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I thoroughly enjoyed creating gift guides for Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and many other occasions and being able to work with some amazing brands and showcase some great products to my readers. Gift guides are extremely popular in the blogging world and they can also be a great stepping stone to working with brands and making money, especially through affiliate marketing! Today I’m going to share some top tips on how to create a gift guide for beginners.
Gift guides are very popular posts. I love reading them myself and I’ve certainly bought items in the past based off another bloggers gift guide recommendation. They’re also a great opportunity to share the love for your favourite brands as well as potentially work with new brands. Perhaps you’re a relatively new blogger then maybe you’re considering creating your first gift guide or you’re not quite sure where to start. Then this post on how to create a gift guide is for you!
Tips on how to create a gift guide:
Include un-gifted products
When learning how to create a gift guide, if it’s your first gift guide and aren’t working with an awful lot of brands then it’s definitely worth adding your own un-gifted products from brands that you love into the guide too. This could even lead to a collaboration with that particular brand in the future on another gift guide!
Pitch to brands you already love
And a gift guide is a really good way to dip your toes into working with brands. Brands LOVE gift guides and around certain occasions, you’ll see hundreds of brands looking for bloggers to feature their products in gift guides. But don’t be scared to pitch directly to brands you already love if they’ll be a good fit and don’t forget to include your media kit!
Related read: How To Create A Media Kit For Your Blog
Recommended: Blog to Business – Your Pitching Toolkit (use code JENNY for 10% off!)
Be clear on the type of guide you’re creating
My own personal gift guides don’t really follow a “theme” but some people create very specific gift guides:
- Handmade Christmas Gift Guide
- Ethical Christmas Gift Guide
- Gifts For Penguin Lovers
- Gifts For Bakers
There are hundreds of different ways you can approach a gift guide. So before you start, be clear on the type of guide you’re creating. There’s no right or wrong! But if you have an idea that’s a bit different, don’t be scared to go for it!
Only include products you love and would buy yourself
I mean, this is pretty straight forward isn’t it. I only include products in my gift guide that I know I love and/or the person the gift guide is for i.e Mother’s Day would love those products too. Most brands allow you to pick some products yourself to feature, so of course you’ll only pick ones you actually love. But don’t just work with a brand for the sake of it in a gift guide because it’s incredibly hard to write positive thing and encourage people to buy a product that you wouldn’t buy yourself!
Make it neat and easy to follow
Gift guides contain a lot of information, links, photos and text from different brands and for different products so it’s important that you format your post so that it’s incredibly easy for the readers to follow. All links should be next to the correct description and using images to break each product up is really useful.
Related read: How To Write A Banging Blog Post People Will Read
Good quality photos
And speaking of photos, your own good quality photos is very important for a gift guide. You wouldn’t purchase a gift unless you could clearly see what it looked like first, would you? Especially if you’re being sent products from brands, taking the time to capture good, high quality images is always a must-do. They don’t have to be awfully fancy, as long as the product in question is the main focus!
Consider offering discount codes
Some brands will automatically offer a discount code for your readers along with their product to be featured in your gift guide, which is great! It’s always a nice extra incentive for readers if they’re interested in that particular product. If they don’t, don’t be scared to bring it up and ask brands yourself and explain the benefits of offering discount codes.
Disclose
If most or all of the products featured in your gift guide are gifted from the brand, then the post needs to be properly disclosed and you need to explain that the products featured were sent to you. There’s no way around this one, it’s the law. So just do it. And please note, “this is a collaborative post” no longer qualifies as correct disclosure, for paid or gifted collaborations. And that pretty much sums up how to create a gift guide!
