It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas
Check your calendars - yes, it’s just four months until Christmas. Now’s the time to make web pages for those premium keywords and cash in on the biggest spending season of the year. Indeed according to a Harris Interactive report, Americans spent 23.2 billion dollars online during the holiday season, up 25% from the year before. As can be imagined, the top three industries to profit from all that spending are, in descending order, apparel & clothing, toys & video games, and consumer electronics. As well, jewellery, flowers and computer hardware & peripherals proved to be the industries to watch as they were the fastest growing categories last year. Personally I’ve found pretty much all my sites do better during the holidays, with revenue about 2-3 times average. Traffic spikes, as does conversion ratios, with shoppers eager to shop right up to a few days before Christmas.
The downside to the holiday period is that when it hits all you can do is watch. Without already having a very large traffic stream, any new web pages you make made probably won’t get into the search engines in time. As well, anecdotal history tells us that Google likes to skew their results during the period hoping to spur more spending in their Adwords program. I’d guess that things will probably be even worse this year with Google now being a public company with shareholders that demand ever increasing profits. It’s probably best to try your luck at being in results on Yahoo! and MSN, as they are becoming more popular and top ten placements still relatively easy to obtain.
So get comfortable in front of your computer and start popping out pages as fast as you can. Work a little longer than usual. And give yourself a nice year end boost in revenue.