I have said it before but it warrants a few more shouts… I LOVE seasonal affiliate sales! Well I love all affiliate sales but seasonal affiliate sales provide a huge boost in earnings a few times a year.

The back to school season is a big seasonal earner for me. I would guesstimate that I made AT LEAST an extra $1000 from late July to mid September. I celebrated by buying myself a new camera lens for my DSLR.

I also see increases during Halloween and Christmas, especially the latter. Remember my review of Info Product Killer last year? It teaches you how to create niche web sites, especially Christmas sites. I used the information to create one niche toy site and a Christmas gift guide on an existing site. Today I ran a couple reports to see how much I earned from these in total. I earned $122.52 from the Wall-e site and $804.55 from the gift guide. Since it only took me 5 hours to put them together I earned $185 per hour. Not bad! I Paid for a domain and the Info Product Killer product and made an $840 profit. Again.. not bad! It can pay to invest in quality learning materials. And remember this was in additition to the monthly income I usually bring in… it was a BONUS.

I really want to get on the ball and make a few more this year. Unfortunately, it is hard for me to be inspired by products I wouldn’t buy or use myself. Somehow I don’t see making dozens but that’s okay. AND instead of making whole sites I can take a shortcut and create a Squidoo page.. they do really well seasonally too. I am already seeing my monthly lens earnings go up.

I did a little research for this year and found one of the HOT toys for xmas 2009 will be the Twilight Barbie Dolls, so I threw together a site for them in less than an hour. Then I put together a quickie Squidoo page, and linked to the new site from a few existing ones. I may try to get an article or two up at ezine articles as well. So I am off to a running start and I love the product too. Now I just need to find the inspiration to make a few more, update my ones from last year, and I will be set to make a nice chunk of change again this Christmas…

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Kelly at Sparkplugging has asked people to participate in a meme and “Spark an Idea About Something You Want So Bad You Can Taste It”.

I have something I want so bad I can taste it…

My goal is to be able to travel with my folks when they retire in a couple years. They want the kids and I to spend summers with them in various parts of the country and world and I want to be able to do that with them. I need to be making enough in income and have enough saved to pay for extended travel for months at a time basically. I also want to be able to take a couple 4-7 day cruises each year. Add heck I have to be able to spend time my brother and nephews who will be moving to Indonesia in a couple months. AND I have to be able to afford to offset my travel (carbon) emissions in some way so that is an extra expense.

When I look at what I REALLY want… it is to travel and I used to be quite the jet setter until my second child was born. Always has been and always will be what I want most in life… it is about time I start making that happen again.

My goals this year are to get a rewards credit card and start paying all my bills with it so I get airline miles BUT I will pay off the card with my debit card immediately so I don’t ever carry a balance. I will also be opening an ING account so I can start adding to a travel fund. I plan to create more niche sites since I am doing so well with the ones I have now… passive income rocks. I also plan to add two more info products to my line up since those too perform fantastically for me. I would love to find a way to make money off my photography too…

I figure I need to be making about $1000-1500 more a month to be able to do this AND keep paying my bills at home. This amount is VERY achievable so I need to get on it….

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Are you an affiliate marketer? If so, you need to be aware that state governments are enacting legislation that could effectively kill your business. I am greatly concerned about this since I would say 50% or more of my monthly income stems from affiliate sales.

As an affiliate I post links and banner advertisements on my sites to Amazon and various other online companies. I send them traffic and potential sales and when a sale is made, they in turn pay me a commission… anywhere from 4% to 75% depending on the company and product. I get a big fat check every month from Amazon and smaller but still very nice checks form a host of other places. But my profession as an affiliate marketer is under attack in many states and sadly many affiliate marketers just got the axe.

First some background though. Online stores like Amazon, Zappos, or Barnes and Noble are only required by law to collect sales taxes in the states where their company resides. That is their tax “nexus”. If they are based in Idaho for example then they only have to collect sales taxes on purchases made by people in Idaho. Sales from Ohio would fall outside their tax nexus and they would not be required to collect sales taxes on those purchases. For years, states have been looking for a way to to get those taxes and the new economic crisis has given them the incentive to try and do it. Unfortunately for affiliate marketers they have decided to use us as the means to do this.

New York and North Carolina recently passed legislation that identifies affiliate relationships as something similar to an employee relationship. Using this logic North Carolina and New York can now require online companies to collect state sales based on the fact that they have “employees” (affiliates) in those states. Well, these companies are not stupid… they saw that they were being railroaded into a new tax nexus by way of their affiliate relationships and in response they are simply firing their affiliates and avoiding the taxes. They avoid a new tax nexus and affiliate marketers in those states are essentially without a job anymore.

Yesterday Amazon.com fired 1000 affiliates in North Carolina. Termination letters have been sent to affiliates in Hawaii from Zappos, Amazon, Endless and several other smaller merchants. This may very well be the sole source of income for these people and now due to a poorly written law they have no income anymore AND the companies avoid paying the taxes anyway. The affiliates lose, the states lose (the sales taxes AND your income taxes), and the companies go on with business as usual. Half a dozen other states are poised to pass similar legislation.

I am simply horrified that these laws are being passed and I am so sorry for affiliate marketers living in these states. I know several affiliate marketers that live in Hawaii and they can only afford to live their because they work online as affiliate marketers. Local jobs are almost non existent in their areas.

If you make any money from affiliate marketing, if you work online, or if you just hoped to make money affiliate marketing some day then you need to write the legislators behind these awful bills. Affiliates are not employees, they are advertisers. Does contracting with a radio station to buy advertising make them your employee? Heck no! The affiliate marketing profession is being used as a weapon to collect state revenue and we will be the ones hurt.

Talk about it, blog about it… we need to stop this before more states adopt it and affiliate marketing is dealt a death blow.

And now more then ever we should all find ways to diversify our income so that if this law passes in our state it will not leave us without any income.

Visit the Performance Marketing Alliance for details.

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I think all to often we see articles and advice that you can make money blogging but then when moms go out and try it they may  only sew a few dollars trickle in. They get discouraged and they think they have been duped or that it is a matter of luck. Some quit blogging and others continue but are highly dubious of the moms who “claim” to make real money. I know I felt that way at one time. I saw Internet Marketers online claiming to make upwards of 5-10 grand a month and when I managed to squeak by with only $50 after busting my butt behind the screen…I was skeptical.

I am not skeptical any more but I am realistic. Some of the figures floating around are not going to be within the reach of the average blogger. Much of it is about having the right niche at the right time. Much of it is about having the right voice and the right writing style. BUT much of it is still about working hard, finding a unique voice and site, testing and tracking your efforts, and always looking for ways to put your content in front of more and more eyes.

I saw this article online today that addresses a WSJ claim that bloggers who have 100,000 uniques per month make on average $75,000. In my personal opinion that figure is crap. I am sure some do make that much but they must have a super hot niche with hot affiliate products to promote. That just cannot be the “average” IMO. I had 88,000 uniques to just ONE of my sites last month and that would theoretically make me $66,000 richer this month. Yeah… that didn’t happen. If that HAD happened I would be blogging right know from my villa in Tuscany or my condo in Costa Rica.

So how can you gauge the amount of money you can potentially make? Heck if I know!

Well, actually I saw a much better model on Frederic Patenaude’s site a few weeks back. I like Frederic because he makes a very good living online in the raw foods niche. He also does some business to business stuff but mostly I see him promoting health and information products so he is closer to my “niche” than a guy who promotes IM stuff. The IM niche (Internet Marketing) model is not very relevant to me and what I do.

Anyway in his graph, in the video on that page, you see the general figures you can make depending on the size of your list. He claims that if you have 3000 readers you can make about $1500-3000 per month. For 5000 readers the number is $2500-5000 and for 10,000 readers the figure is $5000-10,000.

I really like this chart but that may be because I have had results that mesh with it. My list number and monthly income falls within the second tier and I DO see gains when my reader numbers go up. For me the key is having regular readers and also still having that search engine traffic that comes from relevant, focused, content. Those visitors don’t always subscribe but they DO buy and they do increase ad network revenues.

So overall I find it better to work on building your lists (subscribers) rather than just trying to drum up high traffic numbers. The money is in the list.

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To get around a lack of quality promotion materials or the fact that I am using an indirect affiliate service like Amazon I have started to use my own affiliate banners.  They look good and they are unique to me so my visitors know I REALLY DO like these products. Here are some examples I just started using last month.

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If you want to make money with your blog eventually you will likely consider joining an ad network. They basically act as a broker for advertising and their large reach and network of bloggers makes it easier for them to contract with big name advertisers. You devote a spot on your blog, usually a  top position for their ad code and whenever they sign new advertisers they automatically show up on your blog and you get paid on a CPM basis. The ad network does all the work finding advertisers and collecting the money. This makes it easier for YOU to make money selling ads. But is it always peachy working with ad networks? In one word, NO.

Foe one thing, joining an ad network typically changes the way you blog. Many bloggers start out using full RSS feeds where their readers can read all the content in their feed readers. But no money can be made from ad impressions by doing that so bloggers will usually opt to use summary feeds and make their readers click on over to the actual web site. Readers may get annoyed and they may stop reading. At the very least you may have fewer actual readers since you only have a title and a short summary to catch their attention.

Ad networks may also contract with advertisers you and your audience do not approve of. While most networks allow you to opt out of certain campaigns some can get by you and it is highly embarrassing to have junk food ads displaying on a  healthy eating blog, for instance.

Ad networks are also getting more and more picky about your content. A large network that I use recently added a bunch of new rules for their bloggers. You have to post at least once a week, you cannot review products given to you by a company that are valued at over $40, and you cannot do a company sponsored giveaway of any kind. Another ad network disqualifies any social media traffic, like referrals from Stumbleupon or Digg.

More and more it seems that companies wanting to buy ad space on blogs do not want compete with your other money making ventures. They do not want their ad next to giveaway for another company or a review of another product. They want their ad next to a rant about potty training or your latest garden produce…safe posts that will not detract from their banner ad. Frankly it is getting rather annoying.

The network I mentioned earlier decided that you could do reviews and giveaways if you put them on a page that had none of their ads. This required you to make a custom template and relegate your content to a static page where it would not appear with your other posts or be picked up in your RSS feed.

Thanks to help from the lovely Lynette at Mom Masterminds I was able to create a custom “post” template so that I could post giveaways and sponsored reviews in a special category that would not display ads. It is a great solution for me and allowed me to keep working with this ad network. Otherwise I would have kicked them to the curb for trying to dictate the terms under which I run my business…blogging IS a business for me and the other ways I make money are none of their concern.

So if you are considering joining and ad network look closely at their policies and see if the advantages are truly worth it. And if you do decide that the money is worth the aggravation, join up with Mom Masterminds as they ALWAYS help me find tech solutions when I need them and it is all part of the membership!

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There are two main ways that a site visitor can subscribe to your web site/blog or your “feed”.  They can subscribe by adding it to their feed reader or they can subscribe by email. Both have advantages and disadvantages.

Personally I choose to subscribe to my favorite sites using a feed reader. My personal favorite is the built-in Internet Explorer feed reader. Most of my own readers also subscribe via feed reader. I do have the option though for email subscriptions. Some people like to be notified of new content with an email either daily or weekly. Others, like me, may subscribe to so many RSS feeds that they would be bombarded with emails. I like to read on my own time.

But it is still important to let your visitors choose for themselves. You can allow for email subscriptions through services like Feedburner or FeedBlitz. I chose Aweber to manage my RSS email subscriptions because it allowed for many options that other places didn’t offer and it has ended up being a very savvy way to market to my readers. For one monthly price I can host as many newsletters and feeds as I want so if you have more than one site…Aweber is awesome.

When my readers subscribe via RSS they get an email about once a week with links to all the content for that week. I set it up to look like a newsletter rather than a random group of links so that I can get my affiliate links in front of more eyeballs each week. My main blog has about 1400 email subscribers and this is what they see every week. It matches my web site colors, it links to new and fresh content, and it has affiliate links or text link ads from advertisers. Ever since I switched to this format for email subscribers I have had better retention rates and more sales. Even if MOST people like feed readers it is just silly to let pass an opportunity to email your readers directly on a regular basis.

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When I first started an online business five years ago I imagined that I would profit by selling my own products and by selling advertising on my web sites. I knew that I did not want to offer services like coaching, admin help, or design. I was a VA for while until I decided that it was time to put all the light night hours and effort into my own business, not someone else’s.

I quickly found that selling my own physical products was too demanding of my time. Selling my own info products was hard too because I needed to come up with good ideas and at the time I was short on ideas. What I didn’t “get” was that I didn’t have to come up with the ideas but eventually I did catch on. I decided to try my hand at this affiliate marketing “stuff” I was hearing about. I joined a couple programs and added a few links to my sites. For months I earned nothing and I was just about ready to call it quits on that experiment when I decided to send an email to my small list and include an affiliate link. Immediately I got a few sales. They were really small sales that only brought in about $3 each but it was progress. The best part was that this money was completely passive and this was the biggest perk for me because even securing advertisers was too hands on for me.

I joined other relevant programs, added more links to my sites and slowly but surely I was seeing some money every month. I knew that the niche I had chosen for my web site was severely limiting the type of affiliate programs I could work with though, so I decided to start another web site. This one ended up being my cash cow and right from the start my MAIN objective was to bring in affiliate income.

There was just no need to create my own products when I could sell other people’s products and let them do all the hard work. Of course now I DO have my own products but I am still an affiliate marketer first and foremost.

This week one of the BEST and brightest affiliate marketers on the net has opened a new affiliate marketing membership site called Affiliatenaire. Jimmy knows affiliate marketing and has a reputation for selling thousands of products and memberships in days. Everyone knows that when he sells something it is the gold standard…the real deal. Perhaps they are like me and are also enthralled with his mesmerizing Matthew McConaughey voice, hehe.

I have no doubt that Affiliatenaire will sell out quickly (just like Membernaire did) as he is only offering 1000 spots. The program is an an intensive monthly course on affiliate marketing. You get one lesson each week and if you act on everything he gives, you can start building an affiliate marketing empire in only 2-3 hours a week.

This course would be great for beginners but even better for people who are using affiliate marketing techniques already and want to use some of the tactics the pros do. I plan on doing the full course myself as I have never joined one of Jimmy’s programs or bought one of his reports and NOT learned some amazing new things. The first lesson is over 20 pages long and is really good stuff.

With the economy the way it is I know I am trying to secure as many sources of income as possible. I need to get creative and diversify even more to protect what I have worked so hard to build. Here is to another great year in online business!

Check out Affiliatenaire for yourself…

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You can completely customize what your Youtube landing page looks like with background image, custom, html, and widgets. You can add an avatar, bio, and lots of personal information, including a link to your web site. I spent about 10 minutes on mine just to spruce it up and make the colors match my main site. If people stumble upon your videos through Youtube or search engines you have a chance to sell them on your web site as well. It is an opportunity to market yourself a bit more so why not?

Check out my YouTube Channel.

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Google was my main source of income for a long time and I still make good money every month from them but it always seemed too “up in the air” to me and I did not feel comfy having that be the check that paid all the bills so to speak. I didn’t want my Google earnings to go down I just wanted my other income to go up and top Google…and it did. But I also did take a hit with Google as I sold one huge Adsense site that was earning several hundred a month. I ended up buying a car with the money from the sold site so I guess I can hardly complain about the drop in monthly income. Now though I make consistently more than Google from other affiliate sources like Amazon and Shareasale.

I created my first info product and I am still reeling from the success. Seriously I thought I might sell 20 books in the first month and then maybe 1-2 books each month thereafter. That was my prediction. I am averaging around 25-30 sales every month with some of these recent months being even better earners than the first. I worked for about 4 days straight to get the book done and the site up. That one decision and popularity of the niche I chose has resulted in an extra $300 (est.) in my pocket every month. How cool is that? Imagine if I had a dozen products like this??? Ooooh yeah…2009.

My third goal was to tap into new affiliate streams and programs. I did that as well. I have started getting checks from Commission Junction, Vita-Mix, and a few others.

My fourth goal to double my income has been met as well. At the end of this year I realized that I am now making more annually than I did when I was in advertising and marketing. I also have been making more than my hubby. For 2009 I am hoping to double it again…might as well dream big!

A new goal would be to step up my activity in the celebrity niche. When I started a couple actor fan sites this year just for fun I never imagined how well they would do. I now have 4 of them and I would not mind adding to that number.

2009 will be my lucky year.

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