Valentine’s Day Gift Guides

Today’s directive is to make a Valentine’s Day Guide and publish it by this Friday, January 29th at the latest.

If you already have a piece built or an angle planned, then great! Please let us know; it most likely works perfectly as-is.

If you haven’t already begun working on a page or have an angle planned, then here is what we recommend for the page’s title and permalink:

• Title: The City Name Guide to Valentine’s Day

• Permalink: city-name-valentines-day-gift-guide

• Page Type: Article (/p page)

Our Affiliate Manager, Rory, is building a national version of the guide, which will be ready by tomorrow (Thursday) at Noon CT. It will feature national products - but they’ll all be cool, awesome, and on-brand. We promise.

• Michael & Autumn - We’ll copy the national guide onto Do502, Do317, DoPDX, and DoSD for you. Then, our ask will be for you to add 2-3 local gifts and/or experiences to each guide to give them some local feel. 

• Katie, Alexis, Ally, Rhea, Ester, Dave - Please make your own page with 8-10 awesome local gifts and experience suggestions. We’ll then send you blurbs for 5 more national gifts by tomorrow (Thursday) at Noon CT to help monetize your guides.

• Sara, Clay, Matt & Matt - You have the option of either of the above approaches. You can either:

• Start with the national shell and add some local gifts/experiences to it.

• Build your own guide and add national gifts to that.

Everyone! When sourcing local inclusions, please be sure to make sure that:

• All the recommendations fit our brand. We want to include a variety of products and experiences at a variety of price-points, but we also want everything to feel like us. 

• Why is our guide unique among the many Valentine’s Day Gift Guides being published around the city? Why is it better?

• The guide represents businesses from all around the city -- from different neighborhoods, different ethnicities, different target audiences. We want all of our content to feel like the city itself.

• You ask the Sales & Accounts teams who you can include to assist their efforts -- and that you ask the entire team (including interns) for ideas on rad gifts and experiences to include. Collaboration FTW.

• You’re adding pizzazz and personality to your copy whenever possible.

• All of the imagery makes sense within the current pandemic landscape.

Please send a draft of your guide over to me before publishing it (unless you've already done so) so I can check it out and figure out what to buy my wife.

To be super clear: We are not asking you to make a new Valentine’s Day Guide if you already have one built, drafted or planned. That existing one likely works perfectly. Please send it over so we can check it out!

Tracking Upcoming Content

We will never succeed if we don’t have visibility into the editorial content that each city is planning to produce. For this reason, we’ve built out this Google Sheet to track all of the editorial pieces (/p pages and user lists) each city is planning to build and/or significantly update over the next four weeks. 

Going forward, my ask is for everyone on the content team to update it every Monday when you’re adding your notes in the Content Collaboration Doc.

This should include any pending sold/sponsored content, as well as anything created through partnerships and contributors. 

This will be tremendously helpful in helping us help you build the best, most impactful content possible.

No worries if your plans change; just do your best each week to forecast the next 4 with the information you have at hand.

And please do include content that has been scheduled via content directives whenever applicable. It’s a great way to confirm inclusion.

Thanks, everyone! Jam on.