Pay Per Click & Affiliate Marketing

1 Week After the “Amazongeddon”

Christoph — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 02:55:15 +0000

It’s now roughly 1 week (10 days actually) since Amazon terminated the business relationship with affiliates in Colorado. I have spent a lot of hours replacing links to Amazon’s website with product links of other merchants. I still have hundreds of links to go through. That’s what you get for going deep and dirty into niche markets – it works great as you go, but if the merchant underneath pulls out, you’re stuck in the shithole.

In many affiliate forums and blogs where people talked about this scenario they said to replace Amazon links with links of other merchants. So, I went out to Shareasale and CJ and Linkshare looking for merchants with matching products. With many merchants I was already active and with other ones I had to apply for their affiliate program. For my most successful websites where I had links to Amazon I was able to cover roughly 80% of the links – for the remaining 20% of the product links I did not find a replacement.

Now a week after this Amazongeddon thing happened I have to declare that replacing Amazon links with links for other merchants is bad move. As a matter of fact I have ZERO conversions to record. Zero. Null. Nada. Zipp. Zilch.

I still have some merchant product links I can use to replace the merchants that were supposed to see the best conversion rates; pretty much the next tier down following the generic stats of each network (and a lot of guessing). While 1 week is still short, having zero conversions is pretty depressing. I have started removing affiliate links altogether from 2 sites now and rather redirect the links side-internally. Those sites are now running Google Adsense ads instead which is at least making up for some of the losses.

If you are an affiliate in one of the other states that is still fighting active attempts of those darn lawmakers to tax the Internet, you a) better get involved and b) you better start working on a real plan B. If you depend a lot on Amazon.com for your business income, you might face the same fate that my sites have experienced. I am sure some of the merchants have converting products, but are those the products you successfully promoted through Amazon.com’s affiliate product?!

Not only has this Amazongeddon cost me dozens of hours of time where I was writing emails to stupid politicians or waited 12 hours at the Colorado State Capitol to testify in front of the Senate’s Finance Committee, it has also cost me dearly financially. Hundreds of hours of work vaporized instantly. Hundreds of dollars of software investments now sitting useless on my computer’s hard drive. In this case I have nothing positive to put against this issue.

I am not easily to demotivate and so this is a bump in the road, but not the end of the world. What frustrates me a bit is the time I lost. The time could have been spent so much more productive growing my business to the next level. That’s the part that bothers me most. I am diversified to a certain degree and I can make up for the loss of income, but I do hate wasting my time. It’s hard to focus when you’re full of anger.

I am slowly getting back into the right work mood and I hope that I will laugh at Amazon and those stupid Colorado Democrats and show them the finger. One thing they can be sure of is that I will also work towards a goal of not giving them what they are after. At one point I might just move myself and all business operations out of the state of Colorado with satisfaction on my mind.

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?