This has been a very bad year for holiday sales. Businesses have tried all kinds of different things to entice consumers to spend money.

It is interesting how this mirrors an Internet business on a daily basis too. The stores have been full of customers shopping, but not spending money.

This happens to Internet marketers every day. Everyday thousands of people leave your site without making a purchase.

I thought I might take a look at a few things you could do to offer a sale today to encourage people to pull out their credit card while they are on your site.

1. One thing you can do is have a sale at a specific time of the day. For example you know that people are home after work in the evenings between 7:00 and 9:00 p.m. You can offer certain products on sale between that time and to encourage people to make a purchase while they are on your site.

2. Do you have on site tracking set up that you are monitoring your site stats? If you do you probably have noticed a trend in terms of which days are higher traffic days than others.

You can have a sale on your slow days to try to encourage people to come back and make a purchase on those days. You can advertise this right on your website. You can also send out an e-mail to your list letting them know that those specific days will always offer products on sale.

3. Another thing you could do is have a theme day where each day of the week offers something different on sale based around a specific product within the niche of your market.

For example, if you have an Internet marketing site, you might have email marketing products on sale on Monday, niche products on sale on Tuesday, Wednesday is PLR day, eBooks are on sale on Thursday, and so on.

4. Follow the lead of the off line stores and have a holiday or seasonal items on sale too. Regardless of the industry you are in you can offer specials based around the many holidays that come up throughout the year.

Use these holidays as a time to announce sales within your own business, and then promote those heavily on your site and to your mailing list.

In summary this is four things you could do to promote your Internet business by offering sales in creative ways.