Sales Taxes are local and collected by each state from the companies that sell products to residents of that state. With sales tax in some states as high as 9% or 10%, this is a significant income to the states. However, the internet has changed all that. Unlike their brick and mortar counterparts who have to physically reside in a state to sell products, the pure internet players like Amazon can just operate from a single state and sell products to anyone in any state. As these pure internet players don’t register with the individual states, there is no need to pay the sales tax to those states. Of course, a decade back, internet retailing was in it’s infancy and the revenue loss wasn’t much. But as the ecommerce increased leaps and bounds, the amount of sales tax that can be lost is significant. States like California have introduced what’s called a Use Tax and shifted the burden of paying the sales tax from the companies to the tax payers.

Use Tax essentially tells a tax payer to figure out all the products they bought without paying sales tax and pay it at the end of the year, typically along with the income tax filings. It is unclear on how effective the use tax is. There is no easy way to enforce it and I don’t think it the collections would be as good as taxing at the time of the sale.

So, what can be done to make internet retailers to collect and pay the sales tax? One way is to change the definition of who affiliates are. Affiliates are actually not employed by the retailers. Anyone with a website can participate as an affiliate and earn a small amount of side income. Internet retailers rely on affiliates to increase traffic to their websites and improve their sales. Obviously, a person who is an expert in a specific subject area can act as a better faceless sales person to sell a line of products than the retailer itself could ever do. Realizing the fact that internet retailers rely on affiliates and that the affiliates are from all around the country, some states came up with the idea that because the internet retailer has affiliates residing in their states, they have operations within the state and hence should pay the sales tax. New York and North Carolina are a few examples of these states.

Recently Amazon has sent emails to their North Carolina affiliates that they would be terminating it’s relationship with them because North Carolina is going to enforce sales tax on retailers with affiliates in their state. What the people coming up with this type of tax collection schemes don’t realize is, on the internet, anyone can promote a product or a website. In fact, many of the 2 million+ affiliates of Amazon are from outside the US. People from India, Australia, Thailand, Canada and else where are participating in Amazon’s US affiliate program and getting referral fee. If every state in the US starts enforcing sales tax due to affiliates, the end result would be that there will be no affiliates left in the country. We already see so many jobs being outsourced to other countries. Now, affiliates are getting outsourced due to the stupidity of states trying to collect sales tax in a wrong way.

Many Amazon affiliates are reporting that since May 7th, they have been seeing a spike in their clicks and commission. Actually, a heck of a lot more clicks. For some people, it’s as if every visitor on their website was visiting Amazon. Almost like a cookie stuffing. But no, that’s not the case. There is something on Amazon’s end that’s wrong.

Of course, there are many others who didn’t see this new pattern. Initially I didn’t see it either. But after experimenting a bit, I figured out at least one of the widgets that’s causing the spike. Yes, put a products preview widget on your web pages and you are set. Usually Amazon doesn’t set the necessary cookie till a user actually clicks the link from your website and visits Amazon. But for some strange reason, they seem to be setting the cookie for product preview widget. So, if someone visits your website in the morning, doesn’t click the product link to Amazon, but in the evening goes directly to Amazon and buys, you would be getting the referral fee!

Note that not everyone will see a boost in their earnings. For example, I managed to increase the clicks by this but my earnings didn’t change much. So, I guess it depends on the type of traffic to the website. If you have people who play games or teenagers visiting your site, you probably don’t expect them to go to Amazon a little later and buy stuff. But if you have parents or others who are likely to do online shopping, then if not anything, the sheer statistics will eventually get you a bit more money.

I don’t know how long this will last but wonder if this is going to have an impact on Amazon’s earnings this quarter since they are giving out more money to affiliates than without this new behavior (either by design or otherwise). Who knows? On the other hand, with their recent policy preventing PPC ads to their website, the competition to advertising must be a lot lesser making it more profitable for Amazon to advertise itself for a lot cheaper.

Update: As of May 20th, this issue seems to have been fixed by Amazon. Some people might still see a bit of spike in the orders but not clicks and that is natural due to the residual income that comes with 24 hr cookie policy.

I’m sure you all know about google adsense. For those of you who don’t know you can find out more at this LINK

Basically Adsense allows you to place google ads on your website’s pages in order to earn money depending on the clicks they get. Some people seem to do well with them. I don’t. I had ads up for the last month and earned all of $4. Yippy~

Then I found out about Google Affilate Network. You have to apply, and have your own website and agree to certain terms (such as not bidding on companies keywords) but once you are approved you have a large list of affiliates to join.

The network provides you with banners (or text links) which earns you a % if people purchase any items at the links store. It also inserts cookies so it can track your “click” sometimes upto 90 days. So if 45 days later, a person makes a purchase I can still earn a commission. Some commissions for affiliates are upto 25% (a heck of alot more then amazons offering of all of 4%)

They have a great selection of banners (see example above) for each advertiser. They also have a pretty nice reporting section. It shows the number of impressions the ad displayed, the number of times the ad was clicked…as well as, of course, the sales you make. They pay out by check (or transfers to US bank accounts).

I just added it myself this weekend. No sales yet but a few click throughs so who knows, maybe in 24 days

Question: How do I add a list of the books I have read/reading to my blog”

Answer:

1. Go to Amazon Affiliate Program Links

They may require you to log in with your Affiliate username and password

2. Put the book you are wanting to add in the search bar and select “books” or “Music” etc and click search

3. A list of possible books according to your criteria will then display below that bar, right click on the image of the book you want and select “open in new tab/window”

4. Once it has opened up right click on the cover image and select “copy image address/location” (dependent on your browser)

5. Open WordPress as if you were going to write a post and click on the little image button at the top right next to “Add media”

6.  Paste the link in the “Source” section provided and add the Image Title (the book title/author/etc)

7. For the Link URL section copy the address provided in the address bar for the page containing the book you are adding

8. Click center and then insert into Post.  You will now see the book cover that you selected from your Amazon account. 

9. Click on the HTML tab in the top right hand corner and highlight the html code shown here, right click and copy.

10. Click “Design” on your WordPress Dashboard followed by “Widgets”

11. Click on the “Text” lying on the left of the page, it will then jump to the right hand side where all active widgets can be seen. Left click on “edit” and type in the title of your Widget, ie “Books I’ve Read”.

12. Once the title is typed right click in the bigger section and select paste.  All your html code should now be seen like below.

13. Click “Change” followed by “Save Changes”

14. Go look at your blog and you should see something similar to the below image in your sidebar. 

*Note: Should you wish to add more than one book you can add additional “Text” boxes to your widgets, leaving out the “widget title” so that it follows directly below the previous one.

If you want to add “What I am reading now” or other and get stuck pop me an email sanityf@gmail.com and I’ll see what I can do.

Thanks again for all the emails and comments with questions, I will be getting to each as they come in.

If you have talent with you, then sit back on your chair before internet and earn money with a small investment or you can even earn with our investment. But note either you should be good at english or should have marketing skills.

In this article i will give you a brief idea on how to make money from internet. The different ways from which you can some bucks at the beginning stages are:

Affiliate marketing is a type of selling products but it is made through online.It is an internet based marketing technique where most of the bloggers used to make most of their earnings.If you have good marketing skills and have one or more blogs or websites with lots of good traffic, then you can market a product and earn money.For example; If you sold an e-book of value US $50, then you will be given a reward of money in 2 digits like $XX. Many websites are generating money from this type of affiliate marketing. If you don’t have a website also,some companies offer you a page for your promotion and only you have to do is to promote your page and grab a lot of visitors. It depends upon your work and talent.

Ebay one of the biggest online shopping center where you can shop from a small pen to a large vehicles or even costly diamonds,art work etc,. To increase their sales ebay have introduced affiliate marketing to home based workers, bloggers and even online marketers. You don’t need to buy a product and make a sale of that product. Simply if you have a website or blog or a web page, you should place their widget there and the widget is embedded with your referral link. So when a visitor buys a product from this widget some amount is dropped into your account.So, try using the widget in your web page.

Amazon was launched in 1996.Linking to amazon products and services you can easily earn 15% referral amount from your blog for every sale. Amazon has 10 years of track back in online affiliate marketing and it is the first to introduce this type of affiliate marketing to light.For every sale from your website you will get 15% of the total amount. Now huge websites and big blogs are earning huge amount of money by embedding the links or widgets into their blog or website.

How this works :-

• Amazon Associates will drive internet or web traffic to Amazon.com using specially formatted links that allow amazon to track sales and other activity.
• Amazon associates will earn up to 15% referral fees upon qualified buy out from their referrals.
• After you reach certain amount you can request payment from your account.

Few months back when Amazon first introduced the search widget, there was no option to specify a default keyword. That essentially made it useless as a context-sensitive advertising media. Subsequently they added the facility to specify a default keyword. However, the default keyword was part of the widget definition stored by them and so there is no way to dynamically change the keyword (atleast, I am not aware of). Say your website is about Flat Panel Plasma HDTVs and you just want to use a single keyword for search, then it’s not a problem. But if you want to use a different keyword for each category, then the only way that would be possible is to create so many search widgets. And what if you wanted to use the keyword that the visitor has used on a search engine to reach you and provide the amazon search widget with that as the default keyword? Tough luck.

That’s till I saw the Amazon Widget Source, a tool that allows building javascript code for a few widgets by selecting the various parameters. A cool tool I must say. In this, I noticed that the default keyword for the search widget can be specified through the JavaScript. So, now I am able to use the search widget setting the context dynamically based on the page content and visitors.

If you are an Amazon Associate, you would know that Amazon has recently started a website called Endless.com. This is a specialty online retailer selling shoes and handbags (essentially all the leather stuff I guess).

For a company that built a lot of brand and expanded from books to a zillion other categories on Amazon.com, it felt a bit odd on creating a separate site. Wait, till you hear of a new site! Yes, I just saw a job post on craigslist for AmazonFresh website, again a specialty online store dedicated for groceries!

So, can anyone tell me what’s going on? Why does Amazon want to keep creating separate websites? Is this some sort of an SEO strategy? Or, did they realize that a single site with so many categories and not to mention all the new web 2.0 and advertising stuff that they added is causing too much distraction to the customers and losing sales? No idea!

I have tried a handfull of ad networks and the reason to switch from one to the other is either poor click-through-rate or poor eCPM. Granted I don’t have a great site rich of content and so don’t deserve $1.00 CPC ads. Well, not even $0.25.

I recently started using kontera on a PR4 website. First one month went well. CPC ranged from $0.05 to $0.40. Then the ads started deteriorating. Within the 3rd month, there are ads that weren’t even fetching $0.01 per click! One key reason is, most of the ads are template junk from us.com and findstuff.com.

I think ad networks should pay attention not only to the quality of publishers but also the quality of advertisers. My PR4 website recently changed to PR6 and I get more and more targeted traffic. So, why would I want to waste my visitors time for those fraction of pennies with junk ads? So, I removed those ads off my website.

All those who don’t have much traffic but whatever traffic that you get, if it’s a little bit targeted, try just using Amazon affiliate program. The fraction of pennies are not going to get you cross even $10.00 a year! So, even those occasional purchases from the affiliate links on your website could potentially fetch you more money!

Note that the issue is not just related to kontera. Same with adbrite and a few other ad networks as well.

In this regard, I appreciate what Google has done, enforcing certain level of standards for their advertisers in terms of better landing pages and the recent change of display url and the landing page url coming from the same domain.

Wondering what the title is all about? Amazon has done it again! Many of the aStores are showing this message for a reasonable time now and there is no information absolutely whatsoever from Amazon yet! Less than two months back I wrote about how amazon widgets were slow but there was no communication or a prompt action from amazon.

In my last post Amazon Affiliate Linking Options, I briefly mentioned about the various linking options to place Amazon affiliate ads (widgets) on your site. This is mostly for people who are not programmers but are content writers.

For those who want to create specialized applications and are interested in accessing a lot of product data, they can use Amazon Associates Web Services to access the product data programatically and create creative and innovative applications. For example, CloudStore is a great example of an innovative online comparison shopping store created using Amazon Web Services. Yet another example is, Charteo.us, a website that provides sales rank trend charts.

So, if either you are a developer or have a great idea when you have access to a lot of product data, you can invest time and effort in the Amazon Web Services to create a great store with some value. Note that unless there is some value add, the users are not going to bookmark and revisit a website. It would just be yet another me-too-amazon-affiliate-shopping-site.

If you have a creative amazon affiliate website that uses amazon web services, feel free to mention it in the comments.

Having seen some success as an affiliate, I have been thinking about the next step. So, I came across dropship model (which I knew before but didn’t spend much time researching it). So, the dilemma is whether to continue to invest time and effort on the affiliate program or diversify into dropship model.

There are a few dropship companies such as shopster.com which will only show their prices if you have an account (though you can have a 7day free trail account) while I found MegaGoods.com showing it’s prices openly to non-members as well. So, using the member prices given on MegaGoods.com and comparing it to the same product offerings on Amazon, I found that the margins are typically 6% and above for electronics. However, Amazon Affiliate program gives only 4% for electronics category (but gives up to 8.5% depending on performance for other categories). So, while it’s obviously a disadvantage of atleast 2% being an affiliate, here are some pros and cons of Dropship vs Affiliate programs.

Affiliate Pros compared to Dropship

• No need to deal with online transactions
• No need to have secure website to take orders
• No need to process the orders
• No need to deal with customers and take any calls for returns and other maintenance work
• No need to worry about maintaining reputation of the store/brand
• No need to worry about losing a potential customer due to lack of trust/brand recognition
• Number of product choices is much more with a program like Amazon affiliate program, than any of the dropship programs (while Amazon has millions of products and typically hundreds in each category such as GPS or even dozens for a category such as Massage Chairs, the choice available with any dropship program is typically much lesser.

Affiliate Cons compared to Dropship

• No control on pricing. Whatever the affiliate program company (Amazon for example) offers, have to convince visitors to buy at that price.
• No customer info to be able to maintain a mailing list and follow up with them with deals (adhering to the opt-in/out policy)
• No repeat customers
• Difficult to obtain statistics or they are inaccurate

Assuming that in both cases it’s important to maintain a good website, follow SEO techniques, bring traffic to the site and so on:

The lack of operational overhead for affiliate programs is probably enough reason to not worry about the extra 2+% revenue possible with a dropship model.

My current conclusion is that if you are considering either program as a side income and not too serious of making it a mainstream income, then going with affiliate programs is perhaps the best option. But if you are very serious about your own small business and be your own boss one day, then you should definitely try out one or two dropship programs.

In my first post Introduction To Amazon Affiliate Program I discussed about amazon affiliate payment structure. Once you are convinced you want to sign-up the program and be an amazon affiliate, the next big daunting task for you is to decide on how to integrate the affiliate links with your website.

The reason why this is daunting is because there are so many types of widgets that amazon offers that it’s almost like taking a mini-course to learn about them. Luckily, there are details about each of these widgets on Amazon as well as explained in bits and pieces at several places on the web. One useful pointer is Which Amazon Widget When that shows each widget in action along with explaining when it is right to use it on your website. I don’t think there is any precise science in knowing when a particular widget works. However, personal experience had been that the widgets are typically less effective. Hand-picked links matching the content on the website is far more lucrative for websites that have loyal visitors.

For programmers, there is another way to link Amazon products on your website. I will discuss this in the next post.

I have been a dormant Amazon Affiliate for about 2yrs and a serious one for about 6 months. The purpose of this blog is to document my experience as an Amazon Affiliate. Affiliate programs are a good way to earn side income. For some affiliates, if they becomes successful, the side hobby becomes the main-stream income as they decide to go full time on it. But there are very few people who fall into this category since it’s not easy to be so successful as an affiliate.

Amazon Affiliate program is perhaps one of the most lucrative affiliate program. It offers the following key terms (which may vary with time, so check the Amazon Affiliate Program webpage to get the latest info.

* The referral fee is structured as tiered to encourage performance and it ranges from 4% to 8.5%. The good thing is, just by selling 6 items within a month, the rate jumps to 6% and the subsequent tiers get harder and harder to achieve. Note that occasionally, Amazon gives much higher percents for a few products that they are promoting at that time. For example, at present Kindle referrals are credited at 10% rate. Electronics have a max of 4% only and computers are capped at $25.00
* The cookie duration is 1 day.
* The referral is not just for the item which the user clicked but the entire cart. Infact, the user doesn’t even buy the exact item he clicked from your website.

For a starter, one good thing to go with Amazon is, millions of people are already familiar and trust Amazon. So, there is no need to convince the visitor of the site, but just the product (or any product).

This is just the basic introduction of the program. I will keep adding more information about the program and my experience. Please bookmark this blog to get a second experience from my first-hand experience.

Last year, before the holiday season, Amazon introduced a Deals widget. The idea is to showcase all the best deals of the day, of the moment and present them in a widget that any affiliate can place it on their website. At first glance it’s an excellent idea given for a couple of reasons,

1) There is no other way to figure out the best deals going on on Amazon as of a given moment
2) Deals are a best way to encourage people to buy

However, it doesn’t seem to be as successful as expected. From the Amazon Affiliate forums, with statements like

“I ran Amazon’s “Deals Widget” through the holiday season and really liked the look of it and idea of it. I thought it was great! And as far as I can see, after a hundred thousand impressions, it sold nothing “

One hundred thousand impressions and not a single sale? Well, it may not be the case for everyone, but with such large numbers, something can be definitely interpreted.

Most widgets typically will not do good because, the content on the widgets is dynamic and so, a user reaching the page has reached there through some other means and definitely not by searching for the product in the widget. So, context sensitive ads would typically beat outright any widget in terms of conversion.

However, if the widget has a overall theme to it, a theme that is contextual enough to the surrounding content, then the likelihood of that widget doing better is higher.
A good example of such a widget provided by Amazon is the aStore widget. So, for example, if you have website with a particular topic and you create an aStore related to that topic and filled it with all relavant products. Then, the aStore widget
essentially displays on of those products rather than any product. So, since you carefully handpicked the products for your aStore base on your understanding of your audience, the success of the widget is entirely on you.

Based on this type of understanding of which type of Amazon Widgets work and which don’t work, iPodish has created it’s own repackaged widget that we believe will have some success. Given that the iPodish is all about stylish products, more specifically stylish electronics, people with websites or blogs that have demographics who are style conscious would have success using our iPodish Widget For Amazon Affiliates.
This is a new type of widget. The context is “style”. The products displayed are directly pulled from the repository of products that have been reviewed and published by iPodish.com. Note that these are carefully selected products by humans and not just automated pulls of data feeds using Amazon Web Services or other means.

Those who are running a blog and want to make some extra money without much effort can choose to do so by checking our iPodish Widget. In case you are not so much bothered about making the affiliate commission and just want to entertain your web visitors, friends and family with our iPodish Widget, then you can simply grab it from iPodish widget @ widgetbox.com.

Last two days the www.assoc-amazon.com website has been very slow. If you are wondering what this website is and why I am writing about it, read on.

There are many Amazon affiliates that are putting a lot of effort in promoting Amazon’s product and the more effort the more they are rewarded assuming that effort translates into referring more customers who place orders on Amazon.

Amazon has many affiliate widgets and some of them are served off of www.assoc-amazon.com . For some technical reasons, because of the way these widgets are made available by Amazon, it’s not possible to load the widgets after the main page is loaded. As a result, if the above amazon affiliate web server is slow or down, the pages which include these widgets will become very slow giving the visitors of the affiliate websites a bad perception about the visiting site (and not amazon.com itself). Further, since many people want to optimize their revenue opportunity, they place the affiliate scripts prominently at the top half of the website (above the fold) and as a result, the content below the widget script won’t get loaded for a while.

Now, Amazon probably doesn’t care so much about losing a few extra orders a day that are generated through affiliates. But, for many affiliates, this is pretty much the means of making revenue out of their websites. So, everytime there is such a hiccup in the amazon’s affiliate website, it hurts the affiliates.

What’s annoying is that the Amazon affiliate program has forums and they seldom mention about their server problems or give an ETA. So, instead of trying to bring it to their attention and be unheard, I wanted to take it the web route. To talk about it in my little blog. And discuss this not so that the guys operating the Amazon Affiliate program would read it, but because hopefully it may get to the attention of Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos.

Don’t get me wrong, Amazon is among the few companies that are in the forefront of defining the future technologies. I have a great respect for Amazon not due to my affiliation with Amazon as an affiliate, but as a developer who understands what they are doing with Amazon Web Services with offerings such as Amazon Simple Store, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon SimpleDB and so on.

If they want the public to build their web sites, SAAS enterprise applications using their web services, and expect that there is a 99.99% service level, how can people believe in that when their own internal affiliate offerings are not as reliable?

So, Jeff Bezos, please remember many people like me are not just a bunch of amazon affiliates trying to make a few extra bucks a month, but also care and understand the technology aspect and are in a position to recommend the technologies for other startups and potentially consider using it in our own startups. Please try to spend some extra money to revamp your 10yr old affiliate program with more modernized technologies.

My PageRank 3 website fetched me more than $350.00 from Amazon affiliate program in December. And guess how much I made through advertising? For the entire month, using Adbrite’s full page ads, I made $1.37. I have read people talking about how their websites are making a lot of money through Google AdSense and other online advertising options. However, in my case, it’s the affiliate programs, which I initially thought are hard to make money out of, that are doing well for me. Ofcourse, don’t buy into joining any affiliate program. Amazon seem to have worked the best for me, though I haven’t really paid too much time and effort on other affiliate programs.

Artikel seperti ini pasti udah basbang, tapi yang nggak basbang adalah dollar tetep ngalir sama publisher yang masang adsense di blog atau websitenya.

Seperti yang ditulis oleh mas agus-owner edittag, Blog bisa dijadikan tambang dolar bagi pemiliknya terlebih bagi google yang nyata-nyata menjadi makelar iklan dunia. blog seperti sihir baru yang bisa mengalirkan pundi-pundi harta karun bagi pemiliknya.

Dalam bukunya (yg baru 3 hari saya beli) yang berjudul “Meraup dollar lewat Blog” agus hery prasetyo mencoba memandu anda untuk bagaimana bergabung dengan google adsene, adbrite, text-link-ads, dan amazon affiliates, yang mana media tadi bisa mengantarkan anda dalam memanen dollar via blog.

Blog memang sudah menjadi media yang diperhitungkan selain sebagai sumber informasi gratis dan independent, sebagai media penyaluran bakat dan hobi, sebagai media komunikasi abad ini dan bahkan sebagai toko online.

sebenernya bukan hanya dollar yang dapat kita raup lewat blog. rupiah, popularitas, kekasih, dan bahkan pekerjaan bisa didapat dengan asbab blog. budiputra bisa menjadi contoh menyandarkan hidupnya dengan blog, kawan2 di jogja dan bali banyak yang penghasilan bulanannya dari blog, ada juga beberapa blogger lama yang jadi seleb dan populer gara-gara blog, ada yang dapet kontrak acara di televisi karena postingannya tentang rajutan di blog, bahkan saya beberapa hari yang lalu ditawarin kerja di sebuah media karena dia tau saya rajin ngeblog.

kembali ke dollar, blog sebagai media untuk mempublishkan iklan ternyata jangan hanya sekedar blog. makanya dalam bukunya mas agus, dijelaskan beberapa langkah dalam membuat blog khususnya beberapa blog generator mainstream seperti blogger, wordpress, blogsome dan multiply. dan selanjutnya bagaimana memasang adsense, text-link-ads, adbrite, amazon affiliates di blog yang sudah di buat. tak lupa mas agus memberikan penutup bahwa untuk mendulang dollar tersebut harus secara serius dan penuh tekad.

nah bagaimana anda tertarik?