How to make a holiday gift guide for your blog.

Pinterest's guide for brands asks them to go live “as early as possible between September and November”, and its UK team says people's own wishlists peak in November. A guide that is live in October is in place for both.

Two things to do before the first pin

1. Check your words in Pinterest Trends. The free tool shows when interest in a term rises; Pinterest's team points people there for holiday timing.
2. Make several pins, each with its own picture. Simple Pin Media advises little text and a concrete title. Yours could read “Gifts for the home cook under $50”.

Pinterest's own rules for affiliate pins are explained in our Pinterest guide.

For price sections, WP Tasty suggests bands such as under $25 and $25 to $50.

The gift guide template, top to bottom

1. A title that says who it is for.
2. Your disclosure, before the first link (part 4).
3. Two sentences on who the guide is for and how you chose.
4. Jump links to each section, by person and by budget.
5. Each gift with its name as a heading, a “best for” line and three to five sentences on why. Top pick first.
6. A backup for every section.

The budget sections need a price with each gift, kept current. Parts 5 to 7 show how.

For pictures, use your own photos or the ones a shop gives its affiliates (a product feed carries one per product), not pictures cut from an image search or a shop's pages.

The rules are in the Program Policies of Amazon Associates, Amazon's affiliate programme. For a gift guide, in our reading:

Amazon leaves one point open: whether a section called “Under $25” with Amazon gifts in it counts as showing a price. The safe way: Amazon gifts go in the sections by person, and the budget sections come from shops whose product feed gives you the current price.

Amazon's API, which delivers price and picture, opens only to Associates with ten qualifying sales in the past 30 days. Until then, a text link and your own words do the job.

The goal: in December, readers find gifts that are in stock, at today's price, sorted by person and by budget.

Pinterest asks affiliates to check regularly for broken or outdated links. For a gift guide, plan two full checks, just before Black Friday and in early December. From Black Friday to Cyber Monday, add a quick daily look at prices, deals and stock.

The private-window check is walked through in why affiliate posts stop earning. Two kinds of tool can take part of it off you.

What our own plugin does with a gift guide

MyFeeds is the plugin we make, and it works the third way. In the editor you search a shop's products, filter by price, On sale and In stock, and sort with the largest discount first. Typing scarf under 50 sets the price limit for you.

When the shop's feed lists an old price, the card shows it struck through, with the discount as a badge. Every night the plugin re-reads price, old price, stock, picture and link for the products in your published posts. When the sale ends and the feed drops the old price, the badge goes the next night.

From the Starter plan, a gift that sells out in every size leaves the post until it is back in stock; the free plugin keeps showing it. On Pro you see the clicks for every post and every product.

Where it stops

• Nightly, not instantly. A price changed at noon on Black Friday reaches the card after the next night, and a caching plugin can show an old price until its copy of the page is renewed.
• Published posts only. Drafts and scheduled posts are not updated each night, so publish the guide rather than schedule it.
• New and dropped products wait for the weekly read of the whole feed, or for a click on Reimport. Until then a dropped product keeps its last price.
• Amazon gifts show your name, note and link. From Starter, without picture or price, and never checked for stock; picture and price need Pro and Amazon's API.

It needs the WordPress block editor and a shop's product feed as a link: an uploaded file stays as it was the day you uploaded it. You add the disclosure and Amazon's sentence yourself.