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It’s near impossible to know what type of content will be popular week to week. Trends fade in and fade out, and current events change daily. But if done right, you can leverage seasonal events to catch the wave of predictable trends.

Here’s how to plan your annual content calendar to take advantage of seasonal events.

The key to success with seasonal content is timing. Being top of mind, at the right time, is crucial to eaing the greatest views and driving the most traffic to your site.

We’ve pinpointed the ideal times to plan, publish, and promote content around seasonal events.

Not only will this help you organize your annual content calendar, it will help you craft the most relevant content for your readers at exactly the right time. As a result, you’re more likely to see a boost in site traffic, SEO, and general brand awareness.

Here are 6 key takeaways to help you organize your annual content calendar for 2016:

• More than 6 MILLION pieces of content were published around 20 annual events in 2015
• That content received more than 534 MILLION social shares
• The majority of publishing around an annual event happens during a 26-day range
• Typically, ¾ of those 26 publishing days are before an event and ¼ of the days are after the event
• Halloween, Christmas, and New Year’s make up 57% of all the event-related content for 20 annual events in 2015
• Video was the most-shared content format for 40% of all annual events

View the full infographic below.

Download Your Free 2016 Content Calendar

Optimize your content planning and promotion all year long by downloading your free 2016 Annual Content Calendar + Planner. You’ll receive:

• 2016 Calendar with major annual events
• Optimal publication and promotion timelines
• Most successful content types by month, with examples
• Monthly planning documents for January through December

Jennifer Johnson

Jennifer is Marketing Coordinator at Alexa. With a knack for syntax and passion for building connections, she drives daily content strategy to bring you the latest and greatest happenings within Alexa and the wide world of web analytics and marketing.

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We’re pleased to announce that once again, the size of Alexa’s global traffic panel is significantly increasing.

Because it’s impossible to directly track all traffic across the web, one of the ways we calculate our metrics is by using a data panel — a sample of global Inteet traffic, made up of millions of people worldwide. The bigger the sample, the better the estimate.

So by incorporating many new data points, we’ll be improving the accuracy of our estimated metrics, which we use to calculate Alexa Ranks.

So what does this mean for you?

• More accurate rankings
• More accurate estimated traffic metrics
• More actionable SEO recommendations
• Better competitive intelligence

A more robust panel with greater global coverage means we can offer you more accurate rankings, estimated traffic metrics, and actionable recommendations. We can provide deeper insights into your own site but, more importantly, we’ll give you better inside information about your competition.

By giving you a way to peek into someone else’s traffic pattes, we enable you to:

• Benchmark your performance
• Find promising new partners, and
• Size up new markets

With the larger panel, there will also be sites for which we didn’t have metrics before — and now we do.

Another result of the additional data is that you might see changes in your traffic rank. This is especially true for sites ranked greater than 100,000, which are always subject to fluctuation.

A little more about how Alexa measures web traffic

Our estimates draw on data derived from our global traffic panel, but we also use data from direct sources, such as Alexa Certified sites. We combine all this data and filter it though advanced statistical models to determine ranks and traffic estimates.

Few companies can match Alexa’s history of measuring and estimating traffic data. In fact, we’re celebrating our 20th birthday next month. Our data scientists have been working for years to keep our methodologies up to date, and to provide the most accurate metrics possible. Alexa’s data team will continue to grow the panel and improve our models. This most recent increase is notable, but it’s just the latest example of our ongoing commitment to raising the bar for competitive intelligence in web analytics.

In a future post, we’ll talk about how we’re doing the same for another critical component of your marketing stack: SEO.

Kristen Mirenda

Kristen Mirenda is Senior Product Manager at Alexa. Since the '90s, she's built countless web properties for everyone from Expedia to Sesame Street. She's a proud New Jersey native who spent 15 years in New York City before trading coasts for San Francisco.

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I’ll admit it. I fully subscribe to the ethos of growth hacking. It’s a no-stone-left-untued, data and measurement-driven approach to maximizing audience engagement, conversion and loyalty. What’s not to like?

Well, the one thing that never quite sat right with me is the word hacking. There are a number of things implied by that word that don’t align with the intended growth hacking definition. I argue that we must replace the word hacking with something more appropriate. My rationale is as follows.

1. Hacking implies shortcuts and quick fixes.
Anyone obsessed with business growth knows that sustained growth is only achieved through a dedication to understanding and maintaining maximum relevance and appeal to a target audience. Doing so requires the disciplined and relentless application of specific methodologies to drive engagement, conversion and loyalty. Furthermore, additional methodologies must be deployed to detect and adapt to changes in the needs and orientations of that audience.

Great copywriting is not a quick fix. Disciplined A/B testing is not a quick fix. White hat SEO is not a quick fix. Focusing on the customer to optimize engagement and drive down is not a quick fix. And, this applies to all companies, not just startups.

This is a deep process. A long(er) term strategy. This is not hacking.

2. Hacking implies nefarious methods.
Being highly relevant and accessible to your target audience doesn’t come from gaming the system. Black hat SEO techniques to artificially boost page rank are dying off fast as viable means to drive sustainable growth. Real growth hacking strategies not only create better, more relevant content and offerings for customers, they make the web better as a whole. And as more companies engage in a process of continuous optimization (improvement), the entire web improves.

Growth hacking techniques are not shady, deceitful, or ill meaning. They require creativity, analytical thinking, and social prowess to achieve a singular goal.

This is not hacking.

3. The term hacking causes confusion and adoption of false principles.
The term is misunderstood, which means the benefits of growth hacking becoming widespread, or even universally adopted, is slowed unnecessarily.

If the perception among company leaders and marketing generalists is that growth hacking involves quick-fix and black hat methodologies, then the adoption of real techniques to drive customer-oriented optimization stalls. If growth hacking makes for a better web as a whole – as I argued previously – then slowing the adoption of its true methods is bad for the web.

This is the point where I confess that I don’t know if I have anything better in mind. I have no quarrels with growth engineering as a term of art. Growth marketing is also somewhat apt, though less complete in terms of what it encompasses.

In the end, growth hacking may stick. I can probably live with that. Do you know a growth hacker who would prefer to be called a growth engineer? You’re at a party. You introduce yourself to someone. You tell your new companion that you’re a growth hacker. What you do is witchcraft, unknowable to ordinary mortals. You are the James Bond of the deep web. You are mysterious, and important.

Or, you say that you’re a growth engineer. You’re the nerd in the marketing department.

See the difference?

The point is to continuously make the web a better place. This happens when companies focus on being more relevant, more accessible and more frictionless. If this is the true collective ethos of growth hacking, then perhaps it’s time to redefine the word hacking, rather than rebrand our discipline.

Andy Ramm

Andy is the President & General Manager of Alexa. He has nearly 20 years of high tech product and business leadership experience, representing tens of millions of customers in both B2B and consumer environments. Andy has lead product management, UX, software development and market development teams across three continents and eight countries.

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