Holiday spending: Are you prepared for the influx?

With the holidays just around the corner this is make or break time for a lot of retail businesses. It can also be the best time of the year for your home business. Here are a couple of things to plan for:

Set up your Pay-Per-Click Budget.

The holiday season can be a very busy time of year, but don't forget that you can get instant traffic from online search engines via a Pay-Per-Click campaign. Keep in mind that if you have been running ads already because of the time of year there will be more competition and prices could go up. So make sure that you budget accordingly.

Have a back up payment processor.

The worst thing that could happen to you is that you are in the middle of a holiday rush and your payment processor decides to shut you down. It won't really matter how invalid you believe the reason to be, it simply won't change the situation. It's always a good idea to have a payment processor as a backup. Even Paypal has a Virtual Terminal program that you can use for a pretty low fee per month. You could end up loosing a ton of money and time trying to fix the problem, why not have a solution from the start so all you loose is your time.

Decide and test promotions to run.

Don't miss out on the holiday shopping spree and not even have a sale. People love sales, and most expect some kind of sale to go on during the holiday season. Don't disappoint them. Make a couple of different offers and then use Google Website Optimizer to figure out the best option for your holiday campaign. The best part is that the Google Website Optimizer is available for free with your Google Adwords account.

Build email list of people interested in your holiday items.

Don't think that because it's not even Halloween yet that people aren't already shopping for Christmas. I know plenty of women that start their shopping as early as July! If you are planning on doing promotions for the holiday season don't be shy about getting people onto a notification list for all your holiday sales. This a great way to test out offers before making them available to the general public. You can also ask people on your list what they will be shopping for and give it to them.