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.

Rowley is a successful affiliate marketer who runs 50 websites and also has her hands full raising four kids. Still, she found time to design her own house from the ground up and manages to shuttle between Nebraska and Denver to see her boyfriend every other weekend.

She has an easygoing manner, and carries the enthusiasm of someone just a few years out of high school even though she's 34 and has been through a tumultuous seven years, which included a divorce.

An affiliate marketing experiment used Twitter to connect the community at a recent show.

As an idea, Twitter is nothing new – a method of communication between various parties. However, as a real and practical application, Twitter is revolutionary. It has the potential to reinvent communication between affiliates, networks and merchants.

Some folks compare organic search marketing to public relations, where you are trying to get free attention for your business. They further link paid search to traditional advertising. If the comparisons make sense to you, then maybe we can torture the analogy by comparing blogs to press releases. Your company can write a blog post or a press release to try to attract attention, and they are both free.

In the last two issues of Revenue magazine I've written about mistakes that affiliates make, highlighting common errors that most affiliates commit at some point in their affiliate marketing ventures as well as detailing my own outrageous faux pas. Turnabout is fair play, so in this issue we'll look at an example of how affiliate managers prove that they too are only human.

Kathy Eickenberg, who runs PurpleBearsShopnEarn.com, knows exactly what she is going to do this holiday season to ramp up her Christmas sales. One is start early; another is she has started a newsletter. She's hopeful her Christmas ideas will help her move the teddy bears, arts and crafts, toys, children's clothes and other collectibles and party supplies she carries on her site.