7 Ways Publishers Can Leverage Halloween to Drive More Traffic to Their Site

With Halloween just over a month a way, it's time to start thinking about how you can leverage Halloween to drive traffic, engagement and of course revenue through your website. Here are 7 steps to help you accomplish that:

1) Create an Article (or Series of Articles) on Your Site About Halloween.

According to Pinterest, "People have been looking for Halloween ideas on Pinterest since August and searches are still ramping up. Some of the most popular pins around Halloween are recipes, humor, home decor, costume ideas, DIY projects and party themes".

We suggest looking at Pinterest to come up with ideas of your own. In fact, once you find a board you like it's really easy to create an article.

First, right a 4-5 sentence intro about the board, perhaps highlighting your favorite aspect. Next, embed the Pinterest board into your article (click here for simple to follow instructions courtesy of Hubspot and remember that CCE users should set the board width to 628px). Finally, publish and share your article.

That's it! You could also reach out to local haunted houses, corn mazes and the like to do featured article on them like this one at bestofcentralnvt.com. You can even embed Facebook posts from their Facebook page to give readers a sneak peak.

2) Post Halloween Related Events to Your Site

Events are another great way of driving traffic to your site so make sure to find and post several local Halloween related events on your site.

Just make sure to tag them all with "halloween 2014" so you can more easily share the upcoming events on Facebook (by sharing the url to page that shows all events by tag).

These events can also be re-purposed into an article and email. For example, you could create an article titled "20 Things To Do In [Your Town Here] for Halloween" which is great for search engine optimization (SEO).

Then you could include that article in your next email as the featured story (see below). In addition, you could pick your favorite 3 of those 20 and include the actual events in the email as featured events.

3) Create a Series of Posts on Facebook

Leverage Facebook to share your content and engage with your audience often between now and Halloween. It can include links to the articles you created above, probing questions like the one shown to the right, events and more.

Keep it fun and light and try to capture the spirit of All Hallows Eve for your community. That could mean focusing on safety, costumes, parties, decorations, events or any number of Halloween related topics.

4) Run a Halloween Themed Social Promotion

As we talk about often, social promotions are a great way to get paid to continue to build your audience and drive engagement and Halloween offers no shortage of great themes to choose from.

You could run a best costume contest, best decorations contest, best pumpkin carving contest or even a best pet costume contest. Of course, you can always do a simple giveaway as well.

In either case, make sure to go out and find some sponsors such as party stores, costume stores, or other community oriented businesses such as banks or real estate agents (for the latter you can position the sponsorship as "[some business] reminds you to have a safe and happy Halloween").

5) Create a Halloween Guide

Guides are a great way to lend further credibility and value to the listings in your directory. Plus it's a great resource for your readers and great for SEO as well.

To get started simply find (or add) all Halloween related businesses in your directory and then add them to a page on your site (CCE users should use insert snippet option to insert the listings). Then write a few sentences about each.

For example, you could write "Bob's costume store always has the best selection of costumes for all ages and also has great party supplies so you can get all your Halloween shopping done in one place". 

Once published, definitely let every business referenced know that they're featured in the guide, ask them to share it with their customers, fans and followers and also let them know that there's a sponsorship opportunity available (i.e. This Guide brought to you by...).

6) Send a Halloween Themed Email

Once you've created some great Halloween content, make sure to share it via email as it's still one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your site.

You can include any of the articles you've created, events, info about your social promotion and your guide.

Also, don't be afraid to schedule several similar emails between now and Halloween as people need friendly reminders as they often think "I will come back to that later" but forget as things get busy.

7) Include a CTA in your October Print Issue

Don't forget to include a call-to-action (CTA) in the relevant print issue.

You can include a house ad for your social promotion, highlight your favorite events or even spotlight some local business (like the corn maze for example) on the business basics page which is simply a page dedicated to promoting your website that you should be including in every issue.

If you have featured articles on Halloween you can also include calls-to-action at the end of the article to drive more people to your website.

For example, you might say "Visit yourdomain.com to find something to do for Halloween" or "Check out our Halloween Guide at yourdomain.com" or "Visit yourdomain.com to see our favorite costume ideas".

Guides and Listicles (List ARticles) are powerful and incredibly easy to create using our Community Content Engine.

Contact us to learn more about how we can help you grow your audience & revenue!