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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While it may feel too early to start preparing your eBay store for the Christmas Holiday, you can be sure that when it comes to holiday shopping, it’s never too early to start preparing. Rest assured, there are people already doing their holiday shopping and as they say on the playground, you snooze you lose. So let’s win!

Here’s how to increase your eBay sales this Christmas:

#1  Start your holiday sales and campaigns early and end them late. Many eBay experts recommend starting your sales and campaigns as early as mid October and end around mid January.

#2  Create special promotions for the holidays. These include “Buy it Now” options, gift-wrapping services, buy one get one free type promotions and so on. The competition is stiff during the holidays and any value you can add to your store, items and promotions may give you that extra edge.

#3  Make sure you have a well-stocked inventory. That includes shipping supplies and a foolproof system to make sure orders get out and arrive on time. There’s nothing worse than ordering a gift from a store and then having it arrive a day late. Certainly, it’s not good for feedback ratings!

#4  Stock up on and promote what’s popular. If you have a particularly hot item or there’s an item that is hot right now and is appropriate for your store then consider stocking up on it or at least securing suppliers. Note:  you can check with eBay pulse to see what’s hot at any given point in time.

#5  Give your store a holiday theme. Holiday graphics and fonts give your store a festive feel. Of course you can go overboard with it so be careful. Design your store for the season and your target audience. If they love over the top holiday cheer then go for it.

#6  Improve or optimize your payment options. Online if a customer cannot pay how they want to pay, and the payment process isn’t quick and easy, they’re just as likely to go somewhere else. That’s the last thing you want. Open up your payment policies and make sure payments are as easy and straightforward as possible for better holiday sales.

#7  Update your store with a clear and easy to understand policies and procedures. Let customers know if you accept returns. What are your shipping policies? Try to answer any and all potential questions right up front so you don’t lose a customer who isn’t patient or interested enough to send you a question.

#8  Take advantage of marketing tools like newsletters, coupons and advertisements to drive traffic to your eBay store during the holidays. Create promotions just for the holidays and then promote them via social networking, article marketing and your other chosen marketing tools and strategies.

#9  Create goals for the holiday season. Goals are great motivators and they can really inspire us to push ourselves. Sales goals are particularly fun however don’t stop with a goal. Create strategies to achieve them. Lastly, don’t forget to establish a system to measure whether you’ve achieved your goals. For example, if you want to increase visitors to your storefront and item bids, how are you going to measure that?  Keep track of what works so you can repeat your successes next year.

While Christmas is still several months away, planning and preparing ahead of time will put you ahead of the competition and ensure that your holiday sales are as profitable and stress free as possible.

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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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