Now, read on for tips and tutorials you can use to get a jump on successful holiday sales.

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Spotlight
Prepare for Holiday Sales with Effective Marketing

The holiday sales season is around the corner. Now is the time to plan your seasonal marketing programs. As a Yahoo! Small Business customer, many of the Web's best marketing tools are available to you, often at specially negotiated discounts. But which marketing programs do you need? Here's a quick introduction to the benefits of various types of initiatives:

• Paid search and directory listing programs allow you to pay or bid for placement in top shopping portals, search listings, web ads, online yellow pages, and directories. Typically, your advertisement or listing appears on a search results or directory page, along with other results or listings related to your business category or to keywords you've designated. These listings offer opportunities to reach a targeted audience, pay based on performance of the listing, convey your message to a large customer base, and make sure your listing stands out from the competition.

• Direct email marketing gives you a low-cost way to acquire new customers by purchasing lists of potential customers who have opted to receive news and special offers from companies like yours. You can then send them specialized HTML emails promoting your products or services, and encouraging visits to your web site. Direct email also allows you to increase customer activity and spending with special exclusive offers or discounts on bulk purchases sent only to members of your email subscriber list.

• Spread the word for low cost or no cost. When you send an email campaign to your established customer base, ask your loyal customers to spread the word about your business by easily forwarding your email to people who might like to know about your offer. This free "viral marketing" can be an incredibly effective, low-cost means of building awareness and increasing your customer base.

Learn more about all Yahoo! Marketing Tools.

On the Network
Opt In to New, Improved Yahoo! Shopping

This week, Yahoo! Shopping launched a new version of its service, featuring Yahoo! Product Search. Yahoo!'s popular shopping destination has been redesigned to make it easier for consumers to do comparison-shopping. A new interface enables online shoppers to find exactly what they are looking for by providing relevant information on merchants, product specifications, price comparisons, and user reviews. The new Yahoo! Shopping also includes the ability to narrow search results by price or product category. Plus, Yahoo! Product Search will be accessible on the Yahoo! Search start page (http://search.yahoo.com) and on Yahoo! Search results pages via a toggle tab, giving consumers even easier access to Yahoo! Shopping search results.

What does this mean for merchants like you? Yahoo! Shopping's consumer-focused enhancements should make it even more popular and expand the already large audience of shoppers who rely on Yahoo! Shopping to find the products they need. Especially with the holiday sales season on the horizon, a Yahoo! Shopping listing is now even more important to your success.

Yahoo! also launched Yahoo! Product Submit, which is a new web-based management system that allows you to easily manage your products in Yahoo! Shopping. If you are a Yahoo! Merchant Solutions customer, we'll even give you 20% off the rate card!

To learn more about the improvements to Yahoo! Shopping including Yahoo! Product Submit, sign in to Yahoo! Small Business, visit your Store Manager, and click the "Shopping" link. Please note, if you currently participate in Yahoo! Shopping, your listings will not be affected by the new Yahoo! Shopping release.

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Advanced Store-Building Tip
How to Manage Multiple Pages

Don't force customers to scroll through one, long page of items for sale. Give them brief store pages to make shopping easy and fast. You can learn how to make multiple pages for similar items and link them all together -- just check out our new tutorial.

(Note: This advanced tutorial is longer than our usual newsletter content. You may wish to print the tutorial instructions before you give it a try.)

E-commerce on the Web
Links to Sites, Features, and Stories

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