Blogging

Despite the gloom hanging over the holiday shopping season, affiliates can boost sales by giving consumers what they crave: value. Last year, Kim Berry gave her husband Dennis a miter saw and a massage chair pad. He gave her a high-end juicer, a DNA test for their mixed-breed dog and jewelry. There were also plenty of smaller gifts under the tree, and they spent $1,200 on gifts for their parents, a grandmother, brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews.

Hamlet Batista, president and CEO of NEMedia, wants to change your content. He wants to change it so much that he can't wait to get his search team cracking on it. It's his bread and butter. And like any SEO outfit, he claims he can get your site optimized and ranking rapidly. But he also has a passion for words. He wants to respect your content - the carefully crafted articles, summaries and reviews you painstakingly labor over. "You have to write the content for the user," he says. "If they don't like it, they are going to leave."

Japan's had it hard. After nearly a decade of stock market doldrums and an economy on the brink of disaster - just as the rest of Asia struggled too - Japan bounced back. Growth happened. Its economy is still a tad slow, but there are many industries looking way up. Online marketing is one of them.

Has this ever happened to you?

It's late evening and your weekly newsletter, which would normally be queued for delivery on your autoresponder and blog by this time, is still nothing more than the vast white expanse of a blank Word document. Not only haven't you written a word, you also don't have the first clue what to write about, or which product you should try to sell.

Although you are usually passionate about your topic - organic vegetable gardening - you begin to wonder what the heck you were thinking when you chose to build a site around a seasonal niche.

I degraded myself as a content publisher twice last week. In both cases, after reviewing my Google Alerts and picking the day's hot news item, I wrote a blog entry that included a quote, a few inane comments about the topic and a link back to the original post.

It's a technique commonly used by bloggers to drive traffic to their sites through backlinks. Indeed, some bloggers use this pseudo-journalistic technique to play follow-the-leader every day, while others re-post scraped blog content exclusively - without added commentary.