Christmas and New Years have come and gone but there is no time to rest because Valentines Day is coming up fast hot on it’s heels. As webmasters and bloggers there is no time to waste. We need to start preparing for this next holiday now so that we can maximize on the traffic it generates.

If you went into a big box store or pharmacy in the days following Christmas you would have seen that these stores already had their Valentines Day stock out for sale. While some of us may be shaking our head at this in amazement, watching them jump so quickly from holiday to holiday, in reality these guys know what they are doing and how to maximize their profits on Holiday sales. The wouldn’t do it if they hadn’t already learned that making their Valentines Day stock available so quickly leads to more money in their tills.

We can and should learn from this behavior for our own websites and blogs. Valentines Traffic for websites is not just confined to February 14th. In actual fact the lead up to Valentines Day provides a rich resource of traffic to websites and blogs. Let me show you some graphs from one of my websites Quizopolis.com that contains some evergreen Valentines Day traffic.

Valentines Day Website Traffic Graphs

Take a look at the 2 graphs below. These are real traffic graphs. They show all traffic for January and February of 2014 and 2015 that had a landing page containing the word Valentine.

Valentines Day Traffic 2014

Valentines Day Traffic 2015

The first thing to note is that over the last 2 years, Valentines Day content has brought in over 5,000 extra visitors to the website. That’s 5,000 visitors that most likely would not have come to the site if there was no Valentines Day content.

Secondly there is a very clear pattern shown on these graphs. Valentines Day traffic starts to trickle in at the beginning of January but then really starts to take off a full 3 weeks before Valentines Day on February 14th. Both in 2014 and 2015 the traffic to the Valentines Day content takes off in the last week of January.

Planning your Valentines Day Content

Now that we know when we expect the Valentines Day traffic to start hitting our websites, we can start making plans for it. It’s important to create your content well in advance of Valentines Day so that it is ready in time. As the traffic graphs show, creating and publishing your content the week before Valentines Day is not going to get your the most traffic as you are missing out on a lot of traffic from the weeks leading up to Valentines Day.

I like to start planning and creating my Valentines Day content at the beginning of January and have it ready and launched by the 3rd week of January. Here is the timeline i follow.

• January 1st to 5th – Research and plan my Valentines Day content
• January 6th to 21st – Create and release my Valentines Day content
• January 22nd to February 14th – Promote my Valentines Day content

In addition to following the above dates, I try to make sure that as much of the content I create is evergreen content. This means that it is not specific just for a single year, but instead will work and be relevant year after year. This way over the years the amount of Valentines Day content I have grows and attracts more and more visitors to your website or blog.

So now is the time to take action. Don’t wait to get your Valentines Day content out there early and don’t be afraid that you are publishing to soon. The numbers don’t lie. Your visitors are looking for your content early so make sure are making it available for them.