Holiday Season Preparations -- For 2008 (Yes, Already)

I've changed the date of my giveaway to January 15:
Mommy Has To Stay In Bed is available online at Amazon.com and Barnes&Noble, but you don't have to let your fingers do the walking any further than the comment section of this post, because I have two copies of this delightful book to give away to two lucky winners.  Just leave me a comment about why you'd love this book, or who you'd give it to, and I'll draw two names on January 15, 2008.

I admire Trent at The Simple Dollar.  His thoughts make a lot of sense -- even though his advice is rarely new to me, seeing it gathered together ignites a bright light of recognition.  I spend so much time staring at my feet to make sure I don't trip and embarrass myself that I often lose sight of any big picture:

"The Day After: Six Ways to Deal With the Post-Christmas Money Blues - And Plan Ahead for Next Year

Think carefully about what went right - and what went wrong - this year. There were likely some gifts you gave that were great bargains and others that were overpriced duds. What can you learn from that? What sorts of gifts are really great bargains for the people on your list? ...

Do your incidental shopping for next Christmas in the next week or so. The week after Christmas is the best time to buy wrapping paper, ribbons, cards, tags, and so on for next Christmas. Pick them up at 50% off (or better) right now, then toss them into storage for eleven months...

Make your Christmas list now for next year. Make a list of everyone you plan on buying gifts for next Christmas, then start keeping an eye out for gifts right now. For example, I have next year’s list largely ready to go, along with gift ideas for many of the people. This enables me to spend the entire year finding huge bargains on great gifts. I just simply look for the items on sale over the next twelve months ..."

Thanks also to Jason Blanton posting at Blogging Tips for these useful reminders to monitor goals once they've been made (duh):

"Write down precise goals"

(Check -- I'm doing that here)

"Use smaller goals to achieve larger goals"

(Small bites are easier to swallow)

"Keep it in front of you"

(Here it is, staring me in the face -- how could I possibly ignore or forget?)

With the above advice in mind, here are a few of my long term plans to prepare my site for NEXT Christmas season:

Pay more attention to how I look.  Not really me, but FeeFiFoto.  I've made a good start this year thanks to Cindy the graphics fairy, who creates attractive graphics and landing pages for most items we sell.  By next year I should have a library of themes and graphics to mix and match with just a few key strokes when freshening up the site for Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, graduation season or Christmas.

Develop a protocol for marketing emails.  Email blasts work best if you have a reliably expanding mailing list, but even if your list is fairly static, judicious use of email to broadcast reminders of upcoming holidays or graduations can keep your site in the forefront of your potential customers' minds.  I'll continue to use Constant Contact about once a month to design, transmit and monitor emails.  One of my favorite features allows me to copy a previous design and update it by slight tweaking, so my marketing pieces begin to look familiar to readers.

Keep on top of our products and listings.  This year I spent a lot of time putting out fires when I discovered that aspects of pricing, shipping fees, availability or product descriptions were not up to date.  For the coming year I'm going to create a check list showing every task involved in adding or revising products, to make sure that everything ends up in the right place and contains the right attributes.

Develop and implement new ways of attracting and keeping customers -- more on that later in another post.

Continue with the answering service, refining their training and access to information so they can answer more of the mundane questions that roll in during busy times.

Things will undoubtedly possibly run more smoothly next year after I prepare and implement my game plan.