The holidays are a very busy time for marketers, and as an affiliate marketer you need to stay on top of your game. By making extra efforts during the Christmas season, you can make sure to reap the benefits of attracting holiday shoppers. One great way to draw in new customers and reach your target audience is through specialized holiday article marketing.

Whether or not you are already using article in your affiliate marketing efforts, you can take advantage of it during the holiday season. Article marketing is the process of using articles full of original content that display your knowledge and expertise to attract customers. Thousands of content publishers look for quality, relevant articles for their directories.

Further focus your efforts by taking advantage of what consumers need during the holiday shopping season; valuable information. Create quality content that addresses the reader’s concerns as well as provides the information they need to make an informed purchase. Treat each individual article you write like it is the one that will generate your next sale.

Knowledge and Expertise

Some aspects of article marketing don’t change whether it’s spring, summer or Christmas time. It’s always important to highlight your knowledge and expertise about the items you’re marketing. Your knowledge as an affiliate marketer becomes even more valuable during the holiday shopping season.

More than any other time of year, the holidays bring consumers searching for products they may not know much about. Many people are searching for gifts that the recipient is knowledgeable about while they themselves are not. Use your expertise to give them confidence and ideas will draw them directly to back to the sites you are marketing.

Recycle and Use New Keywords

One great thing about article marketing during Christmas is that you can recycle articles you’ve already written. There are several ways to change your focus and re-write articles so that they appeal to the holiday shopper. One way is to highlight Christmas and holiday traditions that are related to the products and services you’re selling.

Another great way to promote your products to gift-buyers and increase sales is by grouping items together. Many people love giving holiday gift baskets or themed packages. Focusing on products that complement each other lets you upsell. Upselling generates more revenue while at the same time providing exactly what consumers are looking to give.

Take advantage of your usual keywords and add targeted holiday keywords. Potential customers will be searching for gifts, holiday themes, and festive merchandise and ideas. By adding specific Christmas keywords, you attract shoppers who are specifically looking for gifts. Once they’ve found your article, they will be further impressed by the information you provide.

Christmas is a great time to draw new customers into the sites you’re marketing. By using articles to show off your expertise and the quality of your products, you attract new shoppers. They pass along great gift ideas to their friends, who will and pass the information along to their friends.

Article marketing is a great way to get the message out there for all of the products you include in your affiliate marketing business. Create a marketing strategy that includes article marketing and take advantage of the opportunity to create high quality content for consumers. Providing information they seek is the best way to turn readers into customers.

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In a statement received by the St. Johns County local news desk at Historic City News, Governor Crist said “The Back to School Sales Tax Holiday is a great way to stimulate the economy and help Florida families save on clothing, books and school supplies.”

Because of constraints in the state budget, Crist added, “For one, two or more days, whatever the Legislature determines we can do at this time, I look forward to helping reinstate the Back to School Sales Tax Holiday.”

Crist says that the stimulus provided by the tax holiday will help ensure that our next generation of doctors, scientists and teachers will have the tools that they need to be successful in the classroom.

“Now is the time to be cutting taxes – to relieve the financial burden families and businesses are currently facing, and to improve the economic outlook of our state”, Crist said in his statement.

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The following is part of our series on different ways Facebook is used across the world. This week, we are featuring stories about how people are connecting for the holidays. You can read previous posts in this series here. If you have a story you’d like to share with us, please submit it here.

In December, when signs of Christmas become apparent everywhere in the U.S., it can be easy to forget about the numerous winter holidays that take place around the world. Amy Bridges, a teacher at an inner-city school in Indianapolis, wanted to change that for her 7th and 8th grade students. Most had never left the city, let alone the state or country.

Amy wanted to share global traditions with a more personal lesson than could be taught from the generic information in a teaching manual. She hoped to illustrate their importance using real-life stories from a variety of people who had direct experience with winter holidays.

Amy reached out last year to friends and family through Facebook with a simple request. Explaining that she was trying to broaden her students’ international horizons, she asked her friends to contribute stories about their experiences with winter celebrations and holidays from other cultures and countries. Their descriptions, she explained, would “provide wonderful, authentic discussion points for 12-to-15-year-old students.” In no time, Amy had received several responses, giving her enough material to shape a lesson around their firsthand accounts.

Thanks to her Facebook friends, Amy’s class talked about various Jewish Hanukkah traditions, the Muslim celebration of Eid, and the evolution of the Yule holiday. They also learned about celebrations connected to the winter solstice, such as the tradition of Yalda that occurs in Iran, and numerous Japanese winter practices.

Finally, Amy’s students were curious to hear about the different ways Christmas was celebrated around the world, with one Facebook friend contributing stories of a snowless “summer Christmas” from New Zealand in the Southern Hemisphere.

According to Amy, it’s hard to tell whether she or her students enjoyed the lesson more. Although the kids were intrigued by the celebrations they discussed, Amy was inspired by the support she had received from her friends on Facebook.

“As ‘authenticity’ becomes an education buzzword,” she said, “Facebook is one place to easily gather information, anecdotes, and documented facts from ‘experts’—if you’re lucky enough to know them.”

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So now we all know, the Government are to make older people work longer, not retire at the age they do now, good news or bad? well if you run a holiday company or travel firm it’s bad, because people who are retired make up 80% of the people who travel to nice places on your buses, planes, and ships, without them who will soon be working who fills your seats?
If you run a firm that sells garden plants, fences, sheds remember that 45% of your visitors who had spare time to spend with you are too busy or tired, so wont be coming in your garden centre.
This change in the law is one outward sign of the fact of life for retirement in a decade or two.
Working won’t be a choice. It”ll be a clear toss up between working and starving, and hundreds of thousands of people will be clinging onto work in an effort to stay solvent, in the desperate hope they won’t be sacked for being too frail.

The cruises will be empty, and the only people flying round the world will be those over 100 years old, still living the dream on their final salary pension.

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With the holiday seasons fast approaching, do you want to stay on a healthy diet but just do not have the slightest idea how you will be able to do it? The world is not deprived of people like you, so you do not have to feel alone or different. Many people all over the world are having the same dilemmas, especially with the thought of the expected holiday cuisines that will be served on the dining tables of their friends and families. However, instead of spending hours thinking how you could possibly avoid all those food, consider adding a special diet plan to your life instead, such as a diet regimen.

A personalized diet like this can help you maintain your figure without giving you the hassles of having to do nutritional value calculations, take extended hours of obsessive-compulsive shopping, and tire yourself with experimental cooking. Best of all, you do not have to torture yourself with hunger strike or starvation attempts, nor do you even have to think about isolating yourself from the celebrating society and then feeling pitiful about yourself in the end because you did not enjoy the holiday season like they did. The plan is designed to keep you from going hungry while preventing the buildup of unwanted weight because of their low-calorie and high nutritional values. Cravings for other stuff like sweets even have solutions, like in this particular case that solution takes the form of a meal bar.

This is very important to know because most people break their diet because they cannot take it when they go hungry. Of course, the natural response to hunger is to eat to satiate it. A professionally crafted diet on the other hand is an excellent alternative to starvation because it provides supplementary meals that will satisfy your hunger without causing you to gain any additional weight. The meals are recurring meals that you have to take every two to three hours, totaling 6 meals that will keep you full at all times.

Luscious foods can make you salivate and over indulge, but structured plans will help you overpower such a tempting presence and sight. For as long as you remain loyal to the diet plans and follow them strictly, you will not have a difficult time getting past the holiday temptations.

Getting through the weight-related risks that the holiday season forebodes can be really challenging to the weight-conscious individual such as you. Besides, who will not be tempted to eat so much when all the good foods and cuisines are prepared on the table-food that you do not get to eat everyday most especially such as rib eyes and high quality steaks? However, if you are really committed to keeping a good diet this holiday season, a formal diet plan can be your perfect partner in this particular endeavor. It can help you deviate from the calling of succulent foods and send you on your way to enjoying a healthy, weight gain-free and sinless holiday season.

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Air travel in the United States continues to get more complicated with every new change implemented by the TSA. While I’m not a road warrior traveling every week, I do take quite a few business and personal trips. I fondly remember the times when I could go through security without taking most of my clothes off, while bringing more than a little quart-sized zipped bag of liquids through security.

While I’m not sure how much of my advice applies this week (since, according to the TSA, “Passengers should not expect to see the same thing at every airport”) I do have a few tips and loopholes to make your travel easier. Many of them revolve around food, since airport food can be unpredictable. Last weekend in the Columbus, Ohio airport, I was limited to the food that I brought with me and what was available in a single vending machine, as none of the stores in my terminal were open.

Smuggle Spreadable Food

I recently learned that peanut butter in a jar is a “liquid”. It seemed pretty solid to me, but that didn’t stop it being confiscated in the Seattle airport as possible liquid contraband. Dangerous stuff. However, if you spread peanut butter between crackers or bread it then becomes a “solid” and can be brought through security. This works for any other spreadable food: hummus, jelly, etc.

The Quart-size Bag isn’t Just for Shampoo and Lotion

This is a good way to smuggle small amounts of hummus, jelly, peanut butter, salad dressing, or any other condiments that you might want to have in the airport: You can put any liquids in the quart-size bag as long as you adhere to the 3.4 ounce per bottle limit, and you can squeeze everything into one bag.

Fitness Training

With all of the delays this holiday season, it can help to practice your running / sprinting before your trip just in case you need to make a tight connection. Last weekend, I managed to make a 5-minute connection in Minneapolis by sprinting between gates. Luckily, all of the running I’ve been doing lately helped me prepare. However, I did learn that running with a backpack containing a laptop and a couple of books while not wearing tennis shoes is way harder than my normal run. If nothing else, I got in a quick little workout combined with an adrenaline rush.

Your mileage may vary with these tips, but we wish you safe travels this holiday season from the WebWorkerDaily team.

What are your tips for making travel easier during the holiday season?

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Several readers wrote to us, in response to a Bits post about the best and worst e-commerce sites, to say that they did all their holiday shopping online this year.

“I did not set foot into a store this holiday season and all Christmas shopping was done online, completely stress-free,” wrote a reader in New York using the name Happy Online Shopper. “Great prices, great service, no dealing with obnoxious salespeople and aggressive crowds.”

Apparently, more and more people feel the same way. ComScore has published its final online sales report for the holiday season, and shoppers spent $27 billion on the Web, an increase of 5 percent over last year.

These numbers do not necessarily signal a happy new year for online shops. The increase follows dismal sales last year, when shoppers were feeling the pinch of the recession and online sales fell for the first time, and is down from double-digit increases in previous years.

But the results are better than many analysts predicted, and prove that online stores continue to steal market share from bricks-and-mortar stores. Offline sales, though still much larger than online sales, increased only 3.6 percent, according to SpendingPulse, an information service of MasterCard Advisors. Meanwhile online sales accounted for about 10 percent of total retail this season, an all-time high, according to Forrester Research.

Though overall sales increased, individuals each spent a little less, comScore said. The successful ones marketed over social media, like sending discounts to their Facebook fans or Twitter followers, and offered free shipping later in the season.

Sites selling consumer electronics, jewelry and watches had significant improvement in sales this season. Big sites like Amazon.com performed better than smaller online shops.

“In these tough economic times, the retailers with sufficient financial resources and a willingness to invest in aggressive marketing and free-shipping offers were clear winners,” said Gian Fulgoni, chairman of comScore.

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c  I’ve been working with Nancy and Hoosh since I started back in 2005 and wouldn’t give them up for the world.  I think I would fight somebody if they tried to take these folks away from me.  Many of you know that we manufacture the majority of the Monif C. line in the USA, and although it is CRAZY expensive to do, we are committed to it not just because of the US economy, but because you can’t get the type of pristine fit and attention to detail anywhere but here in the USA.  And also because I consider these folks my friends…Hoosh my pattern maker learned tailoring (he calls it tailoring not pattern making) in Iran when he was 18 yrs old, you know how much experience that is?  Truly invaluable, and that’s why I always tell customers, the secret to Monif C. is in the fit.  You may not see it on the hanger or straight out of the package, but once you put it on your body, instant vavavavoom!  And these are the great folks that make it happen.

So enjoy the pics of our traditional Chinese soup bowl dinner…ever had soup bowl?  Basically you have a pot full of chicken stock or water, whatever your fancy, and you bring it to a simmer and you put meat, shrimp, chicken, dumplings, and LOTS of vegetables (bok choy, greens, bean sprouts, etc.) in and cook it all together.  Then Nancy mixes together Chinese BBQ paste, soy sauce, and cilantro and you pour that concoction over the whole thing.  Add in champagne, vodka, gin, and cookies, and you got a party!

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Tending to her sideline reporting duties,  Erin Andrews of ESPN was spotted covering the Pacific Life Holiday Bowl in San Diego on Wednesday night (December 30).

The blonde beauty busily made her interviewing rounds as she watched the Nebraska Cornhuskers defeat the Arizona Wildcats by the final score of 33-0 at Qualcomm Stadium.

Meanwhile, Miss Andrews recently voiced her hopes that her convicted stalker receives the maximum sentence for his peeping crimes.

Talking about the effects of being the victim of Illinois insurance executive Michael David Barrett’s voyeurism, Erin told, “I have nightmares. I walk in crowds and I see him in my peripheral vision. When I’m alone in my house, I have fears that he’s going to walk inside and hurt me. I don’t know him. I’ve never met him. I don’t know why he chose me. But I hope he never sees the light of day again.”

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Not every eBay.com auction listing offers something concrete for sale.  A new kind of listing that’s appeared on the Web site seems be selling only Christmas hope.

Nestled in among the Holiday-themed eBay listings for items like Razor Scooters, Transformers and Webkinz, you’ll find listings that ask users to buy Christmas presents for a stranger’s children.

Perhaps it’s a sign of the times, the predictable consequence of a nasty recession and the proliferation of technology. But eBay.com is now teeming with such auctions.

“Donate for holidays to family of 4 in need,” said one listing viewed by msnbc.com on Wednesday, one of several dozen similar auctions easily found.

Parents who use eBay.com at Christmas are generally engaged in a frantic search for this year’s Beanie Baby or Tickle Me Elmo doll, but these families say they are scrambling to give their kids anything at all this holiday season.

“Our family is in need of some help this holiday. With both parents out of work and back in school, our kids may not have a Christmas this year,” writes Bridget Newberry, a 28-year-old mother of two from Lawrenceburg, Ky.  The photo on the listing shows Bridget and her husband, Alan Rice, with their two children. “I will send you a hand-written thank you note for any donation, as long as you include your address & name. Thank you and God bless you.”

Another “item” for sale came from a poster who said she is a single mother of two.

“I am a single mom with a 9-year-old girl and a 4-year-old boy. I work part time at a gas station and I don’t get much for help. I usually plan everything ahead but this year has not left me with many options. My car broke down 4 weeks ago and the repairs are quite high,” she writes. The ad includes a picture of a humbly decorated Christmas tree.”Please contact me if you are willing to donate a present for my kids. If you do not have time, I made a ‘buy it now’ in another auction for presents. I would love to see them have a nice Christmas.”

And still another from a man who’s asking for help in Chico, Calif., under the listing: “Help make Christmas Possible for two Children.”

“Single dad raising two children. Just spent all our money to get an apartment. We are asking for a little help to make Christmas possible this year for my two children. I don’t work right now. My son was born premature with chronic lung disease and requires 24/7 care. We are asking for donations. Anything is appreciated.  Thank you.”

Because eBay’s system requires that something is listed for sale on every auction, many listings offer worthless electronic books or other digital items for sale at 1 cent or 99 cents, but encourage higher bids.

Others include more obvious listings for items the children want as gifts.

The ads have spurred a debate among eBay users that echoes the discussions you’ll hear about real-world panhandling.

“eBay is a marketplace … not a place for someone to put up pictures of their family … and BEG for money,” said one experienced eBay power seller who thinks “eBay panhandling” is bad for the site.  She complained that eBay had not removed the auctions when she notified the firm about them.  “It just cheapens the marketplace when such things are allowed to occur and takes away from some really good charity auctions that are sanctioned and within eBay guidelines.”

Most of the “Christmas donation” auctions contain a smattering of critical comments from other eBay users, telling posters that they should look to local charities for help. And there’s no way to verify the authenticity of a person who lists such an auction — scammers could easily post fake pictures and manufactured tales of woe.

Terms of service violation
The ads, meanwhile, appear to run afoul of more mundane concerns: eBay’s terms of service, according to the firm.

Herbbox”EBay does not allow listings that have no item or service for sale,” the company said in a statement to msnbc.com.  “Additionally, while we do allow listings that will benefit a charity, sellers must be soliciting on behalf of recognized, tax-deductible charitable organization.”

The firm also recommends that eBay users donate to recognized charities rather than individual eBay listers.

The eBay phenomenon appears to parallel another more direct form of cyberbegging. Numerous sites like CyberBeg.com and DonateMoney2Me.com allow users to post their stories and ask for help via PayPal. But those sites don’t attract nearly the audience that eBay does.

Newberry, a long-time eBay user, said she got the idea for her ad when she sorted all eBay auctions by lowest price, looking for inexpensive holiday presents.  When she did, she found many other families listing items for $0.01 so they could be found easily by people looking for bargains.

“So I figured it was worth a try,” she said.

Both Newberry and her husband are currently in school, she said — he’s studying fire science to become a firefighter while she is studying clerical and computer skills so she can get an office job. Newberry said she had worked at a nearby factory, while her husband washed dishes in a restaurant, but both lost their jobs in the past 15 months.  They moved last year from their apartment into a relative’s basement apartment, she said.

“It’s a really hard time, but that’s life,” she said.

Neither child “had much of a birthday,” but Newberry is holding out hope for a better Christmas. Her daughter wants an iPod, but Newberry said she wouldn’t oblige even if she had the money.  A giant stuffed horse they saw recently at a store is a more likely gift.

“But it’s $50. Fifty dollars for a stuffed horse?  Incredible,” she said.

Like many young boys, her son wants Bakugan Battle Brawlers accessories — so he can play the card/action figure game based on a Japanese cartoon show with friends.

But right now both gifts appear out of reach, she said. And her online pleas seem to be a dead end.  So far, she hasn’t gotten a penny from her eBay donation request.

“All that’s happened is I’m out the 65 cent listing fee,” she said.

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