Blogging silly season starts
For those new to blogging, welcome to blog silly season, which is defined as the time between the US holiday of Thanksgiving, and roughly the end of the first week in January. Why silly season you may ask? well it’s the time of year your blog stats don’t play by the rules. No matter how good your posts, people start going away and your blog stats are going to look like a world’s largest rollercoaster, and there isn’t much you can do about it.
Why?
well as I mentioned this is the time of year people start going away in the lead up to Christmas and over the New Year. If you’re running a product related site you’ll get a good lead up to Christmas than an almighty crash after that. For other blogs, things will be a bit all over the place.
What to do?
There is nothing you can really do. You’ll start to notice other bloggers making announcements how they’ll be taking a break from blogging for 1, 2 or even more weeks. Good on them. Personally I see this as an opportunity to provide content where others aren’t because there is still an audience for content, however as I’ve written before it’s still very important that you take a break from blogging once in a while, holidays are good for you.
Income
Here’s the bad news: your Adsense, Chitika and other revenue is going to plunge, particularly over Christmas – New Years. I know Darren over at Problogger works on a theory of averages and plans for this time of year, and so should you. There isn’t alot you can do to change this, other than blog about 4x as hard as you’ve done before, and even then there is no guarantee that the extra activity will counter the downturn.
Embrace it
Personally, I’ve always embraced the silly season. I’m running my Christmas Blogging Awards again this year and the headers on my blogs will all get a some Christmas decorations. After a long year it doesn’t hurt to sit back and relax, enjoy the season, maybe discover some new blogs, and look forward to a successful 2006.
Funny, my traffic sky-rockets between Thanksgiving and New Years Day. Must be my annual BloggingPoet.com 30 Days Of Christmas ’cause those guys with 12 days ain’t got squat. By the way, it starts tomorrow (Nov 26) and it’s going to be even bigger than last year.
When do we sign up for the Christmas Blogging Contest?