Passive Income Opportunity with Temperance

Why Are States Like Colorado Trying To Charge Sales Tax on Affiliate Sales?

2010-02-04T15:20:00.001-05:00

Well as to the purpose, most states are having serious revenue issues. Re-cooping sales tax from online sales made to residents of the state apparently seems like a reasonable avenue for states with a sales tax. Interstate commerce rules make this difficult in reality. While some affiliates see this as a way that states are "strong-arming" businesses into coughing up more money, I'm not so sure I agree.

What doesn't seem reasonable to me is the way large online companies are treating affiliates in those states as a way to avoid adding those sales taxes. Sales tax by states can only be charged if the company has a "physical presence" in the state - and states are using affiliates to show a physical presence.

The problems with defining "physical presence" this way are many-fold. First there is no way to guarantee that a New York based affiliate even made any referrals to someone in New York. For me, technically the "physical presence" of my website is located on a server farm in a different state than I am physically in (or maybe many states or countries depending on how many hosts you use.)

Still dropping all your affiliates in one state to try to win a court battle about "physical presence" seems overboard for these companies in my opinion. Especially since they continue making sales in these states AND charging the sales tax. See Amazon's sales tax policy for example.

I suppose it may be an effective technique to "strong arm" the state as the company is able to effectively lower the income (and income tax where applicable) of the state without necessarily lowering their own income as they still conduct business with residents of the state.

Colorado HB 1193 continues to move forward and is being passed to the Colorado Senate. Affiliates in Colorado should already be preparing for any potential backlash from Amazon and other large affiliate programs as they have already displayed in the past a willingness to leave you cold and dry while happily continuing their own business.

Probably the most important thing to do is get educated and get involved with your local Chamber and politicians to help them understand the ramifications. And then vote for those who will enact sensible legislation. I strongly disagree that these large companies should be allowed to just drop all their affiliates this way, but this is more of an ethical business practice issue than something that could actually be prevented based on law.

Getting the Traffic to Your Site | The Importance of Keyworded Backlinks

2009-11-13T18:49:00.001-05:00

So you have maybe slapped up a few adsense niche blogs or maybe stuck with building an adsense income from sites like hubpages or infobarrel, what now? Are you ready for some residual income online? Not quite yet. Probably the single most important thing about making good income is to get search traffic to your website or hubpage. These are the folks that will click on your ads and be happy that you sent them along to what they were looking for. Don't waste your time chasing those social networking web 2.0 ninnies. They never click ads even though Google is trying to help that with their new user-based ad platform.

Organic traffic is where you want to be. And ranking number one in your slot for your keyword is the trick to creating a truly passive income opportunity. But how to you make money online with adsense if you aren't ranked number one for your keyword? Well now is the time to roll up your sleeves and get to work. Content creation is the no brainer aspect of working with adsense. The real work comes in when you have to figure out how to rank for your keywords.

To get the kind of traffic to your site that will click your links and make you money online, you will need to start getting keyword anchored links to your website from other websites that Google views as having authority. Now there are many different ways to go about doing this. You can contact other websites that outrank you for the same keywords and ask them for a link to your site. You can do blogroll exchanges or participate in link trades with other folks in your niche. One of the easiest ways you can do this on your own, however, is to submit unique content to a quality article directory. This will help gain you exposure as well as having the opportunity to have your article republished across the internet. This is great because publishers must keep your links back to your site in tact when they reprint your article.

When you are submitting articles to directories or even guest posting on other people's blogs, one of the biggest mistakes I see people make is that they don't spend time to search for keyword variations and other options that they can rank easily for. these variations have the bonus value of bringing in more traffic to your site. In addition, you can use these other long tailed phrases to help you vary the anchor text to your site. Never ever link back to your site with the same anchor text everywhere, or even worse with "click here" as your anchor text. Gah, I think Adobe has the rankings zipped up for click here and you will never beat their site out so don't try it!

Somebody asked the other day in a forum I belong to about how many backlinks you need to get to get to the top spot in the Google SERPS. Duh - you need as many as you have the day you finally make it. Is this a fast trip? Well that really depends upon the keywords you choose and your competition for those keywords. Sometimes in larger markets you might even be content to sit on the first page because the payout is so great, but in most niches, your income will vary exponentially as your position away from the number one spot changes.

Don't just trust me, try it out for yourself!

Hubpages Update

2009-07-16T02:17:00.007-04:00

Going back over the hub challenge, I currently have over 30 hubs going. Not all of them are properly supported with backlinks at this point - there seems to be some type of bottleneck for a few folks, myself included, with getting any type of ezine articles published lately. My last article has been in the cue since July 8th. I've never had problems with them being this slow, and when they are my motivation to keep writing new articles to be published there drops way down.

Looking at my Adsense revenues for the last month, they are definitely picking up some as the backlinks get into place. Its really vital to support your main content with links back to it from article directories like ezine, goarticles, infobarrel and others. Infobarrel is nice as they allow for revenue sharing of Adsense as well. Without those backlinks, your hubs may shoot up initially but most likely won't stay up in the SERPs forever. Google is, after all, the largest popularity contest in town.

One thing that struck me when I was analyzing Adsense trends for the last month was that the little blog that could with only a few posts and very few links back in currently is performing almost as well as all my hubs combined. Now I created this blog before I learned proper methods of keyword research and before I knew anything about BANS "scams" or whatever it was that made .info sites fall out of favor with the Big G, but there it is. It doesn't rank for any of its keywords yet but it is indexed and is pulling in a modest Adsense income that continues to build despite my lack of love for it.

I've spent the early part of this week fiddling with my new flagship site and getting it set up initially. I spent entirely too much time messing around with wordpress as my css and php skills leave something to be desired! But I have gotten the posting I wanted to do complete anyway. The backlinks again not so much! (there is a theme here!)

As I'm working with a corporate headhunter at the present, preparations for the hiring fair this weekend have ramped up significantly and put me a little behind from my personal passive income goals - its always the backlinks for me that get pushed off until later. The way I see it, having the content up on your site to start aging is the first important step. Backlinking is vital, but without the content you have nothing! And as its more important to be slower in the beginning with backlinks, that becomes the easiest thing to push out to the future when other priorities step in.

My goals for the second half of the week are to continue on with the hiring fair prep (don't want to get fired by your recruiter!), to go back and create the backlink support I will need for the posting I've already done on the new site, and the biggy given my Adsense analysis - to build up more content on my site that is currently creating some passive income opportunity and pass it some link love. This site is one of the two I had set aside for the 100 blog post in 30 days challenge, so I'm keeping up with that.

This should keep me plenty busy for the rest of the week and weekend!

Oh! A little on the headhunter - I would LOVE to get some corporate experience in sales and marketing to continue building my own individual entrepreneurial skills. I love to read, I love doing all these web experiments, but nothing beats working in a real environment with external pressures for boosting my ability to learn and digest vast amounts of information quickly. For some reason, I just can't seem to put myself under that much pressure alone! In the short term this will take some time away from builign a web empire, but I believe it will make me that much stronger in the long run. Either way I will never know until I try!

Here's to your success building your passive income online!

just a technorati claim post

2009-07-12T16:29:00.001-04:00

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100 Blog Posts in 30 Days Challenge

2009-07-12T15:45:00.005-04:00

As part of my business plan for building my passive income opportunity, I am a member of The Keyword Academy. TKA is a wonderful community of folks who are learning to make money online and is headed up by Court and Mark. This month Court has issued a new challenge - 100 blog posts in 30 days.

Now I haven't quite finished up the 100 hubpage challenge yet, but I am considering participating in the new blog post challenge. The reason is because I do own a few domains that are not hyper-niche targeted and would probably do very well if the blogs were a bit more filled out. This challenge would give me the stimulus to go back and produce more content rather than just letting these blogs age.

Last night I went ahead and changed the hosting over on both domains I plan to use for the 100 blog post challenge - the current account I had them with was set to expire on July 15th and I wasn't very happy with that hosting anyway. I have gone ahead and switched to hostgator - mush easier for us non-code folks to host wordpress blogs on. My previous hosting company provided very little support and a very old install of Wordpress (2.0 I believe!). I continually had permissions problems and if you are like me and the letters FTP scare you, this was not a good solution!

Now I am at the stage where I am waiting not-so-patiently for the little buggers to finally propogate out so I can get the old content back up and running as well as set up the themes and all that. Like I said, I avoid FTP like the plague!

Once these changes are all on place, I am going to follow this plan for the week:

3-4 Blog Posts per day
1-2 Hubs added per day (may or may not be supporting the blog posts)
1-2 Infobarrels added per day (may or may not be supporting the blog posts)
1 Day building backlinks without adding new content

Some of this will require further keyword research to come up with greens and cousin keywords for the blogs I am filling out.

Currently only one of the 2 blogs are monetized with Adsense - although its not yet ranking for its keywords it does provide a trickle of income each month that covers the hosting fees. The other domain I purchased branded rather than keyworded and hadn't decided what to do with it yet. Its been sitting for a little over a month with a hello world! post which ironically is indexed in Google. So basically, both of the blogs that I will be trying to create a larger passive income opportunity with could be classed as flagship sites.

Can't wait to see how the contest goes! I am probably starting a tad behind as I have no pagerank as of yet and both of the domains are fairly new, but its an experiment in making money online. You will never know what happens until you try it yourself!

Building a Passive Income Opportunity with the Amazon Affiliate Program

2009-07-08T23:18:00.005-04:00

This week I have been busy cranking out some hubpages and building backlinks. Once you start pulling in a passive income online, backlink building is probably one of the most important things you can do to safeguard that residual income. Without good backlinks, your rankings in search engines will most likely slide over time as others pursue the same keywords that you are unless you have some really great links from high PR .edu domains.

Anyway, I've started to see my Adsense revenue from hubpages begin to even out and start growing - I don't have a tremendous number of hubs yet like some people, but the days when I am making absolutely zero on hubs seem to be just about gone. Nothing to quit the day job yet, but when you are creating something out of nothing but your own time and effort it is nice to see it start to pay off.

So this is just a little update as to what I am doing regarding my passive income opportunity business plan that I posted earlier. I haven't been able to get approval yet from EPN - and I hear similar tales of woe from others who have been trying for months to get approval, so I am attempting to learn to target Amazon affiliate sales better. I'm not convinced that hubpages is a good platform for Amazon affiliate sales, although I do have Amazon links on some of my hubs and a couple of hubs that target Amazon products specifically.

This week's keyword research dug up some really good, targeted product ideas that I am going to develop into niche websites using the iframes version of embedding an Amazon store into your site. Because these sites will be created from scratch, it may take several months to develop strong traffic to any of them. Following the methods that I have learned at The Keyword Academy, the plan for this week is to create a few of these sites and build them up. I haven't decided yet whether they will be monetized with adsense and Amazon, or simply with Amazon stores. I will have to test both as I've never done this before.

Distractions, Mentors, and Thoughts About Learning to Create Passive Income Opportunity

2009-07-03T11:01:00.008-04:00

As someone who is relatively new to making money online, probably my single biggest distraction away from creating my own passive income is the time I spend on other people's blogs. I find blogs to be both a blessing and a curse.

Blogs are a blessing because I have learned a lot of valuable information from several free blogs out there. These sites have helped me out with more information than I could possibly describe. The problem is, when you are new and just learning a skill set, too much information can be paralyzing.

I was in a PhD program for a while - actually wrote half of my dissertation before I changed courses and decided to pursue other interests. Anyway, the program was in Counselor Education and Supervision. I learned a tremendous amount about the psychology of an internship and how people best learn, but I tend to forget it often myself. The interesting point I want to bring up from that education is that newbies do not learn best from experts or gurus. The problem is that by the time you are an expert or a guru, so many things have become intuitive or automatic to you that you don't even think of explaining them to a brand new apprentice. And often the apprentice is too new to even know what questions to ask to get that information from you. Newbies actually learn best from novice, novices learn best from those that are at an intermediate level, and so on. It is always that one-up level that provides the best mentor match.

So that brings be to why spending so much time reading other people's blogs is a distraction in creating my own passive income opportunity. First, its difficult without spending hours and hours of research to tell whether someone who speaks with a voice of authority actually knows what the hell they are talking about. People even off of the internet have strong convictions and many can even argue their point well, but that doesn't mean that their information is actually correct. Second, because of number one it becomes much easier to gravitate to the guru's blogs than to those intermediate folks who would provide a better level of tutoring and mentoring for me. When you are first beginning anything, almost everyone pretty much needs a concrete set of rules to follow - it doesn't matter whether its plumbing, counseling, nursing, or internet marketing. This is a UNIVERSAL developmental stage. Gurus can have a difficult time giving you a concrete set of steps and often will contradict themselves. This doesn't mean they are wrong, but there is a completely different thought process that happens psychologically speaking in the novice versus the expert.

Once you follow a set pattern and become accustomed to it as well as have many mistakes under your belt, then you become more effective and can creatively adopt your own procedure. Unfortunately there aren't many ways to speed up this process other than dialoguing regularly with a mentor. In counseling, we call this clinical supervision and it happens weekly for a minimum of one hour for two years in grad school and usually at least two years prior to reaching your full licensure. The other thing that is tricky is that the internet is constantly expanding and the rules keep changing daily, unlike counseling where if you stick to learning a tried and true method, it will work even if there are newer methods available.

So I spend valuable hours of my day in forums and on blogs and don't get nearly the amount of things done that I could if I had more organized supervision like when I was getting licensed as a counselor and as a supervisor. These distractions limit the amount of mistakes that I make, slowing down the rate of learning. I have gotten better, and have found a system of mentoring in The Keyword Academy that I believe will work for me. Court and Mark's instructions are very step-by-step in their videos, even if sometimes in talking they contradict themselves (at least Court seems to be more of the level of an Expert than a true intermediate teacher), but its the best alternative I have found so far. Now I just need to stop reading everyone else's blogs for a while until I have more time!

Building a Passive Income Opportunity: The Business Plan

2009-07-02T17:44:00.006-04:00

So up until this point, I have never actually sat down and thought about, let alone constructed, a business plan for my online ventures. I'm getting serious at this point. I can see a lot of potential for making money online through adsense using either my own blogs or even following in the footsteps of the recent Hub Challenge. Today I am buckling down and getting more focused about creating my passive income opportunity. In that line, here is the tentative business plan that I have developed:

Get more organized and focused and stay on task - I have a lot of problems staying on task and avoiding all the shinies online. If you are like most people, then you probably do too! Well, today I am buckling down and putting my nose to the grindstone. Its long past time to get serious, but here it is!

Develop and diversify freelance writing opportunities for immediate cash flow - I left a job that paid well that I absolutely hated at probably one of the worst possible times. Yep, I goofed, but now I need to focus some on bringing in the immediate cash while building my passive income.

Create and maintain a blogger blog related to making a passive income online - that would be this site! Obviously due to my financial situation at present, I will be building my passive income online through free to use sites at first and focusing mostly on adsense. I have created a few affiliate sites in the past and I'm just not sure I've found my niche yet as I'm not a good "hard" sell lol!

Create a minimum of 200 hubpages across 2-3 accounts - if there was one thing that the hub challenge showed, it was that making a livable passive income on hubpages is absolutely within reach, but it does involve throwing as much shit up against the wall as possible to see what sticks! Last month I was slow and pulled in only a little over $10 from my hubs. This month I would like to increase that to the triple digits. I believe this is completely possible IF I maintain focus!

Short term – fix Squidoo lenses to meet the coming policy changes - ugh, I am not looking forward to this and have been putting it off for a bit. My affiliate sales off of Squidoo have been low, but they are trickling in so I need to go through and make some changes.

Limit reading of other peoples blogs (see first goal!) - Hello, my name is Temperance and I'm a blog-a-holic! And yet, all this reading of other people's blogs will NEVER help me create my passive income opportunity. Only doing something will!

Get better at targeting amazon.com sales on hubpages after creating 200 hubs - Not going to face this just yet but I definitely would like to see how I could do better...er better being relative to ZERO. I laughed when I got an email from Amazon today saying something like "hmm, you've been with us for a month now and made no sales, need some help?" Duh - on the other hand I'm not really targeting Amazon sales on hub pages right now but the capsules add nice pictures of products which I do like!

Increase my ability to quickly conduct better keyword research - until I started looking for paying keywords online, I thought my research abilities were bar none. Apparently I don't shop enough! I need to practice more of putting myself into the shoes of Joe and Sally consumer and thinking like they think when approaching keyword research.

Reinvest back some profit into unique article wizard or something similar as well as dragon speech naturally to speed up article writing. Backlinks are probably the most important thing you need to develop to keep up a passive income online. UAW comes highly recommended by several folks so I will be giving it a try once the income level increases. The same with Dragon Speech - anything to speed up my article creation would be wonderful at this point.

Welcome to Passive Income Opportunity with Temperance!

2009-07-02T17:40:00.002-04:00

Hello and welcome to my blog about my journey into creating and sustaining the perfect online passive income opportunity! I am far from my eventual goal of being able to make enough money to live off of while I sleep, and unlike what many internet marketers would have you believe, its a lot of hard work creating a passive income opportunity.

Hard work aside, I am determined to generate a passive income online and never work for "the man" again! I don't claim to have the answers to life, the universe, and everything, but if you join with me on this journey we can keep each other accountable, learn, and grow together in developing our individual passive income opportunity!

If you would like to join me in this journey, don't forget to "follow" me to the right to keep yourself in the loop as I update this blog!