Blog Marketing: How to Use Holiday Down Time to Grow Your Blog Traffic

In yesterday’s post here, we discussed holiday blog marketing. As in, what you should be doing now that the holidays are here and you may be thinking, “Nobody’s reading my posts now anyway.” Think again.

Today, I want to give some more advice along these lines.

When you’re an online entrepreneur, there just never seems to be enough time in the day. There’s always, always, always something that you just never seem to have time to get to. Well, now you do.

Following are two tips on how to use holiday down time to grow your blog’s traffic. You’ll leave your competition in the dust when the holidays are over if you do these two things.

1. Take Care of Backend Tasks: For those who don’t know, backend tasks are usually administrative tasks. For example, have you been meaning to give your readers more than one way to subscribe to your blog? Eg, add an RSS Feed in addition to the email subscriber box you already have.

Have you been meaning to add some additional Wordpress plugins like most popular posts, most recent comments, etc.? Have you been meaning to get an ebook cover designed? Have you been wanting to redesign your blog?

Have you been wanting to hire a ghost writer to put out an industry report? Have you been meaning to write that landing page for Clickbank? Have you been trying to find time to write guests posts and submit them to popular blogs in your niche?

Have you been trying to find time to organize your Favorites so you can actually find stuff quicker? Have you been meaning to “bulk write” posts (ie, write a week’s worth ahead of time)?

All of these are backend tasks that can add to your income. And, now is the time to do it by using some of the “free time” you have when things are a little slow with clients.

How do you accomplish all of this?

Bloggers & Freelance Writers: How to Frontburner Backend Projects So You Make More Money

2. Get Up and Go to Work: The answer to the above question is simple: get up and go to work like you would on any other day.

I’m a holiday nut – I adore the holidays. And the one thing I don’t like to do is work during this time. But as a freelance writer with limited time on any normal work day, I drag my lazy behind to the computer and get some work done anyways.

HOWEVER, to make it palatable, I work half days (really, a bit more). My official office hours are 8am to 6 pm EST. During a holiday week (eg, Thanksgiving), I usually close up shop a few hours early — like between 1 and 3 pm. In this manner, I stay in touch with my business but still feel like I’m enjoying the holidays. Because, if you’re a real business owner, you can’t afford to abandon your business for days or weeks at a time (at least most of us can’t).

This is especially true for online entrepreneurs like bloggers, freelance writers, internet marketers, etc. Because remember — as I mentioned in yesterday’s post — your customer base is ostensibly the world. So while we may be celebrating Thanksgiving here in the U.S., the rest of the world is still in work mode.

The Real Joy of Working from Home as a Freelance Writer, Blogger, Online Entrepreneur

It’s 10 am and I’m in full holiday mode. Four more work hours to go, and I’m back in the stores for more holiday shopping, digging out Christmas decorations to put up, cleaning my house for guests (Thanksgiving dinner is at my house this year), and off to the track to get in my miles for the half-marathon I’m running on Thanksgiving morning.

And, this is the real joy of working from home as a freelance writer, blogger and online entrepreneur – you get to set your own holiday hours! But, work must come before play.

Written by Yuwanda Black from Inkwell Editorial
Posted on November 25th, 2008 and filed under Blogging
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