A Christmas content plan you can write in September

Christmas selling is decided in October and executed in November. Shops that leave it to December are competing for attention in the one month when everybody else is shouting, with prices they had no time to think about.

The dates that actually matter

• Mid-October: gift guides get written by bloggers and saved by shoppers. Anything you want featured needs to exist now.
• Early November: the first serious buying week for handmade and personalised items, because people know they take time.
• Black Friday week: the traffic spike, whether or not you discount.
• First week of December: peak posting for physical goods, last safe week for anything made to order.
• Mid-December: postal cut-offs. After this, digital and instant products are the only thing worth pushing.
• The week between Christmas and New Year: quiet for gifts, excellent for planners, trackers and anything about starting again.

Six weeks, one job each

1. 1Week one: show what exists. Every product, photographed properly, one per post. No selling language.
2. 2Week two: gift framing. Who is each thing for — the sister who reads, the friend who has just started a salon.
3. 3Week three: the objection posts. Delivery times, personalisation deadlines, what arrives and how.
4. 4Week four: proof. Reviews, photographs from customers, the thing somebody said in a message.
5. 5Week five: urgency that is true — actual cut-off dates, actual remaining stock. Never invented.
6. 6Week six: the instant option. Digital, gift cards, printables — for everyone who left it late, which is most people.

The two posts that sell most

The gift-for-a-specific-person post, and the deadline post. Everything else builds the audience; those two convert it. Write both first, in September, when you can think — and schedule them rather than writing them in the week they are needed.

What to prepare now

Photograph everything in one session while the light is still good. Write the delivery and cut-off dates into the shop and the pinned post. Decide the discount, if any, and what it applies to — a decision made in September is a strategy, the same decision made on the day is a panic.

And write down what happens, week by week, so next September starts from a record rather than a memory.