The holidays are a great time to make some exceptional income. It’s also a great time to boost website traffic, opt-ins and increase awareness. So how do you accomplish all this during the busiest season of the year?

Step One:  Make sure your website is in great shape. Before you send tones of new traffic to your website, it’s important to make sure your website is ready. Here are a few questions to ask yourself:

• Is your shopping cart functioning optimally?
• Do you have any broken links?  If so, fix them.
• Is your site easily searchable?
• Does the navigation make sense?
• Are your customers’ transactions secure?
• Does your website load quickly?
• Is your website backed up?

Step Two:  Optimize your site for the holidays. The holiday season presents a unique opportunity to capitalize on a few holiday phrases and keywords. Using standard optimization techniques, research the keywords your audience might use to find you during the holidays and optimize your site for them.

Step Three:  Create holiday promotions. The holidays present a unique promotional opportunity. Here are just a few options to consider:

• A Holiday discount.
• A Free trial.
• A packaged discount.
• A free bonus.
• Free delivery.
• A buy now pay later option.
• Loyalty programs.

Step Four:  Consider creating or adding new holiday products or services. The options for creating new products or services are vast. If you’re a service provider brainstorm ways you can help your clients enjoy the holidays. What do they need that you can provide?

If you sell products, tangible or electronic, then you have unlimited options. Consider:

• Creating new information products
• Launching a membership site or promotion
• Partnering with a relevant business to create a product together.
• Packaging or combining products for the holidays.

Step Five:  Marketing your website and holiday sale. Once you have your website ready, your products and promotions ready to go, it’s time to market your holiday sale. Some marketing options and ideas include:

• Cross promotion with other relevant businesses.
• If you already have an e-newsletter, consider increasing the delivery frequency during the holidays.
• Holiday advertising campaigns.
• Social networking and face-to-face networking.
• Customer loyalty programs are a great way to motivate purchases and they offer the perfect marketing opportunity. You can create press releases and an ad campaign to market your new loyalty program.
• Enhance article marketing efforts.
• Email marketing to your list.
• Using your wonderful affiliates to market your products or services.

When throwing a holiday sale online, savvy entrepreneurs know it takes more than throwing up a sign and placing a red bow on your header. It takes preparation, research, planning and thoughtful execution. Always remember, your business is about your customers. When you make their shopping experience exceptional and consider there wants, needs and desires, your holiday sale will be a verifiable success.

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Mini sites are not known for being flashy. And there’s a good reason for that. Too much flash and splash detracts from the message you’re trying to get across. And when your site is made up of only one or a few pages, your message must get through quickly.

But as we all know, a page full of plain old text isn’t particularly appealing. And even if formatting is used to make certain things stand out, a bright and prominent graphic does a much better job of drawing our attention. So even though graphics should be used sparingly on a mini site, it’s crucial to make sure that the graphics we do use are effective.

The first graphic people will see when they visit your mini site is your page header. It stands to reason that it should be attractive and captivating. It doesn’t have to be a complex work of art, but it should be brightly colored and include the name of your product. A few more words might be in order, but don’t go overboard. The headline will provide more detailed information about what you have to offer. For more awesome graphic ideas for your mini sites go to Mini Site Solution.

Most mini sites have a bulleted list somewhere on the page. They are bulleted because they contain important information, such as your product’s key benefits or what’s included with it. So attention-getting bullets in bright colors are good things to have.

And then there are your buttons and boxes. Boxes are used to bring things like testimonials and calls to action to the reader’s attention. The most commonly used button is the order button, and that should definitely stand out.

A mini site is not the place for a graphic design exhibition (unless, of course, you’re selling graphics). The graphics used should be prominent and professional looking, yet not so fancy that they take the visitor’s attention away from the text.

For help with your mini sites, go to Mini Site Solution. A free video will be there to explain what mini sites can do for you and leads you into creating and marketing your mini sites.

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It’s easy to see why a mini site is called a mini site. Many are only one page, as opposed to some websites that have more pages than an unabridged dictionary. But there’s something else about successful mini sites that’s small: their focus.

A good mini site targets a group of people that shares a very specific need. This is called a niche, and it’s an important asset to a mini site’s success. Your niche is what keeps you out of competition with those sites that claim to have something for everyone. There’s no way a mini site can have something for everyone, but it can have just the thing for some people.

Choosing a good niche topic is essential if you want to have a successful mini site. Choose one that’s too broad, and it will be so saturated that you can’t break in. Choose one that’s too narrow, and there won’t be enough demand to make a profit. For really great tips to help you choose your niche go to Mini Site Solution and watch a really great video.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you want to sell a recipe book. A general recipe book might appeal to lots of people, but there are countless general recipe books already on the market. Another one wouldn’t get much attention. So you decide to get really specific and write a book of Mexican scrambled egg recipes that contain habanero peppers. No doubt some people would like such recipes, but they would probably want a book that covered a little more ground. Mexican egg recipes might be a happy medium.

When it comes to choosing a topic for your mini site, you don’t have to rely on guesswork. You can investigate any topic you’re considering using some free online tools. One such tool is the Google Adwords keyword tool. It will tell you the search volume of any keyword, and it will give you a general idea of the amount of competition among advertisers for that keyword. The higher the search volume, and the lower the competition, the more profitable the keyword.

Mini sites may be small in size, but they have big moneymaking potential. Taking the time to choose a good niche topic will maximize your profits.

For help with your mini sites, go to Mini Site Solution. A free video will be there to explain what mini sites can do for you and leads you into creating and marketing your mini sites.

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Visit almost any restaurant, and you’ll see evidence of the increasingly common belief that bigger is better. Fast food restaurants zealously encourage their patrons to upsize their drinks and fries, and upscale dining establishments pile food high on their customers’ plates.

Many websites have taken the “bigger is better” theory to heart, too. Superstores like Overstock.com and Wal-mart have websites consisting of thousands upon thousands of pages. And they are doing quite well for themselves.

When there are so many large sites online, it may seem futile to try to get a piece of the pie. The average person doesn’t have the time or money to set up such an operation, let alone maintain it. But you don’t have to. A mini site can flourish in a land of Internet giants.

The reason mini sites work is because they do not directly compete with the big guys. Instead of trying to be all things to all people, a mini site simply seeks to do well in a small niche. In this case, in a sense, smaller is better.

The most successful mini sites go after a small but underserved niche. They find a need that isn’t being filled, and they fill it. This puts them into a position to get better rankings in the search engines, because the keywords that people would use to find their offerings are not often targeted by webmasters of larger sites. With some good SEO, they can get targeted traffic at very little expense. To find out more about SEO and you mini site go to Mini Site Solution.

Once the visitors are at the mini site, the sales letter grabs their attention and, hopefully, convinces them to make a purchase. Those who are on the fence may sign up for a newsletter or free course. This provides the opportunity to maintain contact and persuade them to buy later.

A mini site can hold its own, even with millions of other web pages online. You just need a good niche, a quality product and a strong sales pitch.

For help with your mini sites, go to Mini Site Solution. A free video will be there to explain what mini sites can do for you and leads you into creating and marketing your mini sites.

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Marketing is used as a way to make our advertising more effective.  If you have the right audience identified, you can find ways to reach them.  One such way that is growing by leaps and bounds is digital marketing.

What is digital marketing?  It is basically marketing tools that encompass everything but traditional methods.  It doesn’t include print or magazine media.  Some people think of banner ads and email, but the scope is so much larger than that.

Digital media does include the two above-mentioned techniques, but also others you might not have thought to include:

• Podcasts

• RSS feeds

• SMS

• Instant messaging

• Text messaging

• Video streaming

• Social bookmarking

• Blogging

All of these avenues are used to market products and services to the global community.  With traditional forms of marketing, you get feedback from your customers and others who just wanted a look-see, but it takes time.  Compiling responses is labor-intensive.

Here’s an example.  You send a bill to a customer.  On the back it states that they can make a comment or write change of address information if needed.  Let’s say that the customer mails their bill back to you.  It may take three to four days to receive and then another day or two to credit the account and log any responses.  Before that customer hears back from you if they have a complaint, it could be a week or more.

That’s how things were done in the past – exclusively.  Changes in the technological landscape of our world have made waiting a thing of the past for most services.  With instant messaging, we can carry on a conversation with a client in real time.  The same goes for webcasting.  Podcasting is like having your own little radio station on your website.  Even with email and social networking sites you can chat as if you were in the same room.

It really is a convenient way to reach the people who would most benefit from your products and services.  And, what if you want to keep up with someone’s blog postings?  Subscribe to their RSS feed.  When updates are made you are notified.  Checking on news or an eBay auction?  You can do it from your cellular phone with SMS messages.

There are two types of digital media:  push and pull.  Pull is when a user finds you on the Internet using digital media.  They have your website address and they link to you and your media – streaming video, podcasts, and the like.  They establish a link with you.

Push is when you contact the user and entice them to use your services or products.  This is the logic behind the SMS messages you receive on your cellular phone.  Emails from companies can be sent directly to the customer asking them to come and see what you offer.

Digital marketing is moving business ahead in a big way.  We used to be limited to print and then our computer searches, but now, the target market is accessible through many media outlets.

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