Pay Per Click & Affiliate Marketing

Amazon.com’s Colorado Affiliates are worthless

Christoph — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:09:04 +0000

Hey, no offense – I am a now former Colorado-based affiliate for Amazon.com and apparently I am worthless. For one, in a certain way I agree with Amazon’s step to remove Colorado affiliates from their partnership program, but I think they should also stop shipping products to Colorado customers to really make a stand. I think the law is unconstitutional and somebody needs to fight it. Who better than a company with an army of lawyers and deep pockets?!

Anyway, being an affiliate in a merchant’s partner program requires a certain relationship. I provide value to the merchant and the merchant provides me with tools to advertise his products and at the end of the day we all go home happy. I create revenue for the merchant and the merchant pays me for my efforts.

However, with Amazon this is different. They do not care about you. Amazon does not care about its affiliates a single moment. Why? They terminated us without a warning. We never saw any email during the fight here in Colorado about the house bill that eventually would have created nexus for Amazon. There was no communication, no nothing. I do not know how many affiliates Amazon had in Colorado, but I could have imagined we would have seen more people at the Capitol fighting this if Amazon would have mobilized its affiliate army by providing guidance and communication. No, instead affiliates never heard a thing. March 1st went by and the law went into effect and no emails about termination from Amazon arrived. I personally slowly had the hope this thing would be over with, until I woke up this morning and found an email from Amazon in my Inbox:

Hasta la Vista, Baby. You are terminated.

So, Amazon is making its stand on the back of us affiliates. We do the initial fighting and now we are collateral damage among the way. Amazon is trying to use us affiliates as a tool against the government. Good luck with that, Amazon. I will switch merchants and find other means of income, but even if you open the doors again for Colorado affiliates, I will not make that switch back when the time comes and a different merchant is working out.

How much value does an affiliate have for Amazon? Not much. See this screenshot of a Google Adwords ad I saw today while searching the news for more information about what happened in Colorado today. Low prices on Affiliates …

Terminated from Amazon’s Affiliate Program due to CO-HB1093

Christoph — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:28:22 +0000

Received that long expected email from Amazon.com today. As being located in Colorado I am hereby terminated from their affiliate program effective immediately.

We are writing from the Amazon Associates Program to inform you that the Colorado government recently enacted a law to impose sales tax regulations on online retailers. The regulations are burdensome and no other state has similar rules. The new regulations do not require online retailers to collect sales tax. Instead, they are clearly intended to increase the compliance burden to a point where online retailers will be induced to “voluntarily” collect Colorado sales tax — a course we won’t take.
We and many others strongly opposed this legislation, known as HB 10-1193, but it was enacted anyway. Regrettably, as a result of the new law, we have decided to stop advertising through Associates based in Colorado. We plan to continue to sell to Colorado residents, however, and will advertise through other channels, including through Associates based in other states.

And

Your Associates account has been closed as of March 8, 2010, and we will no longer pay advertising fees for customers you refer to Amazon.com after that date. Please be assured that all qualifying advertising fees earned prior to March 8, 2010, will be processed and paid in accordance with our regular payment schedule. Based on your account closure date of March 8, any final payments will be paid by May 31, 2010.

I had kind of expected that even though I was hopeful by not having seen a termination notice from Amazon by March 1st, but I guess it is what it is. I emailed a few state senators already and also send a message to the governor’s office, but again – it is what it is. Now we will see if Walmart.com can replace some of my Amazon links.

Bye Amazon …

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Ignorance or Why Unlimited Web Hosting is good to have

Christoph — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 20:09:26 +0000

Set it and forget it is a great way thing when you can do it with a website that makes money on auto-pilot. However, there is a catch and that catch is how do you know that the site is still making money – especially if you do not check every day on the site or your income stats for certain affiliate programs. One of my set it and forget it websites went belly up when a bad Wordpress plugin failed and an ever growing error log was created. After a while the hosting account ran out of space. CPanel did not allow any more processes to hit the Wordpress database which then took the site down and only displayed a standard Wordpress page and not my content.

2 months of busy work later I wanted to upload a few postings to the site and discover the issue. The site is de-indexed from search engines and it is just a bad situation. If I would have had a web host with unlimited disk space, my site would have continued to be available, but I do not and I usually limit the disk space of my own accounts to 250 megs.

Oh, well I guess I learned my lesson. Now I have to work a little bit harder to regain my rankings, but I hope in a month or so all is well again. If you need a web host with unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth, try Hostgator or JustHost.com. Both are companies I like and that are reliable.

For now I will be posting a few articles to the site and see if the search engines pick it up again the easy way.

How to Make Money Online

Christoph — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 00:45:08 +0000

How to make money online is an often asked question by people I talk to. They see me making money on the Internet and wonder what it takes to get started. I always point out that there is a lot of work involved, but that it also is maybe easier than they think it is.

As an example, many years back I bought several websites. One of these websites was a dessert related website (yes, think recipes for cakes and pies and other stuff in a very specific niche). I bought the site for a mere $25.00 (yes, twenty five dollars). The first day I put Google Adsense on this website was 11/20/2007. I did do some basic SEO which at that time was to submit the site to approx. 1000 web directories as well as a few link exchanges and that was about it. Overall I spent maybe 4 hours of work and additional $50 on this site.

I just ran a report this afternoon and the website has made over $1,000 in Google Adsense earnings since November 2007. A $25 investment has made back its money over 40 times since then. Now granted that $1,000 is not a huge amount money, but you have to think volume. What if you have 10 or 20 or maybe 100 of these kind of websites. 100 x $1,000 is a freaking $100,000.

Now it is 2010 and things are a little different in regards to how to promote a website, but the overall idea is still the same. If you do not know how to make 1 website that can earn a huge amount of money, make websites that make small amounts of money instead. As an example: Look at the email submits or zip submit offers from all the different CPA networks and start building websites around those topics. Write 20 pages with unique articles and post them to your site. Read up about some basic SEO (it does not take much to get 30-40 visitors per day. You do not need many conversions or huge amounts of traffic (even though that helps of course), but a single conversion brings in approx. $1.20 and that should be something you should be able to achieve every other day. One conversion every other day ads up to $18 a month. Now again, think volume and do this not with just 1 website, but maybe with 10, 20, or 100 (over time). Suddenly you make $1,800 a month (100 x $18). Take that money and reinvest it into your business (pay somebody to write the content as an example) and you can probably double that income every 6 months.

The more you do, the better the chances that one of your websites will take off and starts earning more money. Or you expand into different CPA offers. If you build your empire properly and stick to the plan, you can kiss your corporate job goodbye after 2 years and earn a comfortable full-time income from affiliate marketing.

There is only one problem: It requires to take action and that is where 99% of people fail. Which group do you fall into? Do you take action?

Online Videos

Christoph — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 22:19:10 +0000

I started doing more stuff with videos lately. I still have a lot to learn, but my idea is to use videos to better sell products as well as an addon feature to build trust. A website can only go so far in regards to trust. However, with a video where you see a live person explaining items or issues I think a website can gain trust and go past the competitors who do not offer the same feature. This can be a significant advantage.

I made a few investments and still have to shell out another $299 to buy Camtasia. However, so far I bought a license to the Pinnacle Studio software ($129) for video editing as well as I bought a sound file ($14.95) that I am going to use (already using it) in my videos. It’s a 30 second music clip that is energetic and neutral at the same time – meaning, I can use this music clip for many videos to come.

The most difficult part was the first video. Now that have the intro section and the end section ready, all I need to do is to record the actual video. This is definitely a challenge, but my second video turned out to be better than the first one (at least in my opinion). Recording the video and editing it and fitting into the the video framework that I made yesterday was about an hour to 75 minutes. I am sure as time goes by that I will be able to streamline this for sure. I think video content is important as more and moe people expect this on websites or see it as an advantage compared to websites that do not have it. I can also submit the videos to video directories and gain a little bit of SEO value from it. For now I am just using Youtube.com to host the videos. In the long run I want to host them myself, but I have yet to figure it out how to do it. If you know by chance how to do this in a way that the visitor only clicks the play button – let me know. Maybe I even find time to make a video blog post for this website here, but I am not sure yet. I want to concentrate with this for now on my money making websites.