How was Your December (Holiday) Traffic?
December was a month where people celebrate holidays all around the world. We have Christmas and New Year coming up. Students are having school holidays and everyone is in a relaxed mood to welcome the coming new year.
Holidays are always the worst performing days for this blogging tips blog and with a few blogging holidays that I took myself, the traffic went even lower.
What will be the causes of low December traffic (holiday traffic)? Does it have anything to do with you or it is just the behavior of your readers?
Factors that Influence December (Holiday) Traffic
Blog Niche
Shopping sites will see a huge increase of traffic. If you are having a shopping guide blog, you are likely to see more readers, especially if your site ranked well for shopping-related keywords.
On the other hand, sites that promotes effort and productivity from readers such as blogging tips blogs, computer repairs blogs, business blogs and others will see a decrease in traffic because the readers will want to be "lazy" on such topics.
Holiday related contents
Changing your contents to suit the coming holiday such as relating it to Christmas, New Year or even relaxing stuffs will bring in traffic for you. Keeping your usual style will be good but a little tweak would make things better.
For example, if you have a food blog, you can start blogging about the recipe of the food that will be prepared for Christmas night.
A content which is related to the holiday season will take readers come back to your blog since it suited their offline relaxed lifestyle. The tension of productivity might not be there when you are blogging about something related to the holiday season.
Photo by kevindooley
Reader groups
What is the age group of your readers? Are they professionals or seniors at home? If your blog has teenagers as your readers, you are likely to receive more traffic because the school holidays will surely give them more time to get online.
On the flip side, you will see a slight fall in traffic if your blog is targeting professionals and seniors, you might be seeing a drop because a holiday means no work and extra leaning for them.
Photo by krisdecurtis
Holiday environment
Is your blog having a holiday environment? Effects such as snow falling down and also a Christmas theme will certainly bring in the warm effect of this holiday season.
Visitors will come back more because of it and sometimes new readers will stop by for some time. Visitors stay for a longer time as it is the psychology at work. They will like they are on a holiday and they are relaxing around your blog.
Your own effort
Are you having a holiday as well? If you work harder than usual during the holidays, putting in a huge amount of effort in seeking new readers, you shouldn’t see a drop.
Blogger like me is doomed to see a drop with a few blogging leaves and the slowing down of posting frequency. The lesson here is that if you work hard, you will get paid for it.
Photo by Sister72
Can This Be A Wonderful Holiday For Your Blog?
First of all, how was your traffic for December and other holiday season? What do you think has caused such impact to your blog? Also, do you think it is necessary to keep the traffic up during the holidays?
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I’m a new blogger so I don’t expect to see alot of readers on my blog anyway
I’m just trying blogging out for the fun of it. It’s always good to have fun 
My December traffic sucked.
[...] How Was Your December (Holiday) Traffic? from Wayne Liew. [...]
Well I have already seen more traffic this month then in November and I still have 9 days left in the month. I don’t find big drops around holidays. Even on Thanksgiving I saw a fair amount. - Ashley
my christmas traffic quite pleasing heheheh, btw, im gonna dedicate a post or two to Christmas! Lonely Christmas
ps. looks like u got a linkback from vandelay website design, wow that’s cool! well done wayne
“First of all, how was your traffic for December and other holiday season?”
For myself, I believe that I am quite satisfied with the results!
I was away from Kuala Lumpur during 19 - 21 December for a short trip to Singapore, did not bring along my notebook since it was kinda tiring to carry so many baggage. (went by coach).
My Wordpress Stats reached new heights during my absence!
“What do you think has caused such impact to your blog?”
I think the postings of a guide / walk through for a particular game caused such impact.
“Also, do you think it is necessary to keep the traffic up during the holidays?”
Well, being a new blogger in the blogsphere, I think it is somewhat necessary to keep traffic up all the time?
@ Chris
It’s a bit challenging for a new blog to go through this period of drought but as always, those who stays on will be the real winner.
Good luck, Chris and I am sure you will definitely make it.
@ Steven
So do mine.
@ Ashley
Cool. I have take a look at your site and I have found that it is real estate related. Looks like people are looking for new houses to buy for Year 2008. This might be the reason you see a rise in traffic.
Other than this, do you put in extra efforts in getting traffic this month?
@ jayhan
I will be dedicating a post to Christmas as well but maybe just wishes I guess.
I know Steven from that blog since I read his blog and is lucky to get featured for a few times.
@ Deimos
That will be a great result for you. Google traffic for your site? Games… More games are being played during the holidays I guess, even me myself got caught up into some online games.
New bloggers are not allowed to loosen the efforts put in for even one second. The consequences can be disastrous.
My traffic didn’t take a hit, because my blog relies more on Google Image. Only slightly less visitors via Google Image.
You sure have labeled your images well. I guess I have some work to do with my images as well.
I think it is the captions that did the trick….. the file names of the picture doesn’t tell too much.. or something like that…
Traffic’s pretty decent, even with my 2-week MIA.
@ kljs
It’s the alt and title tags right? I do have those in my images but I guess I should target some good keywords to get the traffic in.
@ goldfries
When I look at your site and with you telling me that, I am guessing Google helped you a lot. Right? All those hardware reviews are hard to find (am I wrong?) since the more saturated niche is the gadget category.
According to Google Analytics, Google alone accounts to 38.19% of my traffic for December.
Besides that, I have content that people always come back for and / or refer to.
Wow, that’s a good chunk from Google. My referral traffic is more than my search engine traffic.
Yeah, surprisingly i had quite high traffic around Christmas, highest traffic and pageviews recorded on Christmas eve. Pageviews were like nearly double what’s on my December average.
One word: sucky.
My traffic in December dropped off totally. Comments are also down. Amazingly even though I had a traffic low, I had a high readership wise
Ah well, I’m looking forward to January when it’ll pick up again (I hope so).
@ goldfries
Double your average? On Christmas? You know what goldfries? You frequently give me surprises like this… I hope you remember the Photoshop edit of the Advertlets earnings amount in LYN? You nearly shocked me to death.
@ Ruchir
What I speculate from this is that people might stop visiting our blogs during this season but instead subscribing to the feeds to that they can do catchup later on.
december, my traffic and readership increase a bit..also my earnings
..However, i’m very sad with the comment section, no improvement..still need to learn to attract visitor to leave a comment
Well, you can try commenting on other blogs. Some bloggers will reciprocate by commenting back on your blog.
Anyway, December is going to be over soon!