I came across an interesting article on Clikz.com detailing expected cosumer spending patterns during the upcoming holiday season. The prediction is that more people than ever will make their purchases online, but more interestingly, there is a corresponding increase in shoppers who use the internet to research products prior to buying them in a store. The stat that stood out was that almost 60% of people contacted said they were planning on researching products online. If a consumer does a search for a product and finds all the big box retailers on the first page of search results, they will research the product online, and then go to the store to buy it. This is not a good trend for etailers without brick and mortar stores.

The way to combat this is to make sure that when consumers do research on a specific product that they are finding product pages of your site in search engine results. The fastest way to achieve that is with blog linking and viral blog marketing campaigns.