Bill McRea

As an affiliate marketer, there is little doubt that you have heard about the affiliate (Amazon) tax situation that is having a major impact on affiliate marketers in certain states in the United States. I will say at the outset that this is a huge issue with many ramifications. In this article my goal is to lay out the “Amazon tax,” issue, how it effects you, and share some practical steps that you can take to protect your income as an affiliate marketing professional.

Q: What is the “Amazon tax,” issue about?

A: The affiliate or “Amazon tax,” issue is about collecting Internet sales taxes on goods and services sold over the Internet.

Currently, retail businesses are required to collect sales tax on the sale of their products in states where they have a physical presence, (“nexus”) such as a retail store, a warehouse, or an employee working in that particular state. When you buy an item online that is taxable, but it’s from a retailer located in another state which is not collecting the sales tax at the time of the transaction, you are required to report that transaction and pay the tax all at once each year when you file your state taxes.

The challenge that states are facing from a revenue collection standpoint is that less than 1% of consumers report their purchases and pay the state tax. This represents billions of dollars in lost revenues to the affected states. The “Amazon tax,” represents the states diligent efforts to collect those taxes by trying to require merchants to collect it for them.

Q: Isn’t it against federal law to require one state to collect taxes for another state?

A: Federal judges in states such as Colorado, where an “Amazon tax” law was struck down, call it a “burden on interstate commerce,” to try to force businesses in one state to collect sales taxes in another state.

Q:  What is an “Advertising nexus?”

A: Some states have passed “Advertising nexus” laws, in order to make it easier to collect sales taxes. These laws assert that affiliate programs represent a “nexus,” and that if a merchant in one state pays an affiliate in another state for advertising their products, then that person becomes an “agent” of that company, thus establishing a local nexus for that company in that state.

As a workaround for the slippery nexus issue, a few companies have ended their affiliate relationships with publishers (affiliates) in states which have passed these “Advertising nexus” laws.

Q: How is this issue affecting affiliate marketers?

A: Some affiliate marketers in states with “advertising nexus” laws have lost most if not all of their affiliate income when companies severed their affiliate agreements.

Q:  What is the solution for affiliates who live in affected states?

A: The solution is as complex and changeable as the issue itself, therefore, affiliates should consult with their attorneys and tax professionals to help them to come up with the best solution to solve the problem. You will not be required to move away if you are living in an affected state, but consulting with your attorney and tax professional will help you to protect your affiliate income.

For more information about affiliate marketing and growing your online business, visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog where you will discover how you can leverage the power of the Internet to gain more exposure and reach more customers today.

Affiliate marketing and niche marketing are two separate and distinct business models for making money online. Because there are some similarities between the two models, there may be some confusion about the specifics, so we are going to explore each online business model and explain how each one works and how you make money.

What is niche marketing?

Niche marketing is all about targeting a very specific segment of a larger market, finding out exactly what they want and need and offering it to them.

When you are marketing to a specific niche you want to get some insight into exactly what these buyers want and specialize in that. An example of a major market might be candy. There are hundreds of different kinds of candy available. A niche market within the candy market would be fine chocolates. Your buyers who are looking for the very best fine chocolates are not going to be the same buyers that will be looking for gummy bears, or jaw breakers.

You might set up a website with content focused on the various different varieties of fine chocolates, the countries where it comes from and reviews of the different brands of chocolate. Searchers looking for information about fine chocolates would land on your site, read your reviews and maybe click on the ads you have on your site or maybe they click on an affiliate link that pays you a commission if the visitor actually makes a purchase.

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketers basically drive traffic to a specially coded affiliate link for a product or service that is owned by a merchant. If any of the people who clicked on your affiliate link make a purchase, you earn a commission paid by the merchant once per month.

Affiliate marketers select the products that they want to market, and they create blogs where they can pre-sell the product, add sometimes add value by kicking in a unique bonus that can’t be found anywhere else. In this way, affiliate marketers create relationships with their buyers so that they come to trust them over time and become repeat buyers.

As an affiliate marketer you don’t have to collect payments, you don’t even have to deliver the products you have pre-sold, you don’t have to deal with customer complaints or support. Once you get your affiliate sites up and running, they can operate largely on auto-pilot. All you have to do is send targeted traffic to your sites and you will start generating sales if the offer is appealing.

If you want to get started making money online, but you don’t have a merchant account, you don’t have a product of your own, and you don’t have a lot of money to develop an ecommerce site, affiliate marketing is a good way to delve into the world of making money online.

So, with niche marketing you are focusing in on a defined segment of a market and catering to their specific needs. Affiliate marketing is a broader approach where you might be marketing several different kinds of products.

But niche marketing and affiliate marketing are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the various ways that you can make money online. Visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog, where you will find lots of information about how to build and grow your business online.

Freelancing is one of the quickest ways to start making money online. If you have a particular skill that is marketable and in demand, you can start making money by consulting with other businesses on a freelance basis. You can become a freelancer using many skills including photography, graphic design, programming, writing, web design and more. Another proven way to make money online that is inexpensive to get started with is affiliate marketing. Let’s compare and contrast these two money making methods and see which one might work for you.

Freelancing

To get started as a freelancer, all you really need is to be proficient enough at your chosen skill that clients will want you to work for them, and you need a website to market your services. When you set up your website you’ll want to include a portfolio of samples of work that you have done for other clients along with testimonials from satisfied clients.

One of the benefits of freelancing is that you get to choose the clients that you want to work with. You choose your projects, you do them and then you get paid right away.

One of the down sides of freelancing is that you are basically trading dollars for hours. You are only making money when you are doing the work. You complete the work, deliver it and get paid once for it. Then you must find more clients to work for.

Freelancing is appealing because you can do it from anywhere you have an Internet connection, and it’s flexible enough to fit in with the busy lifestyle of people who work from home.

affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketers make money by referring buyers to product vendors. They generate traffic and build relationships with prospective buyers and then pre-sell them on the merits of a particular product. If the visitor clicks on a special affiliate link and purchases the product, the affiliate marketer earns a commission that represents a percentage of the product’s sales price.

Affiliate marketing takes time to set up a blog or a website and to start generating traffic. You can focus on using free methods to generate traffic that take time, or spend money to purchase PPC (pay per click) traffic that kicks in right away.

With affiliate marketing once you get your sites set up and generating traffic it can become a passive income stream, but until you star generating sales, there is no money coming in.

In comparing the two ways of making money online, with freelancing you’ve got a way to get started quickly and a way to make money quickly. With affiliate marketing it takes time to get your sites set up and get the traffic flowing before you will start making money, however, the potential for making more money is greater with affiliate marketing because of the fact that you can keep setting up more and more affiliate sites, which will continue to build on your income streams.

Freelancing and affiliate marketing are just two of the many different business models when it comes to making money online. Visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog to discover more about Internet marketing today.

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How the FTC is Impacting internet Marketing in a Very Good Way

From the beginnings of ecommerce on the Internet when it could have been compared to the wild, wild west because it was a brand-new medium that people were experimenting with, there was lots of money to be made, but there were also a lot of people who got scammed because of unscrupulous marketers.

In 2009, the FTC released new guidelines that will impact the Internet marketing industry in a positive way because they force marketers to disclose the nature of their relationship with product vendors, and they force marketers to substantiate the claims that they make about product and services that they offer for sale to the public.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has issued newly revised guidelines designed to protect businesses and consumers while maintaining the credibility of the Internet as a medium of commerce. The basic premise of these guidelines is: “Advertising must tell the truth and not mislead consumers. In addition, claims must be substantiated.”

Also, if you talk about the merits of a product or service, and you stand to gain something you are required to disclose the nature of the relationship. So, if you are an affiliate marketer sharing reviews of a product that you stand to earn a commission on if visitors purchase is, you must issue a disclaimer informing them of this material relationship.

Testimonials

If you include testimonials on your website where consumers talk about their experience with a particular product or service you must clearly disclose the actual results, the typical results that someone could expect to gain from using the product or service. The new guidelines state that, “advertisements that feature a consumer and convey his or her experience with a product or service as typical when that is not the case will be required to clearly disclose the results that consumers can generally expect.”

Review copies

If you have received free or discounted products or services from a vendor and you publish a review of it, you are required to disclose how that the product was provided to you.

The new FTC guidelines impact Internet marketing in a good way because it levels the playing field for those marketers who operate their businesses with integrity, but who were fighting a losing battle against those companies that were getting away with publishing inflated, non-typical results which were misleading the public and causing them to make a lot of money by using false claims.

If you are not using deceptive practices in your marketing then there is really nothing for you to be concerned about. These new guidelines will help to keep everyone honest and keep consumers informed.

These new guidelines also seek to protect consumer’s privacy online, require more robust disclosure about business opportunities along with several other issues related to consumer protection. If you are a blogger or an online business person you might want to familiarize yourself with the new guidelines so that you can be sure that your blogs and websites are in compliance.

The new FTC guidelines is just one of the many issues that affect online business owners. For all of the best information about growing your business online, visit http://mcreasite.com/blog.

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Affiliate bloggers know the power of WordPress for creating and managing their blogs, and affiliate marketers know the challenges of dealing with issues such as ad blindness when trying to find ways to capture visitors attention and click where you want them to click. Well, UContext is a contextual advertising program that uses the keywords on Your blog and transforms them into text links to ClickBank products.

With other contextual advertising programs you might earn a few cents when visitors click on the ads on your site, so why not set up ucontext and earn $15. and more when your visitors click on your links and make a purchase.

With Ucontext you get to decide how many links are created and what the links will look like on your blog. If your visitors have been suffering from ad blindness and ignoring the banner ads on your site, these in-text links will get clicked because they are a part of the content that the visitor is reading.

If you’ve had your blog for a long time and have lots of old post moldering away in the archives, this is an efficient way to monetize them and have them generate some revenue for you.

Ucontext saves you time because now you no longer have to go digging through the vast selection of ClickBank products to find those that match your blog’s keywords. Now once you have the plugin installed, when you publish a post, the software automatically creates text links that fit right in with your website’s content.

Concerned about links appearing where you don’t want them? Here’s the level of control that you will have with Ucontext:

• Filters: Refine what Clickbank products are shown by gravity, commissions, etc.
• Choose how many links show on a page
• Add your own Tracking ID’s
• Click Reports: Find out what pages and keyword phrases are getting the most clicks and when
• You can exclude specific pages from receiving in-text links

How to set up ucontext

Setting up the ucontext contextual ad links on your site is as simple as downloading and installing a plugin, which is available for WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. There is also a PHP library for those who want to create their own customizations.

While the plugin is free, membership to Ucontext and use of the API is billed on a recurring monthly basis, which can be cancelled at any time. Price points for membership range from an annual membership for either one website, the Pro level with five sites, and the Unlimited option for an unlimited number of websites.

Earn a referral income

Another way to generate revenues with Ucontext is through their affiliate program, which pays you a 20% commission at the first level and 5% at the second level.

With Ucontext you’ve got a cure for ad blindness, a fast and easy way to add highly lucrative contextual advertising links to monetize your website’s content and an easy to use plugin that makes it all very simple.

Alternative contextual advertising such as Ucontext is just one of the many topics that you will learn about when you visit, http://www.mcreasite.com/blog. Come check out the blog and discover lots of tips and strategies for Internet marketing success.

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