Gift guides are a very popular shopping tool—both online and in print. People love them because they feature unique and popular gift ideas with pictures and a small write-up that make gift shopping easy and fun!
For handmade sellers, these gift guides are a HUGE sales opportunity. Many of you make a large percentage of your sales during the holidays, and these gift guides get your product pictures into the hands of literally thousands and thousands of shoppers.
. . . But how in the world do you get your product featured in one?
In today’s video we’re going to talk about how you absolutely can get your product featured in gift guides—and also talk about when you need to start working on it—which can be, believe it or not—as early as May or June!!
I’m going to answer some of your most common questions, like what the heck is a holiday gift guide, and what are the benefits for my handmade business?
In addition, I have asked my friend and PR expert, Nora Wolf from Wolf Craft PR, for help, and she has given me some great tips that I’m going to share with you in this article.
And I am even more excited to share with you that Nora will actually be doing a free workshop for Tizzit.co to show you exactly how you can get your handmade products into holiday gift guides!
If you like my style of teaching, no fluff, actionable advice, you’ll love her workshop too because she’s just the same! She’ll be walking you through many important strategies that she is using herself to get her clients into gift guides and help them grow their businesses.
Sign up using this link. But for now, let’s dive into today’s article!
So, ready? Let’s dive in.
Some of you may not be familiar with holiday gift guides, so I want to start with a quick description of what they are.
Holiday gift guides are product round-ups that are published from October through December in magazines, newspapers, and blogs. They of course feature gifts that are of interest to the reader of that specific media.
Think of the insert you find in your favorite magazine or in the newspaper, with pages of cool gift ideas that you browse through.
You will also find holiday gift guides online. For example, I just typed “gift for friends” and one of the articles that popped up is called “58 thoughtful gifts to give your friends under $100.” This is a gift guide!
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One very important thing Nora will teach you is the absolutely crazy potential that holiday gift guides offer.
Think of the number of eyes that will see a gift guide that is in a magazine or on a popular website. Easily thousands, right? For some bigger publications, it’s even in the hundreds of thousands or in the millions.
So just think about all the shoppers that would see your product if you secure one or two placements in gift guides—A LOT!
More eyes on your products not only means more sales, but also more brand awareness!
One important thing that Nora shared with me is that you need to think outside the box when making a list of publications you want to pitch your products to.
What she means by this is that you can find holiday gift guides in niche publications you would normally not be able to work with—and this vastly increases the amount of PR opportunities.
One example that she uses is Men’s magazines. If you are a handmade seller that makes products for women, you normally wouldn’t want your product featured in a men’s magazine, right?
Because it wouldn’t reach your ideal customer.
But during the holidays, men’s magazines feature gift guides that give their readers tips on what types of gifts to purchase for the “women in their life”—wives, girlfriends, mothers, and daughters.
So not only can you pursue holiday guides in media publications that target your ideal customer, but you can also approach media publications that target people who will want to buy a GIFT for your ideal customer!
I’m going to dive into this question in much more detail in next article, but the short answer is, you want to get started between May and July, depending on how prepared you are (have you done this before?) and what publication you are pitching your products to!
Nora points out that when it’s your first time, you will need to spend even more time researching which publications are the best fit, planning what products to highlight for each publication, as well as making sure you have the right type of product photos that gift guides are looking for and generally do a bit of prep work to make sure you get as many YES-es as possible.
So whether you’re reading this article when it first comes out in May, or if it’s June or July, the sooner you get started the better!
Another important subject Nora shared with me is …
Her very wise advice is to look at past gift guides in the publications you’re pitching to and pay attention to the small details of each photo.
The editors of each publication will select images that meet their standards and style, and you want your products to match what you see.
Even if you have the most professional and stylish photos of your handmade products, if you don’t match the style the editors are looking for they will pass you over.
So I hope you’re excited about this opportunity to learn exactly how to feature handmade products for holiday gift guides from someone who is really experienced and does this for a living—and gets her clients millions of views in magazines gift guides every year.
Join me and my good friend Nora from Wolf Craft PR for a FREE workshop about how to pitch your handmade products for holiday gift guides!
Wolf Craft is a PR company that helps business owners like you get into magazines, websites—essentially, helps you find and secure PR opportunities. They help their clients secure 3-5 times more press placements, which is a testimony to their expertise in this field.
Nora’s workshop will teach you many practical tips, including her 5 gift guide pitching tips that she has perfected over the years so you’ll know *exactly* what makes a product ready for press outreach.
If you want to be in holiday gift guides this year I would highly recommend you sign up and watch the webinar, you will learn very valuable strategies for pitching holiday guides so that you can get your products in front of thousands of potential customers!
Thanks for reading, make sure to sign up for the gift guide workshop and click to learn about the timeline for pitching holiday gift guides.
Until next time, au revoir!
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