Seasonal articles

What a seasonal article is

A seasonal article is a piece written for a period when your customers are buying, published far enough ahead that it is already in place when they start looking. The subject is ordinary. The timing is the entire job. A piece about preparing an irrigation system for winter is worth a great deal in late summer and almost nothing in November, and the difference is a date in a calendar, not a difference in the writing.

It is not a piece about a holiday, and it is not a sale announcement dressed as an article. The season that matters is your customers' buying season, which often has no relation to the retail calendar. For a company selling grain bins it is set by harvest. For a tax preparer it starts in January. For a patio furniture supplier the decisive weeks are in February, when nobody is thinking about patios except the people who are.

It is also, by design, dead for most of the year. That is the honest shape of the format and worth understanding before buying it.

When you need one

You need seasonal pieces when your revenue is genuinely lumpy. If two or three months carry the year, and customers start looking some weeks before they buy, then having the right article already published during the looking phase is worth more than anything you can do during the buying phase itself.

It is also the right move when you lose people to the competitor who got there first. Being visible at the moment a question occurs to somebody is largely a matter of having published before they thought of it.

You do not need this if demand is flat across the year. Manufacturing a season where none exists produces thin pieces nobody was looking for, and the money is better spent on pieces written to stay true that earn every month. And if last year's seasonal pieces are still sitting there, do not commission new ones. Update them: that is bringing existing posts back to life, and on a seasonal archive it is usually the strongest move available.

What goes in it

A publication date set backwards from the buying window. The first decision, taken before the subject. Typically six to twelve weeks ahead, depending on how long your buyers take between first wondering and first phoning.

Timing the reader can act on. When to book, when it is too late this year, what the lead time is, and what happens to people who leave it. Urgency stated as fact, not manufactured.

Nothing that ties it to one year. No year in the headline, no reference to this particular season's weather or prices in the body. The whole point is that this article is updated next year rather than rewritten, so the parts that would date are kept in one clearly marked block.

The local specifics. Seasons are regional. A piece written for the Fraser Valley and a piece written for southern Alberta are different pieces even when the task is identical, and the article says which it means.

One instruction at the end. Book, order, or diarise. Seasonal readers act or forget, and there is no third outcome.

What you get

A season map. One page showing your buying windows across the twelve months, when each piece has to be live, and therefore when it has to be written. It comes first, drives everything else, and is useful even if no article follows.

The articles. Each usually 800 to 1,500 words, in a shared document you own, with headline, title tag and meta description in a box at the top, and the dateable material isolated in one marked block.

A yearly update note per piece. A short list of exactly what to change when the season comes round again, so next year's job is an hour rather than a commission.

One round of revision per article is included. Drafts arrive with slack before the live date, because a seasonal piece delivered late has lost most of its value.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A New Brunswick company services and winterises boats. It has four blog posts about winterising, all published in the second half of October, which is when the owner has time. By then customers have already chosen a yard. The busy season is decided in the first fortnight of September, and the posts are consistently four weeks late every single year.

The season map shows two windows rather than one: winterising decided in late August and early September, and spring recommissioning decided in March. Five articles are planned, and the publication dates are set first. The main piece, on what winterising includes and how to compare two quotes, goes live on the first of August. A second, on the three things that damage a hull over a Maritime winter, follows a fortnight later. Two shorter pieces cover shrink wrap against indoor storage and what to remove from the boat yourself. The spring piece is written in the same batch and scheduled for late February. Each carries a boxed block with the year's dates and capacity, marked for a yearly swap. The following August the whole set goes live again after about ninety minutes of edits.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. When your customers actually buy, how far ahead they start looking, and what you published last year. No charge.
2. The season map. Within a week, the twelve-month picture with required live dates working backwards from each window.
3. A fixed price in writing. Per article or per season, with the live dates written into the agreement as deadlines.
4. Recorded calls. Usually one per season rather than one per article, because the material for a batch comes out of a single conversation.
5. Drafts, early. Delivered at least three weeks before each live date, so a revision round cannot push a piece past its window.
6. Handover and diarising. Final articles, metadata and update notes, with next year's edit dates written down while everyone remembers why.

What it costs

Seasonal articles are quoted as a fixed price after the half-hour call, usually per season rather than per piece, because four articles drawn from one conversation cost less than four commissioned separately. The season map is quoted separately if you want it on its own. The yearly update pass costs a fraction of the original, since the writing already exists. All figures are in CAD and agreed in writing before anything starts; the pricing page shows the four ways of working here.

What happens next

Three things usually follow. The live dates get folded into a dated schedule you can actually keep, so next year does not depend on somebody remembering in August. The articles get sent to the list at the right moment, which is a matter of a sending plan built around the same windows. And because seasonal work leaves ten quiet months, most people balance it with pieces written to be true in three years so the blog earns year-round. None of that is assumed. A season's articles are complete on their own, and they are yours from the day they are delivered.