As you watch sales climb with Christmas fast approaching, have you given any thought about what you are going to do when January rolls around and things begin to slow? Baring some sort of luck, you know that the first couple months of the year are not as great for online retailers and t-shirt entrepreneurs as the Holiday season.

So how are you going to cope when that those nice checks for November and December turn into ho-hum profits for January and February? Here are five ideas about how to spend your time until things pick up again and maybe help you keep the downward trend to a minimum.

1. Get Your Christmas/Holiday Designs Put Away

If you had designs specifically for the Holidays, you had better of had them displayed prominently on your site to generate interest. Well, now it is time to move that link to the bottom of the list and remove your holiday specific banners and graphics. Don’t delete them or “hide” them, but get them out of prominent view as soon as the holidays are over.

If you delay, it does two things that are bad. First it draws your visitor’s attention to something that is out of date and you should be displaying something that they are actually interested in instead of showing them your Christmas designs in January and having them decide to move on. Second, it shows your visitors that you are not an active shop and someone that just threw a store up and forgot about it. Would you shop at a brick and mortar store that kept its Christmas decorations up until March or a store that was obviously not kept in good shape?

2. Start A New Year Advertising Campaign

Advertising is something a lot of online t-shirt entrepreneurs do not do. But you should consider it. In fact now is a perfect time to start. While advertising rates tend to go up with the holidays on the horizon, you can often strike a deal if you agree to keep running through the first part of the year. You may pay more for December, but you should be able to more than make up for it in discounts for January and February. And you can cut your costs even further usually by committing to longer schedules. You’ll probably also see better results since it advertising campaigns take time to generate interest and work properly.

Design a great ad and get your foot in the door while your competition is sitting on their butt.

3. Get Ready For The Next “Event” On The Horizon

Whether it is Spring, St. Patrick’s Day, Valentines Day, Groundhog Day or whatever get a jump on it now. If you have new designs get them uploaded so the search engines can find them. If you have to make new promotional graphics design them now so they are ready to go up when needed rather than scrambling around to create a banner with hearts for Valentines Day three days before.

4. Spy On Your Competition

Note, “spying” on your competition does not mean “copy” your competition or their designs. But you should know what they are doing. So take a look around. Gather as much information as you can from their site and see if you can figure out what they are doing well and then make a plan for taking their market share.

Sometimes it is easy to grow your business by taking business away from your competition than expanding into unknown territory.

5. Start Thinking About NEXT Christmas/Holiday Season

Did you not get all the designs up that you wanted? Maybe you didn’t get all the variations up that you needed to and know you lost sales because of it. Did you get a lot of “looks” at a particular design by no buyers? If so, think about what you can do to avoid those lost sales next November and December.

Those two months make up a large chunk of yearly income for online t-shirt entrepreneurs so not being ready for them hurts more so than any other time of the year.

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J.J. Jackson is President of Land of the Free Studios, Inc. and Cafepress “Top Shopkeeper”. He has been selling t-shirts on-line since 2004 and is the owner of the T-Shirt Entrepreneur, a site dedicated to helping people get involved in the T-shirt Economy. He is also the owner of Funny When Wet T-shirts, American Infidel Tshirts, Uber Gamer T-shirts as well as many other online t-shirt and gift stores.