Wal-Mart heavily publicizes website shopping for Black Friday

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) said this week that it would heavily publicize its website for this Friday's Black Friday sales event and would kick off the 'official' start to holiday sales on Thanksgiving Day. It will launch several web-only sales tomorrow and will accept orders as well on turkey day. Then, come Friday morning, stores will unleash into pandemonium most likely, along with other retailers nationwide.

Some of the deals that will be visible on www.walmart.com tomorrow have already been officially announced by the retailer. Examples: the Microsoft Zune 30 gigabyte MP3 video player for $98.87, and the Garmin Nuvi 650 Portable global positioning system for $298.87. In the case of the Zune, it's last year's model that is already selling for under $100 at many web retailers, so that's not a surprise.

In addition to "visible" sales that will launch on the Wal-Mart website tomorrow, the retailer will have a special "secret" deals area on its website to allude to deals that will be available in stores first thing Friday morning. That is, Black Friday morning.

Those "secret" deals won't be advertised in its circulars, which are the most common ways customers find Black Friday sales information. I said last week that Wal-Mart needs to become a little more creative in its Black Friday marketing efforts. This isn't a huge start, but it's a start.