Let’s be frank. Amazon sales tax is coming to most states in the U.S. It could happen this year or in a couple of years. With states being broke, affiliates are the easiest targets to go after. If all or most states implement these rules, Amazon won’t have too many affiliates left in the U.S. The Street has put together a map that demonstrates the state of these battles

Credit: thestreet.com

Even if your state is not listed as being close to passing laws against affiliates, you should not assume things. Jeff Bezos certainly is not willing to concede:

In the U.S., the Constitution prohibits states from interfering in interstate commerce, and there was a Supreme Court case decades ago that clarified that mail-order companies, because the Internet didn’t exist then, would not be required to collect sales tax in states where they didn’t have what’s called a nexus

Amazon affiliates should probably diversify and invest their efforts into other channels to make sure they don’t go out of business once the states turn against affiliates.

Amazon is one of the best affiliate companies to work with if you intend to bring a deal affiliate site online. Deal and coupons sites can be quite effective if you work hard and do your research to only offer your customers the best deals around. If you intend to add Amazon products to your website, having a decent price tracker for that site would be helpful. Amazon does change its prices from time to time, so you want to make sure you offer your visitors the best Amazon deals possible.

These 4 Amazon price trackers can be quite handy:

Camel Camel Camel: a powerful tool that can save you a lot of time digging up Amazon deals. It keeps you on top of Amazon price drops. Its browser extensions are nice. You can import your wish-lists too.

My Price Track: allows you to subscribe to wishlists, registry lists, and listmania. It also keeps you up to date with price changes at Amazon.

The Tracktor: keeps track of changes in new and used products. It has a price history chart to help you keep up with changes more effectively.

Chintzee: want to keep track of the price for an individual product or two? Maybe you have a short list of top converting products you want to keep an eye on. This tool has you covered.

With all the tools available for affiliates today, there is no excuse for not posting the best deals to your deal site on a consistent basis.

A lot of affiliates are now starting to understand the power of WordPress when it comes to developing affiliate portals to make money online. A few years ago, people used to use those good old HTML based websites to get their affiliate landing pages up and running. But with the power of WordPress, you can manage huge portals easily without sweating a break. Best of all, WordPress is for free, so you’ve really got nothing to lose by using WordPress for your affiliate websites. Just make sure you choose a good theme to keep things looking as professional as possible.

If you are looking for a cool affiliate theme for WordPress that not only is well-designed but it gives you the chance to make more sales everyday, here are 12 affiliate WordPress themes you should consider:

CouponPress: promoting coupons is where most newbie affiliates get started with their career. CouponPress allows you to start your very own coupon site fast.

Instant Q&A: Q/A sites can be quite awesome for promoting affiliate products. Of course, you will need original content to make your Q/A site work. But thanks to this theme, you won’t have to spend too much time tweaking your design.

StudioPress: a powerful platform that can be used to create affiliate landing pages, portals, blogs, and everything in between. Once you get a handle for all its bells and whistles, the sky’s the limit.

Affiliate Theme: the ultimate theme for affiliate marketers. If you are looking to start your review site or just manage your landing pages, Affiliate Theme comes in very handy.

eShop: many affiliate marketers make money by selling products from Amazon and eBay. If you happen to be in that group, you are going to find eShop for WordPress pretty useful. Makes it easy to create a store around affiliate products.

Kidz Store: another attractive e-shop WordPress theme that you can use to sell affiliate products. You can even build your own store and mix it up with your affiliate products. The choice is yours.

Classipress: a powerful classified listing theme for affiliate marketers. While you can use this theme to create a fully-fledged classified website, you can also build a killer affiliate portal. Just be creative!

Thesis: Thesis is one of the most flexible themes ever made for WordPress. Whether you are a blogger or an affiliate marketer, you’ve got a lot to work with Thesis WP Theme.

WordPress Review Theme: one of the most flexible affiliate marketing themes for WordPress. You can easily create your review sites fast with this theme.

AffiliatePre$$: a free affiliate marketing WordPress themes that lets you go live with your affiliate website fast. It has a dark look and feel to it but it’s highly customizable.

Classified Theme: a great way to add products from Amazon, eBay, and more and start making money online. You can also charge others for adding products to your pages.

Market Theme: a very good looking application for those hoping to sell products through their mini affiliate store. You can sell your very own products using this too.

Starting an affiliate website used to cost a lot of money and take a lot of time. But no more. With the above themes, you have all the ammunition you need to take your affiliate business to the next level.

Amazon Associates program is one of the most popular affiliate programs. If you are not using Amazon products to make some revenue for your business, you are leaving money on the table. Maybe you have linked to Amazon products in the past on your website but did not bother to include your affiliate tag. Changing all those links to affiliate links can be a hassle. Not if you use Amazon Affiliate Link Localizer. It’s an awesome plugin that adds your affiliate tag to all your Amazon links. It even covers Amazon’s international websites.

This plugin is very easy to work with. All you have to do is provide it with your associates accounts’ information. It will go through your links and add your affiliate tags to them. You don’t have to change your code or write a single line to get this to work.

Amazon Affiliate Link Localizer won’t guarantee you a whole lot of money. But it can save you a lot of time adding your own affiliate links to your website. It won’t slow down your website (unless you have a ton of links), so it’s well worth a look.

I am a big fan of being transparent with my readers. The more they know about my relationships with certain merchants, the more likely they are to make the best decisions for them. There is a difference between being transparent and naive. You certainly do not want to share your affiliate links with spammers and black-hat affiliates. That’s why masking your affiliate URL is a must do (helps with tracking too). There are plenty of expensive paid scripts that can help affiliates mask their URLs, but if you are using WordPress, all you will need is Redirection plugin.

Redirection Plugin creates your own URL shortener on your own domain. It lets you choose the type of redirect you want to use for each URL. Its most powerful feature is regular expressions. Thanks to this feature, you can pass all kinds of URLs to this plugin and have it do the redirecting without you having to enter a ton of URLs by hand.

Take a look at the above screen-short. Let’s say you work with Buy.com, and you want to create and mask your Buy.com URLs without entering them into your system one by one. The above URL structure lets you pass /x/{buy.com URL} to Redirection and have it take care of the rest for you.

If you are an expert in regular expressions, you can pull of all kinds of sophisticated tricks with Redirection. You don’t have to spend a penny to get the job done. What’s not to like?

© Jenny Rollo

It still surprised me to see affiliate websites that link directly to merchants’ websites without any masking. Many affiliates want to be as transparent as possible with their audience. There is nothing wrong with that. But using the links you get from merchants in your articles and posts is not very smart. It could expose you to risks down the road and waste your time in the process. Using a URL shortener can help you save some time and effort and get more out of each affiliate links.

If you have been using regular affiliate links (unmasked) on your website, here are 5 reasons you should go with a URL shortener:

• Protect your commissions: there are plenty of people who will steal your content and change your links to steal your commission. There are many other ways people can go about stealing your content and substitute your affiliate ID with theirs. By using your own URL shortener, you make life more difficult for them.
• Track Your Results: using a plugin such as Redirection not only lets you hide your affiliate links, it also helps you figure out how many people have clicked on your links. That way, you have one more way to compare your results with those of merchants.
• Save time changing links: merchants move from one network to another every few years. Just because your merchant is with Linkshare today does not mean that it will stay with that company forever. Using a URL shortener saves you time when you need to change your existing affiliate links. Changing your affiliate links one by one by hand is not the best way to use your time.
• Protect Your Business: so you spend a lot of time testing and finding merchants that are worth working with. You test different landing pages and find the one that converts the best. You don’t want people to just come in and steal your hard work. Using a URL shortener won’t prevent that from happening but it makes it harder for people to just hijack your high converting links (as you hide the ID).
• Do some testing: many merchants offer multiple landing pages for their offers. As an affiliate, it’s your job to test those landing pages to find the one that converts the best. With a URL shortener, that’s easy to do.

Having your own branded URL shortener can not only be handy on Twitter, but it can help your affiliate business too. If you feel using a shortener is not transparent enough for your visitors, you can always add a disclosure note to your pages. The benefits of using these solutions far outweigh their disadvantages.

I am a big fan of spying on what other affiliates are doing to push certain products. No one has the “perfect” strategy, but there are things we all can learn by looking at other people’s work. There are lots of tools that let you spy on your competitors but not too many of them bring everything together under one interface. As an affiliate, you do not want to just pay attention to others’ PPC campaigns. Their SEO campaigns, keywords, and everything else matter too. That’s where iSpionage comes into play. It lets people spy on their competitors’ SEO and PPC campaigns and gather some valuable data for further analysis.

iSpionage brings it all together. All you have to do is enter a keyword or a website and the tool will go to work for you. It grabs all kinds of information based on your input. If you enter a keyword, the tool will show you the SEO and PPC players for that keyword. It also shows the ads that are running for that keyword.

iSpionage provides you with SEO ranking information and link information for your competitors too. Just by looking at some of this data, you can come up with all kinds of ideas for your own campaigns. Of course, you can export them all and do a more complete analysis on it all.

At the end of the day, iSpionage is just a tool. The data you get from this tool won’t matter unless you do something with it. Nevertheless, it’s nice to have a tool that brings SEO and PPC data together.

Affiliate marketing is more than just playing with your landing pages and finding the right offers. Sure. Finding products that people can actually buy and get value from is a part of the process. But you want to make sure people can get to your landing pages and get connected with what you are trying to convey. That’s why you need to invest in a premium keyword research tool to help you with your affiliate campaigns.

You can always get away with using free keyword tools when you are starting, but if you want to expand your business, you are going to need the right tools. With that in mind, here are top 5 best affiliate keyword tools that can help you take your campaign to the next level:

Keyword Country: The ultimate tool for affiliate marketers that often goes unnoticed. It’s used by both Adwords and Adsense experts. Great way to put the right foot forward in a new niche. It can help you discover new markets too.

Keyword Spy: one of the most powerful keyword spying tools on the market. Whether you are interested in spying on your competitors or just want to figure out what markets can be lucrative for you to enter, Keyword Spy comes handy.

SpyFu: another one of those top spying tools that helps you develop long keyword lists, spy on your competitors, and find out new markets to enter to. You can use Kombat feature to compare your campaigns against your competitors.

Keyword Discovery: has been one of the best keyword research tools around for years. The data that you can dig up by using this service can help you plan those affiliate projects more effectively.

WordTracker: the tool has been around for years and has been used by most affiliate marketers. Since everybody seems to be using this tool, I don’t put too much emphasis on it. But knowing how to use this tool can give you an edge over most other affiliates.

What’s your favorite affiliate keyword research tool?

If you have been involved in the affiliate marketing industry for a while, you know the importance of choosing the right keywords to target your prospects. Not all keyword phrases are created equal. Some are capable of making you a lot of money, while there are others that could cause you a big headache and baffle you on their performance. What sets apart top affiliates from rest is not only just the strategies used but also the affiliate tools and how they are used to develop more optimized campaigns. A lot of newbie affiliates use those free tools on the market to set up their affiliate campaigns. That may work for a while, but if you intend to build a real business around your affiliate efforts, you are going to spend money to earn money.

There are plenty of tools that you can choose from to get your keyword research done properly. Affiliates have been using WordTracker, Keyword Discover, and Wordze in the past to develop their affiliate campaigns. These tools are nice on the surface, but they don’t provide you with affiliate specific information. There are keyword tools out there that not only help you build up your affiliate lists, but they also help you find out what other affiliates are doing and whether you should go after a specific keyword. If that is what you are looking for, here are 3 killer affiliate tools you should try:

Keyword Spy: my favorite affiliate keyword research tool. It’s one of the best tools on the market for pay per click affiliate marketers. The tool shows you how much competition you are going to face per each keyword and how much you may have to pay to achieve results with your pay per click marketing campaigns.

Keyword Country: this tool is the prime example of a keyword research tool that has something for everyone. Whether you are an Adsense marketer or just want to start a profitable affiliate marketing campaign on Google Adwords, Keyword Country has something for you. Great tool for bloggers as well.

SpyFu: the secret tool no one talks about. I have heard many top affiliates mention all kinds of tools that they use to generate profit, but they rarely mention SpyFu. It’s not that the tool is not effective. It’s that it’s too effective. If you have access to this tool, you can download your competitors and those super affiliates’ keywords and duplicate and better their campaigns. I have no doubt that your super affiliate mentor has your best in mind, but he/she is not going to introduce you to a tool that could spill the beans. SpyFu Kombat is a wonderful way to not only optimize your Adwords campaigns but also take your SEO game to the next level.

What’s your favorite affiliate keyword tool?

Article marketing is one of the best ways to get traffic to your affiliate offers and make money online. I remember reading Affiliate Project X years ago and learned how you can earn money writing articles for a living. You need to have a real strategy if you want to make money with article marketing and keep your traffic going. Article marketing not only sends targeted traffic to your website, it can also help you increase your search engine rankings and get some free traffic that way as well. The key to having success on article directories is not how many articles you have but rather how many people you can get to republish your articles. I know. You can write thousands of articles and get a decent amount of traffic to your website, but if SEO is a part of your strategy as well, you want to focus on articles that people want to publish as well.

Before you go around counting your future visitors, you need to be able to write articles properly. It’s not just about having a decent piece but doing your keyword research and write a piece of content that can get ranked high on search engines as well. And don’t forget that you have a lot of opportunities to maximize what you get back with each and every article by optimizing your summery and resources box.

Unfortunately, a lot of affiliates don’t know how to write articles properly and a lot of those who do flood the market with duplicate entries and shoot themselves in the foot. There are many article directories that you can submit your articles to, but that doesn’t mean you should without changing things around a bit. You’ve got to know the facts and make sure you build your credibility as an author and avoid SEO flags in the process.
Mass Article Control Pro is a cool article marketing kit designed for affiliates who want to seriously pursue article marketing as a channel to make money online. If you are tired of writing articles and getting few results, you should seriously consider changing your strategies. Mass Article Control comes with two software packages to let you get the most out of your article marketing efforts. First, you can use use Mass Article Creator to simplify the process of creating multiple versions of your articles. So when you submit your articles to thousands of directories, you no longer get penalized for having duplicate content by search engines. At first, I was skeptical about this whole changing words around claim but your articles are going to be different enough not to get flagged by search engines.

Once you have created your articles, you are going to need to submit them to many directories to maximize your profits. With Mass Article Submitter, you can simplify the process and get your submissions done in a much shorter period of time. The software allows you to put your articles on major article directories in less than 40 seconds. That’s a fraction of time that it takes to submit one article to EzineArticles.com. Remember, your goal is not to submit to 2000 article directories. Many of these smaller article directories will automatically pick up your articles from top directories. So your goal should be to focus on the large, more popular ones.

Article marketing is a good way to manage your overall CPA. You can always try to spend your way out of trouble with your affiliate offers. But if you have a decent landing page, you can easily use your articles to drive targeted traffic to your website and get free leads in the process. Article marketing is never going to be your be all end all solution when it comes to promoting affiliate products. But it’s a great way to manage your costs and expand your business little by little. Mass Article Control just lets you go through the process much faster.