Are You Ready For The Ride Of Your Life?

You are headed for an amazing ride of thrills, chills, action, and adventure. The best thing I can relate it to is a roller coaster at an amusement park.
By Steve Foss

Congratulations! You have made the courageous decision to be an independent businessperson and sell products to the general population. You also made the very wise decision to have a large part of your marketing strategy be online selling through your web site. What you may not have realized yet is that you are very close to being in a position for the damn to break and business to start flooding your way. But you better get in, sit down, and fasten your seat belt or you might get swept away with the unprepared. And I’m talking about online sales for Christmas 2006.

Internet sales for Christmas 2005 exceeded everyone’s expectations. Analysts expected there to be a 15% increase over 2004 with sales approaching 20 billion dollars. After all the wrapping paper settled, online sales were up 24% over 2004 with sales surpassing a whopping 30.1 billion dollars. Everyone expects the numbers for Christmas 2006 to be just as good. Read what the pros say about it here:

Did you say 2006 looks great?

Did you say 30.1BILLION (with a B)?

It’s August and there are some things you should be doing RIGHT NOW to insure that you are ready to capitalize on the massive amounts of business that will take place starting after Halloween in October.

1. Make sure you have selected the right products to sell. Do all the competitive analysis you must do in order to cash in on the gift giving frenzy.

2. Have your drop shipper relationship solidified. Make sure they are able to handle the type of volumes needed for aggressive online retailers. That partnership MUST be a well oiled machine before orders start coming in, or you will find yourself having a miserable holiday season filled with serious customer service issues. Get it done today.

3. Have your web site built, evaluated, and ready to go. Make sure it is going to keep customer’s attention through captivating content once they get there, and not let them leave until the sale is consummated. A professional website evaluation from our company is a must.

4. Take care of the business end of things. Think about the money flow. Is your shopping cart functional and easy to use? Is your accounting system able to handle the volume? Are you prepared to take the next step and enter the big leagues of e-commerce sales?

5. Get optimized…fast! If you haven’t started your rise to page one of the major search engines, you had better get started immediately. This is a process that doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a couple of months for your relationship with people like Google and Yahoo to get beneficial. Also start your link exchange program with other sites that will see high traffic during the Christmas season.

6. Finish the journey! If you have no idea what I am talking about, you haven’t been on the journey. It is a step by step process that will walk you through everything I have listed above. Get in the portal, sign up for the journey, and finish it. The good book says “having done all, stand”. So do ALL, and then stand.

I spoke with a person one time who was a small business owner about their Christmas sales. What they said floored me. He let me know that he makes enough money in a two month period to pay all his bills for a year. He said that he “played the other ten months”.

Can you hear the click, click, click as you approach the start of the Christmas season roller coaster ride? Remember, if you make only one tenth of one percent of all the sales that will be made this holiday season, you will walk away with almost half a million dollars. Why not you? Seriously! Now go get busy!