He makes a good point, most bloggers won’t go back and delete the Amazon links. They’ll likely refer uncompensated business for years… this is just another form of corporate theft from big business that’s able to “get away” with shafting the little guy.

I agree with Amazon that states shouldn’t tax these transactions… or any sales from brick and mortar businesses. If state’s taxed land values, that would be the fairest method (click here and read the paragraph “a really efficient tax system”)

Dear Jeff–

Thank you for your letter today, informing me that after seven years of being one of your affiliates — and having earned for you about $150,000 in that time — that you “deeply regret” unilaterally terminating my contract with Amazon to be an affiliate. I also especially appreciated the part where you reassured me that this action wouldn’t affect my ability to keep buying from your company. Nice touch.

I deeply appreciate that after so many years of supporting your company, and earning my 4.5% cut over those years (as I figured today, looking at my stats), that you’ve decided that I should be a pawn in your fight with my state. That type of loyalty really makes me want to support you in the future, should you restore your program. It also encourages me to want to continue shopping with you

Click here to continue reading at Daggle…

 
Replete with established news logos and official-sounding names such as “News 6 News Alerts,” the sites tout independent investigations of “miracle” acai berry supplements, claiming that they cause major weight loss in a short period of time with no diet or exercise.

“Almost everything about these sites is fake,” David Vladeck, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement. “The weight loss results, the so-called investigations, the reporters, the consumer testimonials, and the attempt to portray an objective, journalistic endeavor.”

A newly instituted consumer alert cautions potential buyers, “As a rule, legitimate news organizations do not endorse products.”

See it all at Business Insider

You can see one of the “fake pages” below (if you haven’t seen them 100 times already)…

As Dan Frommer notes:

In theory, the law was supposed to benefit mom-and-pop local businesses, who may be threatened by ecommerce sites like Amazon. But as Amazon points out, in reality, the law benefiting the national big-box retailers who are most threatened by Amazon — most of which aren’t even based in Illinois. And now it’s hurting mom-and-pop web publishers.

Of course, this is part of Illinois’ attempt to save itself from bankruptcy and they’ve increased taxes and cut spending across the board.

In some ways, this hurts the smallest entrepreneurs who may be using Amazon to make a few hundred extra dollars per month to keep them afloat but who now have to scramble for new resources.

Note: If you’ve been “Amazon slapped” check out this strategy for making money online with digital products http://goo.gl/s238w (affiliate link).

As I said yesterday in the post about making $100 per day on Hub Pages, if you follow the success principles enunciated in these Hub success stories and then add some VERY basic article marketing strategies, I believe you could EASILY DOUBLE what these folks are doing!

Why would you wait for months and months to earn money on Hub Pages when some simple strategies could help you earn money much sooner?

Anyway, here’s what I’ve found since 12/16/2010 on Hub Pages.

1. Follow ALL their rules.

2. No more than 2 affiliate links per hub.

3. No duplicate content.

4. Link to other pages on Hub Pages in each hub.

5. Write quality content without spamming.

6. Do your keyword research up front so you know what keywords you can rank for!

7. Be patient it can take a bit for search engine traffic to appear but Hub Page traffic can get you affiliate product sales.

8. Do whatever you need to keep your user score above 75 (then all your links outside Hub Pages will be “do follow” links)

Before the “recession” (depression?) I had a nice little Clickbank check coming in from basically one particular product.

It was an offline business opportunity the recession killed but while it lasted, I was getting a nice little paycheck every 2 weeks from Clickbank.

I did some decent search engine optimization for one particular keyword term related to the product AND I offered a bonus I’d created so people would buy through my link. I didn’t get rich off it, but when the recession sent that check check crashing to the ground, it was enough that my wife asked me… “Hey, what happened to those checks?”

Now I’m trying to rebuild that income stream from another product but I’m bummed out about having to make another BONUS offer.

Here’s a way around that I just discovered that you might want to consider.

I’m sure you’ve seen gurus offering “bonuses” and you wondered how you could emulate them without lots of programming knowledge to make that work for you?

Here’s how:

If you’re an affiliate for a Clickbank product, you know you could find yourself competing with literally as many as 100,000 OTHER affiliates selling the very same product.

How do you differentiate yourself?

As I said, I’ve done that through a laborious process of offering free consulting or some little information packages that I had to send out manually after verifying the sale… a hassle but I did what I needed to do to make a sale.

The problem is finding a suitable BONUS and a way to AUTOMATE DELIVERY after the sale.

If you can do it yourself, the only question is how to automate delivery. But if you don’t have a “Freebie” to give… what do you do?

I just found an inexpensive service that , along with lots of other great tools, offers you up to 93 digital products you can offer instantly as a bonus to purchase a Clickbank product from you! You can see all 93 of them here. Just click through and scroll down to the link!

Whether you’re selling a health and fitness, home and garden, parenting, self-help, publishing, internet marketing or other popular topic, you’ve got a wide variety of “bonuses” to give you a competitive advantage. And then if you come up with your own bonus later, you can use this same system for your own bonuses.

What I like about the guys here is that instead of selling you more worthless information, they are giving you tools to make money with.

I think it’s also amazing how they let you test the system for free so you can see just how simply it works.

One of the “pains” of the Clickbank platform is that it does not automatically notify affiliates when they make a sale (they notify the product owner but not you).  With this Bonus manager, you’re emailed whenever you make a sale and the bonus is downloaded.  To me, there is nothing more motivating than to get emails saying “you’ve made another affiliate sale”! That makes me work even harder to get those sales coming in!

Last but not least, this Bonus Manager works for as many Clickbank campaigns as you can dream up.  Once you do it gives you a cloaked affiliate link to protect your commissions and guarantee the bonus is properly delivered to your customer!

Awesome! Anyway check it out for yourself. It’s quite thought provoking about what you can accomplish with Clickbank…

Check out how to add bonuses to your Clickbank Affiliate sales! (affiliate link)

My main negative about “Easy Paycheck Formula” is the word “Easy” in the title. The word “easy” has about a million possible meanings to people. What makes something “easy”?

Compared to catching a speeding bullet with your teeth and not getting killed in the process, everything Sara talks about IS incredibly easy.
But I know that for most people writing anything for the internet is difficult. I love to write but I know that while following her instructions isn’t difficult, costs no “out of pocket” expense to apply the information, and doesn’t require you to climb Mount Everest in a swim suit – some of the things Sara talks about require sheer effort and the will to persist.

Whether you’re totally new to making money online or have some experience under your belt you’ll appreciate:

1. Learning how to craft and implement online marketing campaigns in an hour or less
2. How to accomplish your income goals using free resources like HubPages (that also keeps money in your pocket)
3. It’s ok if you’re just starting from ZERO. Easy Paycheck Formula does not require any technical or internet marketing experience, no lists involved or joint venture (JV) partners to recruit, and best of all you do not have to supply your own product
4. You can see some fairly quick results (i.e. within a week or two, sometimes days though) that encourage you to keep doing more… this creates a “snowball effect”.
5. I’ve never received any complaints that Sara leaves out any important detail. Everything is offered in a step by step fashion.
6. She shows you how she used free traffic methods to ear $100 per day or more from just one project… pretty awesome.
7. She shows you how to pick the right keywords to identify a  buyer.
8. She shows you how to create a “landing page” that “sells”.
9. How to turn an article you write in an hour or less into long term income month after month.

As with any information product of this type, you should be ready to “just add hard work”.  That’s where most people fail I think – giving up too soon.

Here’s what one of her students said:

“I recently took Sara Young’s class and was very impressed with it. I have to admit it took me a little to get the hang of it, but only because Affiliate Marketing was completely foreign to me.

I was a little nervous at first because I am not a writer, but it didn’t make. Sara showed me the most important things to include in my articles, which made it very easy to write.

I absolutely loved the fact that I could go at my own pace. In fact, my family and I went on vacation right in the middle of the classes, then the Holidays hit, and then I had an unexpected death in the family, so I couldn’t always work on the lessons when they were posted. I took a little time off then picked right back up where I left off and still completed the classes with in a three month period.

Best of all I made my first 4 sales before I even got to lesson 8.”

– Kim Schmidt

Likewise, here are some videos about Sara Young’s “Easy Paycheck Formula”:

Want to know more? Check out Sara Young’s “Easy Paycheck Formula”. There’s a money back guarantee if you’re not delighted!

Illinois Affiliate Marketers: Time to Contact the Governor

States with imploding budgets want to raise all kinds of taxes to make up for years of thoughtless spending. One tax the want to impose internet sales has, in the past, made Amazon.com and other online retailers leave affiliates residing in that state “high and dry” without a business.

If Illinois passes this new onerous legislation and you’re making your living from Amazon.com or other retailer without local outlets in the state, then this law could gut your online income.

(It is, by the way, another reason for supporting a Land Value Tax? )

Here are the details:

We have just been advised that Governor Quinn will likely not sign or veto this section of the bill until after next week. We now have time to educate him on the devastating impact this will have on affiliate marketers.

If you are an Illinois affiliate marketer, please take a few minutes to call, email, fax or write Governor Quinn. If you call, you’ll most likely just leave a voice mail. They count those!

Here are some talking points:

My name is [ ], I am an affiliate marketer in [town], and if Amendment 3 of HB 3659 passes, my business will be devastated. I’m a small business owner, I run a website and earn revenue from advertising. Out of state merchants will terminate my advertising partnerships to avoid nexus. Overstock and Amazon already sent termination letters to their Illinois affiliates. The state won’t gain any sales tax from this law, and I’ll be put out of business in the process. There are 9,000 affiliate marketers in Illinois just like me. Please VETO Senate Amendment 3 of HB 3659 (see Line 22 through 25, Sec. 1.1 on page 9.

You can reach him here:

Honorable Patrick Quinn, Governor

Office of the Governor
207 State Capitol Building
Springfield, IL 62706

Email: governor@illinois.gov
Fax: 217-558-0898
Telephone: 217-782-6830

So how do you get started?

I was able to start with only a basic website, without a “mailing list”… and even really without a “clue” but still managed to make enough money to realize… “this is great!”

Now you could do the same!

Dave Lovelace who always puts together good products has done a great job telling folks how to get started.

Here’s what he shows you how to do with a 26 minute in depth video…

He lets you in on how he went about making $845.62 in just 48 hours STARTING FROM SCRATCH!

He did it (and I think you could too) with NO list, no “affiliates” and none of the “usual” methods!

He’ll even show you a “secret” website that helped him pull it all off.

Check it out here: 48 Hour Cash Secret … and it’s only $9.95!

Note: This is an affiliate product!

Think again!

This is a pretty amazing article by a person who claims to have made $1 million per month from a well known affiliate program.  And that’s when his life started getting STRANGE!

How much is true?

I have no way to know – neither do you really.

But let’s just say that parts of it have the ring of truth.

If something weren’t true… then why dream up a lawsuit?

My point is the strange things that started happening when people heard he was making that vaunted $1M per month!

I think you’ll at least read it and say “OK, I’m good with $900K per month!”

This awesome tool allows you to dominate niches and get paid well, it’s called “Clickbank Engine”

Best of all it has a FREE 15 Day membership and a PRO membership… with the PRO membership costing only $39.95 PER YEAR.

What does it do?

It allows you to find high profit, low competition niches with relatively inexpensive and “fast” mini sites so you’re not constantly in an “SEO” war with the heavy hitters.

This tool is being used by full time affiliate marketers to stop beating themselves in the head and start making some money. Will it work for everyone? Nothing does so probably this won’t either, but it’s unique enough I wanted you to see it for yourself! As familiar as I am with Clickbank, I’d never seen this awesome tool before!

Here’s why I LOVE Clickbank and why I’m using Clickbank Engine myself.

In the past, I’ve been able to find particular Clickbank products that have sold really well. Each has had it’s “lifespan” but when I find one of these, it tends to keep on producing revenue month after month.

When I can zero in on one of these niches that produces $500 or more per month, it’s cool to come home and see that extra check sitting in the stack of mail. Now some affiliates may earn lots more, but with simple little pages bringing in an extra $500 per month, I’ve been very satisfied.

But now I want to find several of these little niches and try to do even better.

Clickbank only deals with only 2 things ever electronic products and money… they pay on time, every time. When you build up a sales system with Clickbank, it means you have checks coming to your house every 2 weeks like clockwork and with no hassles of handling money, refunds, no products to stock, no trips to the Post Office, etc. … that’s all take care of for you.

Recently the recession hit the product I was selling so well. My wife even said “Hey, where are those Clickbank checks?”

So now it’s time to get back to work and this is the tool I plan to use: Clickbank Engine.

I’d like to find 5 to 10 simple sales systems for profitable clickbank products in low competition areas and see if I can start turning out checks that are even bigger so my wife stops wondering where the Clickbank Checks are!

Note: Clickbank Engine is an affiliate link. Clickbank Engine is a product finder and analysis tool, not a quick fix. It’s use does not guarantee results. To make this work properly you must at least know the basics of creating simple blogs and websites. No results are guaranteed, but this is an extremely valuable tool in my experience.