The Christmas/ New Year holiday break is a time many go offline, be it on vacation or to spend time with family. It's a traditionally slow time of the year, but it's an opportunity waiting to happen.

Christmas is a great time to ramp up your online activity. Simply your competitors and peers will be taking it easy and marketing less (be it content or virtual good) and yet as more and more people turn online in their spare time much of the audience will still be there.

The line

There is of course a line; sending marketing emails on Christmas Day for example is considered poor form, however sending a happy Christmas message to your client base or readers is a great way of remaining connected. Post-Christmas to the New Year is an even better time to be pushing solutions that may solve a Christmas shopping hangover or two.

Content

As mentioned above a lot of people take time off over Christmas, which makes it the perfect time to ramp up your output as readers seek out something to read. If you're in the news business it's hard as everything slows down and there's not always a lot to write about, but you can always be creative. Here's a few things you can do over this period to keep up your content:

• Dig through your archives: if you're like me you keep email pitches in a folder. I wouldn't run 95% of the stuff I receive, but I'll be digging through the submissions as a way to find new sites and things to write about
• End of year lists: a little cliched but they always work a treat, particularly if you've got something interesting, or dare I say out there to write. Tell people what your best sites/ products were of 2007
  
• Topical: write stuff about the holidays and link this in to your usual content. A great christmas SEO site perhaps? People love reading stuff about the holidays at Christmas, you just need a little imagination and a good couple of ideas
• Predictions: futurism is a favorite of mine and I've already started making predictions for 2008. At the basic level you can do one post of predictions, if you're smart you can break it down per niche vertical and do some great writing on why you think something will happen in each, complete with links and research. I know as a reader I love well argued predictions

Obviously everyone wants to spend time with family and friends over the holidays and there will be times where you just don't have the time, but if you can find it, or even better start pre-writing the content now. If you run a blog most blog packages support pre-posting as well so you don't even have to be at home when the post goes live.