Cyber Monday is quickly approaching, and that means businesses offering deals online are gearing up for massive amounts of traffic, and hopefully massive amounts of money.

Are you running Cyber Monday deals this year? Let us know in the comments.

comScore put out a report looking at why Cyber Monday is becoming more important to holiday season e-commerce.

“Since its inception, we have witnessed an extremely strong growth in Cyber Monday spending with sales more than doubling from 2005-2010, with a compound annual growth rate of 16% during that timeframe. 2010 was an especially important year in the history of Cyber Monday as online spending reached $1.028 billion, the first time on record that a single day had eclipsed the $1 billion spending threshold,” says comScore’s Andrew Lipsman. “ It also achieved another landmark by finishing as the heaviest online spending day of the year for the first time in history!”

“We at comScore have spent a lot of time in past holiday seasons dispelling the notion that Cyber Monday was the heaviest online spending day of the year, and just when it seemed that message finally began to sink in, Cyber Monday has a banner year and jumps to the top of the ranking,” says Lipsman. “Interestingly, from 2005-2007 Cyber Monday wasn’t even close to the top of the ranking, going from the 8th heaviest spending day to 12th to 9th. But in 2008, Cyber Monday’s overall importance in the context of the holiday shopping season began to change as it surged up the ranking to #3. The following year it ranked as the second heaviest spending day, and finally culminated in 2010 assuming the top position for the year.”

BIA/Kelsey and ConStat put out a report about how local businesses are expected to use digital tools gto lure shoppers on Cyber Monday (in addition to Black Friday and Small Business Saturday). According to that, SMBs have allocated 37% of their total ad and promotional budget to digital/online media in the last 12 months. On average, they intend to increase their digital/online spending in the next 12 months to 40 percent of their total ad budget.

“The data indicate SMBs are getting smarter in their use of digital and online media,” said Steve Marshall, director of research, BIA/Kelsey. “They’re focused on strengthening and enhancing their digital presence, engaging customers with social media and empirically measuring the performance of their online advertising initiatives.”

Of SMBs with an online presence (website, landing page, Facebook page, Google Places page, etc.):

• 69 percent report they update their online presence at least once a month
• 27 percent pay for regular assistance in updating their online presence
• 25 percent report using an Internet service or program to help monitor or manage customer ratings, reviews or comments about their businesses

Tips

Lisa Barone provides some Cyber Monday tips at Small Business Trends. While she elaborates on each one, they essentially boil down to: promote site wide sales, reward fans, throw a Twitter party, and go viral with email marketing.

Heather Clancy in ZDNet’s Small Business Matters column suggests: planning for traffic to double year-over-year, testing throughput and considering hosting static content elsewhere for the peak traffic period, keeping tabs on visitor stats, keeping mobile in mind, and finding a flexible cloud infrastructure provider.

Sounds like good advice to me.

Is your site prepared for Cyber Monday? Let us know in the comments.