How To Take Advantage of Seasonal Ad Rates Being High
The end of the year has become an important time in the digital ecosystem. It’s when advertisers begin cranking up their budgets and digital publishers begin reaping the benefits of high seasonal ad rates.
This has become more and more pronounced every year. As advertisers shift more of their budgets away from TV and print, digital advertising has gotten more and more competitive towards the end of the year.
For publishers, it’s a big opportunity to capitalize on two major opportunities.
- Record-high ad rates
- Seasonal booms in web traffic
Below, I highlight how to do both in an instructional video.
Taking advantage of high digital ad rates
In the first part of the video, I detail how Ezoic publishers can maximize their opportunity in this kind of environment.
Most publishers have probably noticed historically that they make more money in the final months of the year. This is because advertisers are trying to capitalize on increased consumer spending. This means that ad rates are more competitive (thus higher) this time of the year.
This results in publishers receiving higher rates for the ad space on their websites during this timeframe.
2018 has already been a record year for publishers; according to The Ad Revenue Index.
For publishers, this means that it is a prime opportunity to publish new content, maximize intelligent tools for displaying ads, and to ensure that everything on the site is working properly.
This is typically not the best time to experiment with redesigns or major site changes.
Ezoic publishers are typically in a better position than most. The nature of Ezoic’s intelligence platform and the testing process ensures that the publisher is in the best position possible to take advantage of the increased competition for all types of ad inventory.
If you leverage Ezoic, it’s a great time to increase traffic to Ezoic or add additional placeholders.
Taking advantage of seasonal traffic
For all the reasons above, it is a great time to be sharing and publishing content.
If you have previous seasonal content, it’s a great time to share it again on all your social media platforms. If you’re creating new content, consider what seasonal slants might be popular this year.
Even if you typically neglect certain social media channels, it’s worth it to publish content to these channels this time of the year with appropriate hashtags and associations. This can help you maximize seasonal enthusiasm and drive more traffic back to your website.
Lastly, it’s an excellent time to take full advantage of traffic sources that may not always be a part of your regular content sharing procedures.
Outlets like Reddit or Quora offer major reach. Places like Reddit are not regular places where you can drop every new piece of content you create, but because of the seasonal aspect of some of your content, you may be able to find some really good sub-Reddits that make a lot of sense for your content.
As we discussed in a recent Inside The Publisher Lab, Reddit has a lot of emerging potential for publishers.
However, one of my favorite places to share content offers some of the greatest opportunities this time of year.
Quora can be the source of a lot of new quality traffic.
Simply create an account (if you don’t already have one) and begin finding new questions that are being asked around topics that you currently have content written about.
Take a snippet of your content and publish it as an answer and then link back to the full article living on your site. Easy peasy.
Do this 5-6 times and you are bound to have one answer strike gold and send some quality traffic your direction.
Check out examples of how I have done this with the Ezoic blog here.
Wrapping it all up
It’s one of the best times of the year for digital publishers. Make sure you take full advantage.
Questions, comments, thoughts? Leave them below and I’ll answer them personally.
