Amazon up to Christmas

We start preparing for the holidays on December 26 of the previous year. That's because while our sales are pretty good for most of the year, for us it's during the holidays that they really soar.

During most of the year we are building our lists, building our social media followings, building our traffic. We want people to know and trust us and to know and trust that when doing their holiday shopping, we're the go-to site for those who fall in our niche.

During the year our content blends product-focused content with informative, interesting and entertaining content (but all of which is relevant to our niche and our customers). As the holidays approach, however, the balance between product-focused and non-product focused content shifts. We still do a lot of the latter, but the product-focused content definitely is a larger proportion of our total output -- which is actually what our fans and followers want since they've got shopping to do!

Since we have literally of thousands of products on our site, we spin those into lists and guides (as agmccall suggested, lists like "5 great gifts for the fishermen in your family" work really well for us.) We blog about them, post about them, and email about them. Again and again and again. Naturally, we make sure that the writing is top notch, the design is good and our site is easy to navigate. And we don't just grab the list of products from the Amazon best sellers list -- anyone can find those without our help. Instead because all year we're learning our customers, and all year we're following the latest, greatest products in our niche, we're able to provide recommendations and ideas that our customers may not have thought about otherwise.

None of this is particularly quick or easy... But come November and December, it definitely seems to work!