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Affiliate marketing is more than just creating campaigns, optimizing them, and then cashing your checks. You can’t relax in this business and have any chance of making it big. You should always be on the lookout for news you can take advantage of to take your business to the next level. While many gurus want you to believe that making it big in affiliate business involves going to lavish parties and taking 6 months of vacation each year, in reality, you’ll have to work a tad bit harder.

Here are just 5 reasons all affiliates should keep up with the trends in their niche:

• Identify new opportunities: you won’t be able to pounce on new opportunities unless you see them coming your way in advance. Let’s take Amazon’s Android store for instance. If and when Amazon decides to give commissions on those apps, there will be some good money to be earned there. You won’t be doing that if you haven’t been paying attention.
• Maximize existing opportunities: things change very quickly in some niches. You don’t have to close shop as soon as things dramatically change. You can just adapt and find other ways to get the most out of your niche. Keeping up with the latest news in your niche gives you a better opportunity to do just that.
• Plan your exit: nobody likes to accept defeat. Sometimes, market just go away. If you happen to be experiencing that, you better be ready to make your next move. Just because your partners go out of business does not mean you should too.
• Find new partners: keeping up with the latest topics trending in your niche, you can figure out the new players in your niche and pounce on opportunities before others do. Companies that are just getting their feet wet in a market are more open to working with marketers and affiliates. That window of opportunity to ask for lucrative commissions and create initial buzz for your partners’ products is small.
• Develop your own product: you don’t want to be an affiliate forever, do you? Knowing what’s going on in your market give you ideas about products you can make to take your business to the next level.

Affiliate marketing can technically be done from your bed. But don’t expect amazing results if you intend to take breaks and off-days all the time. People may think of affiliate marketing as an easy business but it’s far from that.

Just like anything in marketing, there are multiple ways to look at Twitter and how one can take advantage of it to make more money online. Twitter marketing is nothing new. People have been taking advantage of Twitter to generate leads and make money from affiliate products for months now. Of course, just like anything else, you don’t hear about top Twitter marketing tactics until they are old. That’s really how marketing training courses have worked in the past, and this continues to be the case.

I would also blame fake Internet marketers that make a living on teaching people who to spam Twitter and make money that way. Don’t get me wrong. It IS possible to spam Twitter and make money for a short period of time. But sooner rather than later, you are going to get caught and all your efforts go to waste.

The tactics that fake Internet marketers are teaching these days involve opening up multiple Twitter accounts, setting up robots, and spamming the heck out of Twitter. That’s not marketing. That’s spamming and harassing others on Twitter. Of course, black hat marketers don’t mind teaching others how to spam on these sites. The funny thing is, they don’t teach you how they make money online. But these people take your money and throw you to wolves. So newbies end up spamming and getting caught for their trouble.

Real Twitter marketing is all about connecting with your leads, providing them with value, and building trust with them. It will take time to achieve all that, but if you are looking to build a long term business, there are no short-cuts. And anybody that tell you it is has some other agenda.

Many of you know about the budget crisis that is going on in California. But no one is going to be affected more than affiliates once the latest tax bill gets approved. We all know what happened with Amazon and the state of New York. Commission Junction understands that there is a good chance this bill will go through. That’s why it has decided to let affiliates know about the impending doom:

As you may already know, there are proposed California bills that could require the collection of sales tax for online purchases similar to bills proposed in other states and that could resemble the law that recently passed in New York State. At this time, a hearing date for AB 178 has been set for April 13, 2009. As with all laws, if passed, these laws may or may not apply to you and your business.

Commission Junction is headquartered in California and impacted by the current California budget crisis. Nevertheless, we are opposed to the recently proposed legislation and are working with a lobbyist and other groups in hopes that we can influence the rejection of the bills’ passage. Rest assured, we recognize that our industry and many of our clients may be impacted by these bills.

The application of the bills is dependent on particular business and factual circumstances, and Commission Junction is not in a position to provide legal and tax advice regarding the bills. However, we encourage you to perform the appropriate due diligence as it relates to your business. You may be contacted by advertisers in the Commission Junction network as they perform their due diligence.

The culprit here is Nancy Skinner. She believes this bill will bring the much needed revenue to help California avoid bankruptcy:

During this unprecedented fiscal crisis we cannot afford to lose sales tax revenue from out-of-state companies when our own local businesses are struggling to keep their doors open.

So what can affiliates expect if and when this bill gets through? Simple:

• Expect a few merchants to get out of the market. The very same thing happened in New York, and I suspect this will happen here as well.
• Expect decrease in commissions. That’s right. Companies can’t afford to pay you the same amount of money if they are getting taxed through their nose.
• Affiliates to lose more battles across the country. I was optimistic a few months ago but not anymore. The country is in trouble, and I am sure there are a lot of states that want to close this “loophole.”
• Expect more Internet regulations. As the country struggles economically, you can expect more taxes and more regulations for the Internet industry. It’s sad to say, but right now the Internet industry looks extremely attractive to the tax masters.

Did I miss anything? Yes. The end of the world. OK, that’s not going to happen. But the way we are taxing the living and the dead, who knows.

Advanta may not be a famous credit card company. They are not Chase, and they are certainly not American Express. But they are a super conservative card issuer that has survived several hardships in the past. But this year seems different. For the first time in years, they stopped issuing dividends. But the more surprising part was when they announced that they will close down their affiliate business.

I’ve got to say that Advanta has had some of the best conversions among products that I did promote in the past. I personally don’t care too much about the credit card business. There are just too many folks involved in it, and not so much value is added with all these guys copying each other. But Advanta had strong relationships with its affiliates. With them pulling out, the business credit card affiliate market is officially dead, or close to it. Business cards will still be around, but companies can’t afford to pay us affiliates $50 to $100 to acquire customers for them. No wonder things don’t look like getting better these days.

Your thoughts: how have you been affected by major affiliate pullouts?

WordPress revolution keeps going as LinkShare has jumped on the bandwagon by coming up with its own WordPress plug-in. The folks at LinkShare are not dumb. They understand that many affiliates are using WordPress to build their affiliate sites, and you can bet LinkShare wants a piece of that pie.

All you need to do is download the WordPress plugin, activate it, and use the token given to you by LinkShare to take advantage of their service. Now, I got to say that I don’t do much business with LinkShare these days, but this plug-in is going to make it much easier for anyone who does work with them to input put affiliate products up (you can create deep links too). I am glad that LinkShare’s new direction includes taking advantage of new technologies to help affiliates have an easier time promoting products.

What’s been your experience with LinkShare plug-in?

Affiliate summit is one of my favorite events every year. I always try to make myself go to Vegas to take advantage of AS and the networking opportunities that it presents. Well, I couldn’t go this year for various reasons, but thanks to Ustream you can now watch parts of this great show. Don’t miss Gary V

Catch Affiliate Summit 09 recording here.

Circuit City announced today that they will seek bankruptcy court approval to start liquidate its assets. Unfortunately, affiliates who have earned commissions from Circuit City could be left for dead in the process.

Here is what Google had to say about the issue:

Commission
We are working with Circuit City and legal teams to understand the status of commissions.

1. Pre-Chapter 11 filing: We do not have any update on commissions filed through the bankruptcy courts, which are as follows: July, September, October and November 1-9.

2. Post-Chapter 11 filing: We are entitled to dollar-for-dollar payment on all post-Chapter 11 filing, which is as follows: November 10-30, December and January to date. Today’s liquidation announcement does not change this.

It is clear that Google Affiliate Network team will try its best to get affiliates the commissions that they are owned, but nothing is for certain at this point. I personally did not work with Circuit City, but it was obvious from last year that the company was in big trouble. This is a developing story that has the potential to get even uglier. But as bad as all this sounds, one has to fill for 30,000 plus folks who will be losing their job in the process.

Here is the link to the press release by Circuit City.

I don’t know about you, but I haven’t had a day going without hearing about the whole proposition 8. Keith Olbermann probably had the best piece on the whole Prop 8 fiasco, and the whole gay marriage issue is not the issue that I intend to address today. However, if you are an affiliate marketer, that bulb has probably been going off with all this buzz about gay marriage.

Dating sites have been around for years, and dating content sites are still one of the best Adsense paying sites out there. But the whole gay dating market is going to get even hotter after all this. Just a few days ago it came out that eHarmony will allow gays to date on its site: means $$$ for us.

Affiliate marketing is all about taking advantage of opportunities before others do. Now I know the issue of gay marriage is important to many folks, and I am all for it, but you can’t deny the opportunity here to make some big bucks. The gay dating market has been around for a while, but eHarmony is one of the biggest players in this market, and them jumping on the ship can only solidify this niche. And don’t for a second think that those Adsense ads will stop paying less than before. Money is everywhere…

Should you allows your kids to get started with affiliate marketing early? That’s the question many folks ask themselves everyday. Now, it’s true that there aren’t many kids who want to get started in this business, but I come from the school of thought that the earlier you get started, the better chance you have of succeeding in this business.

Younger kids have a unique look at the world. I remember when I was a kid. Things were much simpler. I could think about all kinds of things without having the worries that I do now as a family man. Besides, research has shown that as we age, we become less flexible physically and mentally. Our abilities deteriorate everyday that passes us by. That doesn’t mean that a 45 year old man or woman can’t start an affiliate business and be successful at it. But it does mean that if they start their business earlier, they will have a better shot at succeeding.

But you think starting in your late teen years is early, think again. The 12 year old Jason has set the bar very high for our kid. I do credit the folks around him to have provided him with the opportunity to realize his potential at such an early age. Not everyone’s going to get there, but Jason’s case can be used as a blueprint to develop other talented kids and help them realize their potential. I know a lot of folks talk about kids being kids, but that school of thought belongs to the last century. The 21st century is the century of innovators. The sooner you get started, the better.

Do you know a young one that is having success in the affiliate marketing world? Please share your stories here.

Today is the vote day folks. So you better get out and vote. Barack Obama is my choice as he is going to provide incentives for small businesses and reduce taxes of folks who make less than $250,000 in profits. The keyword here is “profits.” You can have a million dollar revenue company, but if your profits are less than $250,000, Barack is your man. But don’t let me tell you who you should vote for. Just stop procrastinating and vote. The future of this country depends on it!