever you are an expert in.
2. Spread your expertise far and wide using the various tasks described above.
3. Attempt to get the attention of an Influencer (without making a pest out of yourself).
4. Work towards a top 10 ranking for “your topic guru”, “your topic expert”, or “your topic authority”.

We’ve almost come to the final chapter in our journey towards positioning ourselves as authorities within in our niches. There is one final step that you should take, and we’ll cover that next time. Until then, make a list of the top 20 Influencers in your field and begin your journey to Guru-ness.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2008. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: authority, Christmas, expert, guru, journalist, online mountain biking communities, search engine, search results, site search engine, social networks
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I’d like to thank all of you for spending time with me this year by giving you this little holiday greeting. You’ll see I prepared it just for you directly from me. (Yes, that’s me grinning at you in the picture above!) Just click here, or on the picture to get your holiday cheer from me. When you’ve finished watching it, make your own, and send it to all your readers.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2007. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Christmas, elf yourself, fun
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But what else does this day mean? For me, it means the start of the holiday season. None of that Black Friday stuff for me. Waiting till the day after Thanksgiving means waiting too long! People begin Christmas shopping earlier and earlier every year. And with online shopping getting to be simply huge, now’s the time that people start ordering online. So, what does that really mean for me and you?

That means it’s time to profit from the online holiday shopping sprees. Now’s the perfect time to sign up for some high-dollar affiliate products. It may be difficult to convert shoppers for high-priced items during the rest of the year, but pockets open up a lot more now. Parents have saved up all year long to get the kids their wished-for electronic toys and gadgets, and those things can cost quite a bit of money.

If YOU help those parents decide which products to buy…
If YOU explain what their options are, and show the pros and cons of each…
If YOU give them the information they need to make a decision…

Then there’s a good chance that your affiliate links will be the ones to send them on to their final purchase. And if those purchases are high-dollar sales, you earn some nice commissions. So, if you don’t already have some expensive affiliate items lined up, go find some. Then do your homework, and create some outstanding comparisons or reviews so that you can guide holiday shoppers on to their destinations – purchases that make them happy, and you as well.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Christmas, Halloween, high-dollar affiliate products, holiday affiliate products, holiday season, online holiday shopping sprees, online shopping, seasonal business planning, Thanksgiving
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Here’s a little Christmas card just for you.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2006. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Christmas
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So, this last week before Christmas, I still have to get some more groceries for the big dinner. We usually get together Christmas Eve so the kids can go off to the inlaws for Christmas Day. We’ll bake a ham, slice it up, make sandwiches, and have lots of finger foods to go with it. Everyone seems to prefer the snackies type Christmas dinner over the traditional dinner, since Thanksgiving dinner was just a few weeks ago.

My granddaughter is just a little over 1 year old, so this will be the first Christmas she’ll be able to enjoy. She still doesn’t really know what’s going on, but she does like the Christmas ornaments and lights, and she has a pretty decent grasp on the concept of opening a present and getting cool stuff. So, this year should be pretty fun. I think her favorite toy will be the toy cell phone I got for her. The kid is absolutely bonkers about two things – remote controls and phones. We had to give her her very own (old, no longer used) remote control to play with, but she still tries to grab the real ones whenever possible. And don’t get a phone anywhere within her reach! So, I found a nifty toy phone that lets you record a message, so when she hits a button, she actually hears someone (me) on the other end. It also does some other cool things, so I think she’s gonna go ga-ga over it.

Since we recently moved here, we didn’t go all out on the decorations this year, but next year we’ll be decorating the outside of the house, the front porch, and the back deck. There were just too many other things to do this year. But the inside of the house is nicely decorated and has a very nice ambience right now. Life is good.

What are y’all doing to get ready for Christmas (or whichever holiday you may be celebrating at this time of year)? Whatever it is you do, I hope all of you have a wonderful, joyful time, filled with great fun and lots of love this holiday season.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2006. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cellular telephone, Christmas, Christmas Day, Christmas Eve, Thanksgiving
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