A sports gift guide is a gift that can keep on giving to your business all year long.
From Mother’s Day and Father’s Day to birthdays and anniversaries, there’s always something to celebrate. Often, those celebrations include gifts.
If you haven’t created sports gift guides for your audience, you’re missing out on an opportunity to drive traffic to your website, promote your business, and generate additional revenue if you participate in affiliate programs.
Whether you sell pickleball paddles, coach golf, or anything in between, you can tailor your gift guides for your audience and promote products you love. Here’s how to get started.
How to Plan Your Sports Gift Guide
Gift guides can be a very crowded space. Nearly every publisher creates them in some form or fashion, and it can be challenging to stand out. But as a sports business, your goal is not necessarily to compete with big publishers with broad audiences.
After all, you’ve spent time curating a passionate audience that loves pickleball, tennis, or golf. You know them better than anyone else. You know which gifts they want to receive or purchase. With a little bit of planning, you can create a sports gift guide that serves your audience very well.
Understand Your Audience
In most cases, you write your blog posts, newsletters, or social media posts with your ideal customer in mind. For a gift guide, your audience will vary based on the theme of your gift guide.
For example, let’s imagine you sell pickleball paddles. Your typical audience is people who play pickleball. They likely have basic pickleball knowledge, and might even have intermediate or advanced pickleball knowledge.
Most of your day-to-day content speaks to this audience. If you want to write a gift guide that speaks to this audience, you might focus on gifts they can give to other people in their pickleball circle, like their playing partner or coach.
However, the person searching for pickleball gifts might not fall into the category of your ideal customer. Instead, it might be the son, daughter, spouse, or friend of an avid pickleball player.
This person might not play themselves, but someone they love does. They not only need gift ideas, but they also need help identifying why a particular gift is a good fit for the pickleball player they know.
In other words, there is a knowledge gap that you can address. It is an opportunity to establish yourself as an expert and, potentially, create a new customer who will return to you again and again for gifts for their loved ones in the future.
Brainstorm Gift Guide Ideas
Gift guides are a chance to expand your audience. You can – and should – write multiple guides that target specific audiences.
If this seems like a huge lift, don’t worry! You don’t have to create all of these at once. There are opportunities to publish gift guides throughout the year. Brainstorming some ideas now will help you fill your content calendar in the coming months. Here’s how to brainstorm great ideas, step by step.
Step 1: Consider What You Offer
Your gift guides should generate traffic to your website, of course. You also want them to generate revenue through affiliate links or by encouraging readers to directly purchase a product or service from your website.
Service-Based Businesses
If you are a service provider, like a pickleball coach or a pickleball club, you want to prioritize gift guides that let you seamlessly incorporate your service into the guide.
If you use affiliate marketing to generate some of your income, you will have more options for gift guides that align with your business.
Product-Based Businesses
If you sell a tangible product, like pickleball paddles or attire, you can prioritize gift guides that align with your products. There are creative ways to do this to help you stand out from competitors. We’ll go over a few ideas later in this post.
Step 2: Review Your Audience
Remember, your gift guide audience falls into two categories: people who are already familiar with (and playing) your sport, and people who are unfamiliar with it.
Keep both of these audiences in mind as you brainstorm ideas. If you’re a pen-and-paper brainstormer, place an asterisk next to the ideas that will work for the audience that is already playing your sport, and an exclamation point next to the ideas that will appeal to people who are unfamiliar with it.
Step 3: Brainstorm
It’s time to have some fun! As you brainstorm, write down everything that comes to mind, from general ideas for gift guides to any products or services you want to promote.
For example, if you’re a pickleball coach, you might have several affiliate products or partners that you want to promote. After listing these products individually, you realize they have a connection you did not consider before, like being great for at-home training or perfect for introducing your kids to pickleball. That could be an entirely different gift guide that sets you apart from your competition.
How to Create Your Sports Gift Guide
After your brainstorming session, you will have plenty of options for gift guides. You don’t have to tackle them all at once! Start with one and build out your library of gift guides over time.
Pick Your First Gift Guide
Which gift guide should you write first? It depends!
What Time of the Year Is It?
Some gift guides have a clear-cut time peg. Many small businesses produce gift guides for:
- Valentine’s Day
- Mother’s Day
- Father’s Day
- Black Friday
- End-of-year holidays like Christmas and Hanukkah
You don’t have to limit yourself to holiday gift guides, though. You might also consider putting together gift guides for:
- Graduation
- Back to School
- Birthdays
- Anniversaries
- Retirements
- Housewarmings
The list is truly endless — the only limit is your creativity!
How Far Can You Niche?
If you want to attract your ideal customer to your site, you can also create a hyper-targeted gift guide. These gift guides aren’t necessarily for a particular holiday type of event. Instead, they target a particular gifting category.
Need examples? Here are a few:
- Kitchen Items: Find 5-10 kitchen items, like dishes, towels, and serving utensils, that are pickleball, golf, or tennis-themed that foodies and home chefs will love.
- Home Decor: Find some sports-themed artwork, decorative pillows, and other decor items to share to help readers shop for the person who loves decor.
- Bar Cart Items: Cocktail napkins, drink stirrers, flasks, and wine glasses appeal to adults who love to host.
You can also write a gift guide dedicated to a particular item, like hats, or age group, like college students or retirees.
Pick the Right Products
You don’t want to share high-priced items if your target customer is a budget shopper. You also don’t want to share gag gifts if your service or product is geared toward serious players. Know your audience, and pick ones that you can actually picture your ideal customer purchasing.
When you’re choosing products, consider factors such as:
- Price Point: Pick products that align with the price point for your products or services.
- Aesthetic: If your ideal customer prefers a neutral look, skip the neon gear. You want to choose products that your ideal customer will use.
- Service/Product Alignment: Ideally, you want the products in your gift guide to complement, not compete, with what you offer. For example, if you sell golf attire, gift guides that heavily feature decor or items for your golf bag will bring your ideal customer to your site without directing them to a competitor.
Finding products can be overwhelming. Consider keeping a running list of products that catch your eye throughout the year to make gift guide prep a little bit easier and don’t be afraid to partner with other complementary businesses to promote each other’s products or services.
Write, Edit, and Optimize
After all the research, it’s finally time to write, edit, and optimize your gift guide. There are three ways to do this: write the gift guide yourself, hand it off to a team member, or outsource it to a freelance writer. Here’s how to approach each option.
Writing a Gift Guide Yourself
Before deciding to write a gift guide yourself, think carefully about how much time you have on your plate. Each gift guide takes time to research, write, edit, and optimize. Depending on how fast you can research and write, you will likely invest 4-5 hours writing your gift guide and another 60-90 minutes optimizing and scheduling publication.
Your gift guide should be published several weeks to a month before a major holiday in order to capture shoppers. Unlike some other types of content, gift guides tend to have hard deadlines, so commit to blocking out time on your calendar to write if you decide to produce these yourself.
Handing It Off to a Team Member
If you have employees, you might hand this task off to someone with time on their plate.
If you decide to hand this task off to a team member, make sure to share any products or services that you want them to highlight and clearly define the audience you want to target.
Assign the gift guide 2-3 weeks before you plan to publish so you have enough time to review the content before it is published.
Hiring a Freelance Writer to Write a Gift Guide
Hiring a freelance writer is a great way to expand your team and reduce the amount of time you spend creating content without committing to a full-time employee.
Gift guides are excellent opportunities to dip your toes into hiring a freelance writer. Gift guides can be reused with a few updates for several years and generate income through affiliate links, so you’re more likely to receive a return on your investment. They also involve a bit of creative writing for the introduction and research to find products to feature, so you’ll learn quite a bit about a potential freelance writer through this type of assignment.
Each of these options can produce an excellent gift guide that generates traffic and income for your business. The right choice for you depends on your personal bandwidth, the strengths of your team members, and your budget.
How to Promote Your Sports Gift Guide
Your gift guide is finally ready to go! It’s time to share your finds with the world. Here’s how to ensure people read the gift guide you invested so much time into producing.
Publish Early
Your gift guide should promote your business, but it is also a service to your existing audience and potential new customers. Publish your gift guide approximately a month before time-sensitive holidays. Publishing early gives you plenty of time to promote your gift guide and ensures your readers have plenty of time to shop!
Develop a Promotional Plan
You should have a promotional plan for every piece of content you publish, and a gift guide is no exception. Plan to promote the gift guide several times and in several ways after publication.
Your promotional plan can include things like:
- Standalone posts on Instagram and Facebook upon publication
- Additional posts about specific products or services featured in the gift guide
- Instagram stories about the gift guide, including highlights about featured products you already use and love
- Reels or TikToks about featured products or services included in the gift guide
- Reminder posts about the upcoming holidays with links to the gift guide
Designing a promotional plan as soon as you finish your gift guide gives you plenty of time to prepare each post ahead of time and schedule them for publication.
Review and Improve
Once you publish your gift guide, it’s time to sit back and relax – kind of. Monitor your promotional plan, traffic to the post, and resulting sales.
Your gift guide can be repurposed and reused for years with a few minor adjustments. The data you collect after publication will help you make those tweaks and provide you with insight for future gift guides.
What does that look like in real life? For example, if you are a golf instructor who created a gift guide about golf attire for women, you might notice that readers love a particular style of skirt or color scheme. Use this knowledge as inspiration for another gift guide or future post.
What Sports Gift Guide Will You Create First?
Are you planning a gift guide for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, or the holidays? These tips will help you put together a sports gift guide that generates traffic and sales. If you need help researching, compiling and writing your gift guide, send me a note.
