Preparing Big Huge Holiday Profits – Day 1 of Day 25

Good morning!

Today is a delightful rain-soaked wind-swept howling mishmash of weather related oddities for me. And it's the first day of December too! Which reminds me….

Time to start walking the walk I talk, and starting with the prelaunch of my latest, Big Huge Holiday Profits!

What's that?

You don't know what Big Huge Holiday Profits…*is*?

Ah! Well, it's my guidebook that will showcase to you some nifty ideas to get your holiday sales as plumply profitable as possible.

I'm still working on it, mind you..but you *can* opt to reserve your copy of the GOLD version for only $17 (more on that later!)

In the meantime, how about I give you some chapter samples so you can see the goodness that is clamoring to embrace your very site? Hope you enjoy!

Introduction

Hello and welcome to this work at home study guide for ensuring your end of the year holiday profits are as high as you could possibly hope for!

This workbook is broken down into 4 milestones, each of the spanning 6 days (as 25 divided by 4 equals 6. Kinda sorta. A bit. Maybe. Well hey, at least it's nice and even. 🙂 )

This way, every day you have one specific task you can follow. And you don't even have to do only one a day – if you're really into leapfrogging over your competitors, you can probably get through the whole book in less than a week, and have your holiday profits process up and running smoothly before 2.

Not only that – I also give you excellent resources and ideas for you to take my ideas and run off into the wild blue yonder! You're only limited…by your imagination.

In short, there's no open ends here! Each milestone in this workbook gives you the foundation to move to the next level, and the next level, and the…. you know what I mean.

Couple of things to notice – one, do you see the nice column to the right that has the word NOTES above it?

That's for YOU to write down anything that stands out in your mind. But not only that – for each milestone, I provide you with a printable checklist that you can print off and use to keep track of your own progress. Neat, eh?

Before you know it, you'll be well on your way to beefing up your final holiday profit goals.

Ready to begin? Alright then, turn to the next page and let's go!

Milestone 1 – Doing The Prep Work

Before you dive earlobe first into maximizing the money you make during the next 25 days, it would help to have a few basics down. Here are the tools I consider to be mandatory for you to possess and use.

Autoresponders.

An autoresponder is how you can do send followup emails to interested customers.

You might be aware of it already if you currently run a newsletter (generally powered by autoresponders) or a mailing list (ditto). There are other ways of contacting a customer base, mind you, using a Facebook Fan Page or a Yahoo Group or a Google Group etc. But truly, for personalization and ease of use, you simply NEED (as in, it's not debatable, you NEED) an autoresponder.

Popular autoresponders are:

aWeber

GetResponse

MailChimp

Way to let customers sign up at your site for more information (ie, add the autoresponder to your site)

Once you have an autoresponder, you need a way to tie it into your site.

Assuming you use WordPress, the following links are helpful:

www.aweber.com/faq/questions/241/How+Do+I+Integrate+My+Wordpress+Blog+With+AWeber%3F

wordpress.org/extend/plugins/aweber-integration/

wptutorial.com/blog/information/adding-opt-in-box-to-your-blog

Popup Domination (that's one of the things I use)

Way to transact sales – In normal people speak, this means a way that people can:
- 1.) See something they want to buy on your site
- 2.) Buy said something (ie, give you money)
- 3.) Receive said something (ie, you fulfill the order)
  - My book, 21 Easy Steps To Putting Your Business Online in 24 Hours or LESS, covers this in detail. But at the easiest, you can throw up a Paypal “Buy It Now!” button for your products.
- Other helpful resources include:
Way to build a site – For me of course, that would mean that you have your own WordPress blog or site or what have you. Some tips for that include:

Obviously, the above is only a brief brief BRIEF smattering of the barerock bare-bones bare-back thingees that you need to be profitable this holiday season.

But trust me…they're absolutely critical. 100%….critical. More critical than warp drive is for the Starship Enterprise. And if by chance you already have the above done and are ready to start incorporating affiliates to sell your stuff for you, you can indulge in:

Now, with that out of the way….let's begin your adventure!

December 1 – Add Xmas countdown widget to your site, create special sales price

Before you begin

Now…why would you want a holiday countdown widget on your site?

Simple! It draws attention to the fact that there are only X shopping days remaining until the G-day (gift day!).

So adding a free countdown widget is most intelligent indeed.

Why it's important

Customers need to be nudged more…than once.

7 times actually, if you'll believe what 99.983% of the worlds' foremost marketers say.

chat a bit about this.

But luckily here, we have 25 whole days to make our point!

That's why you want to include the countdown widget.

How to do it

The widget part? Easy!

Visit mycountdown.org/ . There's Xmas countdowns and Chanukah countdowns and special day countdowns and ….

Choose the widget you want, say, mycountdown.org/Holiday/Christmas/getwidget/3015/ , configure it and add it to your WordPress site via the Widgets option on your dashboard.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GIsWgyGCzQ is a nice video about configuring widgets in WordPress, if you've never tackled that before.

www.springwidgets.com/widgets/search?terms=christmas is another resource as well.

The special sales page – here's what I did. My special Holiday product that I'll be pushing is this book you're reading – Big Huge Holiday Profits.

However, even though it's going to take me more than one day to complete, I want to start generating income as soon as possible.

Thus, I created a special “Prelaunch” page over at www.barbaraling.com/bhhp-prelaunch/ that does several things.

It lets people reserve their copy of the Gold edition at only $17 (I'll probably end up pricing the gold at $37 or more). It's only a straight Paypal button that anyone can use.
If folks choose NOT to buy at that instant, they can STILL optin to my Big Huge Holiday Profits autoresponder and be alerted to when the book is finally available. Thus, I'm also building my list at the same time.

I accomplished the above by the following:

Step 1.) Created my Holiday autoresponder.

Step 2.) Created this button:

Buy Now

Want free buy now buttons?

www.hypercovertemplates.com/marketinggraphics/buttons.htm has some, and you can also invest in

to easily handcraft your own (that fits your site color scheme…it's from Quick Web Creations).

Step 3.) Went to Paypal and set up said button via this link:

www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_web-tools

Step 4.) Created my Prelaunch page at

www.barbaraling.com/bhhp-prelaunch/

Step 5.) Created my Thank You page at

www.barbaraling.com/thankyou/ (that's where Paypal sends people once they've paid for the prelaunch).

Step 6.) Added the following caption/image to my sidebar via a typical WordPress Text Widget:

So now I'm ready to continue!

Closing thoughts

Yes, it's quite a lot of work on the first day…I'll have to hand you that!

However, getting all of the precise annoying specifics out of the way asap….it gives you time to concentrate upon your future marketing later on in the month.

And about the holiday widget…

Think a bit about how you want to display your widget.

X days until Xmas

is kinda sorta boring…what about