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Well, the numbers are finally in and the US retail sector had its worst holiday season in 5 years. Economists had been predicting this even before the 2007 holiday shopping season kicked into gear. Actually, anyone paying any attention at all to the dire economic news — sub-prime mortgage mess, turmoil in the credit markets, and ever rising food and energy prices, could have seen this coming from way off

It was only a matter of time before the US consumer started putting a clamp on spending.

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It’s only 2 days left to Christmas Day and the online shopping season for most of us doing business online effectively ended a week ago. It really is pretty amazing how short this online shopping season is. This is now the third time I’ve been through the cycle since I first got started in affiliate marketing.

I learn a little bit more each time through.

Below are a few of the things that have become a bit clearer about doing affiliate marketing during the holiday season:

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So, I’ve got a few campaigns currently running on Adwords for merchants that I had some success with this same time last year. These are campaigns in relatively competitive consumer product niches. Not hyper-competitive like the financial niches, but last year I could get on the first page of Google results for a bid price of between .15 to .20.

This time around I was disappointed to find that I was getting virtually no impressions several hours after putting up my Adwords campaigns for these products. Google’s diagnostics were telling me that my ad was not being shown on the first page of results for all of my keywords even though most of them had a “Great” quality score with a minimum bid price of .04.

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Well, The “Big G” felt it was time to take out the “Hand of Death” yet again and put the big slapdown on some thin affiliate sites as well as a few other sites it deemed to be of “very poor quality” last week.

The inevitable wailing and gnashing of Webmaster teeth then ensued on the forums.

Much sage advice was offered up as to what’s behind the Slap and the various ways to slap-proof your sites. The now well-worn method for resurrecting slapped sites was also mentioned quite a bit.

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I received an email from Anita Chaperon yesterday that she was closing down her blog of 8 months and directed subscribers to the blog’s home page for more details.

I couldn’t help but feel a profound sadness at the news.

It’s hard to explain, but I would liken it to pulling up to your favorite bar or restaurant and finding that it’s gone out of business.

Her blog was Reviewlicious.com and was the first blog I entered into my BlogRoll. As I recall, I think I received a notice from her husband Andre, that Anita was launching Reviewlicious.com and eagerly signed up for the announcement list.

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