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!