A discussion of earning with the Best Affiliate Programs, SEO, Wordpress Blogging and General Motivational Ideas for Internet Publishers and Affiliate Marketers.

It’s a sign of troubled economic times. Politicians everywhere around the US are searching high and low for new and innovative sources of taxation to balance their budgets and offset their deficits. While this “innovative legislation” may seem well intentioned, especially when claims of millions of dollars in tax revenues are at stake, the real truth is you can’t just indiscriminately take money from one place and give to another without causing harm to somebody in the middle.

It’s no suprise that several affiliate marketing industry leaders have been blogging about upcoming California Assembly Bill 178 which could have dire consequences for the affiliate marketing industry as well as for internet retailers :

California has a pending bill, copying a similar one in New York, unfairly categorizing publishers as sales presence for out-of-state advertisers. This means taxes will be levied on out-of-state advertisers, potentially causing them to shut down their publisher relationships in the state (it happened in New York).

The Performance Marketing Alliance is leading the fight against this bill which threatens to set precedent for several other states if California allows it to move forward.

Linda Buquet at 5 Star Affiliate Blogs posted an urgent update regarding Bill SF 282 already on the books in the state of Minnesota which has made it to the Senate level with a hearing scheduled for this week. Connecticut, Hawaii and Tennessee also have similar sales tax legislation pending and it would seem logical that other states will not follow far behind in the cash grab.

Last year I was not just taken back, I was completely dumbfounded when I read about the “Amazon Tax” bill that had been proposed in New York. Many called the portion of the tax bill specifically targeting affiliate marketers unconstitutional but it struck me as bizzare that lawmakers could be so reckless :

Specifically, the new law says that a retailer must collect sales tax from residents if any New York-based web site earns referral payments from Amazon (by running ads for Amazon on their web sites, by offering Amazon product referral links, or by being an Amazon affiliate). According to the statute, Amazon would need to collect sales tax on every purchase made by a New York resident through the site, regardless of whether it was bought from a New York-based affiliate.

Take a scenario where an internet user in New York visits a New york based Amazon affiliate’s site, clicks a link to amazon and buys something !!

Could this short sighted legislation potentially set precedent for other states? Unless one of your state representatives has an Amazon Associates account and know how to build landing pages, affiliate marketers everywhere should take notice of this legislation and write your state and local representatives expressing your fear that similar legislation may be on the books in your state. You can find your representatives at house.gov.

Although this subject is no laughing matter, it might leave you with a smirk on your face to know that this legislation was first proposed by former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer who resigned his post after a federal wiretap caught him with a $1000 per hour call girl.

         

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It seems like that for an eternity Feedburner stat counters have adorned blogs far and wide. Many bloggers have blogged about their Feedburner RSS Reader stats, increasing their RSS Reader stats and the value of Feedburner stats. A common philisophy evolved that the higher the number of RSS readers a blog has, the more worthy it is of advertising dollars. I believe this philosophy is archaic and any advertiser who is seeking an indicator of a blog’s strength for advertising purposes should never equate Feedburner RSS reader stats, which are easily gamed, with true “eyes on” traffic. Here’s why I believe this…

Holding Contests to Inflate Feedburner RSS Reader Stats

Countless bloggers have used contests to inflate their RSS reader stats. In the end they are only getting “ghost readers”, not real readers. Maybe you or I would never do it but wherever there is a contest on the internet that requires somebody to do something, there are cheaters trying to manipulate the system. For example : SockPuppet Blog is holding a contest. They are giving a Flip Mino to one lucky winner. All you have to do is subscribe to SockPuppet RSS feed by email. Great… So 15yo Wing Chen, who thinks he’s a genius hacker, uses 100 @mailinator.com disposable email addresses to subscribe to SockPuppet’s feed 100 times. Of course SockPuppet sees Wing Chen is cheating and disqualifies him from the contest but SockPuppet still has 100 new RSS feed readers. Rinse and repeat the contest ad nauseum to end up with thousands of “ghost readers”.

Using Bloglines to Inflate Feedburner RSS Reader Stats

Nothing can inflate Feedburner RSS reader stats faster and wider than being listed in “most popular subscriptions according to Bloglines members” (ask Michael Arrington). Of course, the most popular subscriptions never changes because 9 out of 10 new Bloglines users will choose to auto-subscribe to those featured blogs. Oops, I forgot to mention that Feedburner pulls subscriber count data from Bloglines on a daily basis… As with many online services, Bloglines probably has 10% active users at best, the rest are abandoned accounts or ghost accounts created by people who sign up hundreds of Bloglines accounts so they can sell “100 RSS Subscriber” packs on black hat webmaster forums. An industrious gamer could feasably create 20-30 Bloglines accounts every day using a different proxy and add desired feeds.

Using Feedblitz to Blitzkrieg Feedburner RSS Reader Stats

Feedblitz is a third party service used by Feedburner to agregate RSS reader data. Feedblitz allows readers to subscribe to an RSS feed via email. It’s a very popular service, especially with people who long ago learned to game this system simply by using a “catch all” email address on a domain they own to subscribe hundreds, if not thousands of times with email addresses @ their domain. As soon the subscribers are activated, use a qmail filter to pipe all the Feedblitz emails into /dev/null to make it look like the emails are being read and not bounced. And you were wondering how some of those awful blogs have 600+ RSS subscribers while you only have 16 ?

Should I Game my Feedburner RSS Reader Stats?

No offense to Feedburner, Feedblitz and Bloglines. They are all great services that I use daily and highly recommend to every blogger. They have to leave their systems relatively open for sincere users and the tactics used by people trying to game the system are not harmful to the rest of the users, so it’s a non-issue. At best, gaming Feedburner RSS Reader Stats is a personal, ethical issue that one must deal with for oneself. Which is why I believe that using the number of RSS readers a blog has to gauge it’s effectiveness from an advertising standpoint is ludicrous.

The funniest attempts to game Feedburner stats I’ve ever seen involve bloggers who either replace their Feedburner image with somebody elses or create a fake image that show off their desired count. One blogger even got called out for faking his feedburner image which was quite embarassing and led to the eventual demise of his “super affiliate” blog.

My opinion on gaming stats is “why bother” because in the advertising business, long term relationships are far more important than suckering people into believing you’re something that you’re not. I would rather have happy long term advertisers than an advertiser who feels cheated after the first contract expires and never advertises again.

         

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Social media has become a rising phenomenon in Web2.0 with three main contenders fighting it out for control of an endless stream of internet users. MySpace, FaceBook and Twitter are all reaching for the brass ring but as each evolves around it’s users, a trend is emerging that has the lines between each drawn by generation rather than assimilation.

I’m probably not the first to say that MySpace has been becoming more and more geared towards the teen, pre-teen and tweens. There’s nothing wrong with that. These days, every age group is a target marketing demographic. Outside of band and musician profiles, the only people over the age of twenty spending any significant on MySpace are probably marketing to the demographic. As for being over thirty and on MySpace, that’s just creepy.

FaceBook is MySpace’s older sibling who has grown up and went off to college. When I was in college, away from my family for the first time, I felt so mature and wise but when I look back now I realize how niave I was. I thought I was grown up enough to handle my own life but at the same time I didn’t want to give up my relationship with skateboards, videogames and keg parties at the frat house. That’s how Facebook strikes me. A thin veil of maturity covering a postpubescent explosion of hormones that are constantly at war like little angels and devils on your shoulder telling you what to do.

I have experimented with both MySpace and FaceBook in the past. As an ex-musician, MySpace helped me re-connect with some friends and bandmates from the past but within a few weeks I realized why I’d lost contact with them in the first place. Some thing are better off left remembered - just like my account on MySpace which has laid dormant for two years now. With FaceBook, by the time I managed to get through the grueling signup process, I’d already lost interest - I have no desire to connect with people from college or high school I never really liked in the first place.

When I joined Twitter back in 2007, it was amazing how many people were already embracing it as a revolutionary tool for communication. I remember thinking Twitter was completely useless and Twitter’s public timeline reminded me of a crowded chat room where trying to follow a conversation was nearly impossible. I toyed around with Twitter for a few days and then gave up interest out of boredom. It wasn’t until a year later when I decided to give Twitter another try that I started seeing some possibilities.

One thing I’ve noticed about Twitter is that it is being used by an overwhelming number of professionals who are old enough to be the parents or even grandparents of their MySpace and FaceBook counterparts. Could it be that Twitter is intentionally tapping into a more mature demographic or is the demographic embracing Twitter as a means for communication? I believe it’s the latter. I’ll explain why.

Twitter’s obvious appeal to professionals lies in the ability to control incoming information streams by following key people in specific industries. While Twitter might not be useful for for somebody like Joe the Plumber’s information gathering needs, it is extremely useful for bloggers, journalists, writers, news media and many other industries who currently rely on feed readers to stay informed. Twitter taps them into a continual stream where they can pan for gold. For knowledgable prospectors, Twitter is a goldmine that never stops producing.

It’s not about how many people are following you, it’s about how many “quality” people you are following. If done properly you can refine Twitter content streams into your own personal two-way information system where you are taking in information while disseminating and aggregating information of your own to interested parties. If you take Seth Godin’s concept of Permission Marketing from the whiteboard into reality, Twitter is rapidly becoming the ultimate tool to build the type of relationships Seth advocates with others while over time winning their permission to market directly to them.

I think this is why Twitter appeals to me more than MySpace or FaceBook and I’m sure many other professional adults who have been searching for a relatively spam free information system where you can control everything from your exposure to the community, interaction with the community and most importantly, input from the community.

         

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The message came across my Twitter a few minutes ago from Convert2Media that they would be cutting referral commissions down to 2% and there was more information avaiable at the official Convert2Media blog.

Ruck says…

In the specific case of Convert2Media while it may not sit well with you now, after the changes that are made in the near future we know it will make 99% of the publisher base happy. Knowing you cannot satisfy everyone in this business calls for a set of balls some dont seem to have when making decisions. The ramifications of bad press from people who do not work with Convert2Media is meaningless. I’ve never been one to give a shit what others thought. If I did, I probably would have never came online in the first place.

See the full post here. As usual, there’s several tidbits of information in Ruck’s lengthy post that all affiliate marketers should be aware particularly issues regarding affiliate networks and referring other marketers as a source of residual earnings. Even though the latter is one of my staples, the reduction to 2% doesn’t bother me in the least bit considering half of the programs I’ve referred people into pay squat for the efforts.

I’ve only recently joined Convert2Media and haven’t run any significant campaigns through them but I like what I see already and it’s not just because they’re an hour away from me in Central Florida.

If you haven’t joined Convert2Media and checked out what they have to offer :

         

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