Each year, there’s more and more hype about Cyber Monday- the Monday everyone goes back to work after Thanksgiving and, supposedly, spends tons of cash doing online holiday shopping.

While it does seem to pan out for the large online retailers, there’s no real data that shows if this phenomenon holds true for the little guys. So, we’re curious. Did you see an increase of sales on Cyber Monday? Did you run a special to draw in customers?

Thanksgiving is this Thursday, and you know what that means! Holiday season will soon be in high gear.

This year, my husband and I are putting in a real effort to make and buy as many handmade gifts as possible. Judging from all of the handmade holiday action on the web, it seems that we’re not alone.

The ladies at Sew Mama Sew are running a fantastic series on their blog- Handmade Holidays, 30 days of gifts to sew.

Each day features links to projects (all available for free at various blogs and craft sites) with a different theme. I haven’t started actually *making* anything yet, but I have found the perfect gift for almost everyone on my list through this series. Thanks gals!

Buy Handmade: Take the handmade pledge!

From their website: “The ascendancy of chain store culture and global manufacturing has left people all dressing, furnishing, and decorating alike. The connection between producer and consumer has been lost. Buying handmade helps them reconnect. We created the pledge as a call to action for consumers to be conscious of how they spend their money this holiday season. We want people, whenever possible, to support independent creators and shop outside the big boxes.”

At first, I thought that it would be difficult to go all handmade with two little boys in the house who have visions of toy trains and yu-gi-oh cards dancing in their heads. But as we’ve gone over their lists, we’ve found that nearly everything (with the exception of the aforementioned yu-gi-oh cards) can be handmade with a little creativity and effort!

So, I think, since I didn’t see any Chris Cringle on the pledge list, we’ll ask him to bring the yu-gi-oh cards, and the rest will be handmade from mom and dad. Our boys may not appreciate it much now, but I think they will some day.

We all know that more retail dollars are spent during the holiday shopping months than any other time of the year, but how do we make sure to get our share? Besides the obvious things like having an attractive website and high quality products and images, we also need to make sure that the droves of shoppers can find us.

If you’re on etsy, listing often definitely helps to keep your work visible, but it doesn’t increase the number of potential buyers coming to the site. Likewise, if you have your own website and have exchanged links with other designers, that helps, but just relying on those links won’t do much to increase your holiday sales.

Promotion is the key, my friends! But where and how to promote?

Set up a Holiday Sale or Coupon Code

We all know that resisting a special deal on something we really love is close to impossible. My personal shopping weakness is free shipping. I can justify almost any purchase with free shipping! For others, it’s a percentage off. Whatever you choose to do, make sure that you can afford the loss of profit. For instance, if you’re selling something very heavy and expensive to ship, offering free shipping for the holidays might be a very costly mistake for your business. Likewise, if you don’t build enough of a profit into your retail price and offer a 40% off sale, you may find yourself barely breaking even. If you’ve spent the entire month of December slaving away for holiday sales only to realize that you’re not making any money, you may find yourself a bit scroogey.

Submit Your Sale

Once you’ve decided on a sale that works for your business, it’s time to submit it to websites that will bring you traffic! The best method of doing this is to send a short, professional email to the site’s contact address that says what the sale is, the coupon code (if applicable) and a link to your website. If you’ve created an image, don’t send it as an attachment, but include a link to it in your email.

Shopping and fashion blogs that cater to the handmade culture are great places to contact. For a fantastic list of blogs, see this thread at the Switchboards. You can also submit a sale at Style Envy and, if you’re brave, post your coupon code on RetailMeNot.

Happy making!