Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope your day is filled with wonderful food, happy family and many blessings!

10 Tips For Holiday Promotions

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day and Christmas is but a month away. These are the biggest shopping days of the year. If you are having a sale you need to get the word out. Today I have come up with a few ideas to help you out this year and to prepare for next year.

1. If you can afford it, send a post card to everyone who bought from you during the year. Wish them a happy holiday and offer them a special deal. Maybe free shipping or 20% off. Mail this out the week of Thanksgiving so it is in their mailbox when they get home.

2. Send a virtual happy holiday card to all your shoppers. Same as above but no postage cost.

3. Tweet a link to your shop/sale 3 or 4 times a day. Make sure the tweet is different each time. Remember not everyone is on Twitter at the same time. Be sure to make some tweets in between so as not to sound too spammy.

4. Look for forums talking about sales and specials and post yours in the appropriate threads. Again try not to be too spammy.

5. Change your email signature to include information about your sale.

6. Put ads in Craigslist. This can really work, especially if you offer custom made items. Just be sure not to post the same ad more than once.

7. Get together with a few of your fellow crafters and put a cooperative ad out there somewhere. Maybe in the local paper or even a national magazine. What seems too expensive for you alone may not seem so bad split 6 ways or more. Co-Op ads are the best way to get exposure for a fraction of the individual.

8. Write a press release and send it out. That's right, a sale is newsworthy. Send it to your favorite bloggers, newspapers, magazines both online and off.

9. Make sure your listings have links to your sections, especially if you have a sale section.

10. Don't put anything on sale that you can't afford to. If your sale price is going to cause you to lose money, exclude the item from the sale and make it very plain. Or raise the price of those items so that if someone does want it, you won't lose money in the sale.

That is it for today. I hope each and every one of you have a happy and safe Holiday weekend. I will be back Monday. In the meantime, leave your comments or send me an email: MarketMyShop@gmail.com

Etsy Cyber Monday

Cyber Monday Sales started as a way for businesses to continue eliminating stock for the year end inventory. It is also a way for those businesses without a brick and mortar to be able to get those extra sales right before Christmas. It is especially good for people who sell on Etsy.

I personally am combining my Black Friday and Cyber Monday Sale with a week long sales event that started yesterday. If you have the ability to add a section to your shop that is probably the easiest way to organize your items. I unfortunately have all 10 of my sections in use.

There is a great alternative to having a shop section just for Black Friday or Cyber Monday. What you do is make sure all of your items are tagged with Black Friday and or Cyber Monday. Go to your shop view and type Black Friday into the "This Shop" Search. This will bring up all of the items in your shop tagged with Black Friday. Then you just copy the long link in the address bar of your web browser and go to a URL shortening service. I like tinyurl.com but there are many to choose from.

After your URL is shortened use it on Twitter, Facebook, your blog, etc. to point people to your sale. This will work with any search term and is a great way to showcase only certain items from your shop. Be sure to keep a copy of the shortened URL handy in case you'd like to share it somewhere else, like say, a newsletter.

I hope this helps. Tomorrow I will be discussing a few more tips to help spread the word about your sales. Then I will be taking Thursday and Friday and spending it with family and friends. Then I will be back on Cyber Monday! Let me know if you have any questions MarkeyMyShop@gmail.com