Another holiday season come and gone. And of course, what would the holidays be without a making few missteps that we can learn from for next year. A few such lessons include that we now know that it is not in fact physically possible to drink an entire gallon of Aunt Edna’s famous eggnog, and this year we’re finally certain that it’s not a good idea to put off shopping until 4:30 on Christmas Eve. Or that New Year’s celebrations maybe shouldn’t include an indoor fireworks display. But I digress – we learned some stuff as it pertains to the world of doing business online too. A few that we think others can learn from as well:
- Don’t make site updates during the holidays. We’re pretty sure that Santa has some elves that went rouge and exist now primarily to ensure that any holiday-time site changes go horribly, horribly wrong.
- If the site does go down, be sure you have a direct line 24/7 to someone who can interrupt your online advertising (PPC, display advertising, etc) – if your site is flat out broken, you don’t want to be paying to drive traffic to it.
- Keep an eye on hot search trends – if a product you sell ends up at the top of a major list of “Best Gifts for 2011”, are you prepared to handle the mania?
- On that note, make sure you have a top notch online PR team lined up to get your products visible on one of those Best Gifts lists. Nobody is going to know to search for your product, you know, the “Greatest Thing Ever That You Never Knew You Needed but Won’t Be Able to Live Without” unless they hear about it somewhere first. Getting coverage on a popular blog or other online news outlet can be a great way to get exposure.
Ok, those are the first four. Look for more to come as we continue to emerge from the eggnog induced haze of Holiday 2010…