The Internet sales tax is coming sooner rather than later. At this point, it comes down to what the Congress decides. California was one of the states that managed to pass the Internet sales tax bill but has put that on hold for a year. Every product that we buy from companies such as Amazon should technically be taxed at the state level. But customers rarely pay those taxes.

eBay has suggested that companies with sales of up to $30 million should be exempt from collecting taxes. Amazon is aiming for exemption for companies with revenue below $500K. Of course, the issue of enforcing Internet sales taxes in states can be quite costly at state levels. It could also be a small business killer if this is not implemented the right way. Amazon has fought off Internet sales tax bills in the past. But if a federal law is passed, Amazon wants few companies to be exempt:

widespread collection no longer would be an unconstitutional burden on interstate commerce, and Congress feasibly can authorize the states to require all but the very smallest volume sellers to collect,

Paul Misener, Amazon’s vice president for global public policy, explained. One way or the other this battle will be settled soon. Let’s hope small affiliates do not get the shaft.

There are plenty of scripts you can download to manage affiliate links on your site. Of course, in order to start an affiliate program of your own, you are going to have to offer a good or service. Thanks to Affiliates for WordPress, you can set your affiliate program up and running on WordPress. This is the perfect solution for those of you who plan to run a small affiliate program using WordPress.

Affiliates for WordPress tracks visits to your websites and allows you to start recruiting affiliates for your business. Referrals are stored on your website, giving you the opportunity to compensate others for driving leads and sales for your business. The plugin is powerful enough to handle embeddable links and banners for affiliates.

Affiliates for WP offers reporting for referrals. You do have the option to remove affiliate leads based on the search engines referring them to you. This is a practice used by Amazon and many other top affiliate programs. This plugin makes handling that super easy. Users are in control of permissions and standard referral settings too.

Affiliates probably would not work for large affiliate programs. But it should do the job for smaller businesses. It is simple to use and saves you from having to master a new script to go live with your affiliate program.

For a long time, I was using one tracking ID for each site I had thinking that was the right approach. After all, I didn’t care where my clicks and sales came from as long as they were coming. Optimizing your landing page and testing to see what works are necessary if you want to increase the amount of commission you get from Amazon. If you are planning to run affiliate ads in your sidebar and also include links inside your posts, it is always better to separate their tracking tags to make sure what’s working for you.

In order to create multiple tracking IDs, you should click on Account Settings. From there, you can manage all your IDs with just a click. When choosing a tracking ID for your site, make sure you choose a word that clearly defines the place you will be using your affiliate links.

You can have as many tracking IDs as you want on Amazon. The more specific they are, the better you can optimize your Amazon campaigns to make as much money as possible from your efforts. If you are planning to do some portal optimization, using multiple tracking IDs can make your life easier.

Commission Junction is one of the top affiliate networks around. It has a ton of merchants and can bring you a considerable amount of revenue if you take time to promote the offers available in it. I am personally not a big fan of importing data feeds to my sites to make money from affiliate offers. But some affiliates have managed to make a decent living by making sophisticated websites out of affiliate data feeds. If you plan to create a website based on CJ data feeds, CJ Datafeed for WordPress is a plugin worth checking out.

CJ Datafeed is designed specifically for CJ affiliates. All you have to do is set up your datafeeds from CJ’s interface to get started. You can then upload your import file and make changes to your template to make your website perform as you wish. Of course, the more time you spend playing around with the template, the better chance you have of making a quality website based on affiliate products from CJ.

Creating a website based on just affiliate feeds is not the best way to make money online. But if you are creative enough, you may be able to get this to work for your business.

In case you have not noticed, platforms such as Kindle have given independent publishers more ways to publish their books without having to go broke. As long as you can write valuable content, there is no reason you can’t be a success on Amazon. Of course, you will have to promote your e-book properly to gain traction in that market. The good news is there are more than one way to make money from e-books. Everybody knows that people prefer not paying for anything if they can get away with it. By offering your e-book to your fans for free, you will have a better chance to grab their attention.

Giving away your e-book for free seems very risky. After all, you may have worked on your e-book for weeks or months. What if you don’t get compensated for your efforts? If you plan this project properly, you won’t have to worry about that. Some affiliates make money from e-books by including paid links in their books. That could be a turn off for some. Setting up a portal to upsell your readers is a better way.

Let’s say you want to make a living promoting “how to blog” products. Writing an e-book on it and giving it away free gives you the chance to promote your blogging portal (with affiliate offers) more effectively. If you don’t mind creating your own membership site, your e-book can be a great lead generation tool for it. Many affiliates assume that the best way to make money these days is by slapping links all over their works and hope for the best. Being a successful affiliate is all about being creative. If you do just what everyone else is doing, you are most likely leaving money on table.

Google Plus is the latest great social network. It has been growing exponentially fast and is on its way towards becoming a dominant force in this space. Not surprisingly, top affiliates are now looking for ways to promote their offers in this network and make even more money online. Considering that technically you can’t operate a G+ account with a fake name, you want to organize your G+ account and be subtle with your affiliate promotions.

People do not come to G+ to click on your affiliate offers. In order for them to do so, you are going to have to build trust. That can be achieved by providing your followers with the diet of top content from all around the web. Engaging in discussions and showing that you care about contributing to the community you are a part of helps too.

Google+ is still in early stages. It is not clear how people respond to affiliate offers in that network. That’s why you want to take time to create targeted circles to experiment with your promotions. You do not want to be overly aggressive nor do you want to bombard your followers with affiliate offers.

Some affiliates do tend to only recommend affiliate products to others on their blogs. There is nothing wrong with that approach as long as those are great products. That strategy probably won’t work on G+ though. So make sure you include non-affiliate products in your recommendations too.

G+ is going to take a bit of time to develop. The best affiliates can do at this point is mastering what G+ already has to offer and learn from others’ experiences. The future is bright for G+.

Many affiliates have been on the move to avoid getting kicked out by Amazon over sales tax laws in their states. There is no question that some states have been more friendly towards Amazon affiliates than others. But if the Democrats have their way, the law will be applied all over the country. Amazon has supported such legislation in the past.

Main Street retailers collect sales taxes on behalf of consumers, why shouldn’t online retailers do the same? In 2012, states across the country, including Illinois, are expected to lose as much as $24 billion in uncollected state and local taxes on internet and catalogue sales. From 2005 to 2010 the state of Illinois estimated it lost $153 million each year. The Main Street Fairness Act doesn’t ask anyone to pay a single penny more in taxes. Instead, it would help governors and mayors collect taxes that are already owed

explained Sen. Dick Durbin. Of course, this won’t just hurt affiliates. It could also put a huge burden on small businesses that only rely on the Internet to stay afloat. At the same time, it does make life easier for consumers and businesses that make purchases online. At this point, it is not clear how Amazon and other merchants will treat affiliates if such a law is passed. Could it end some of the affiliate programs in the U.S.? It is too early to say but we should not count that out.

Many of us are too attached to our work and assume that merchants have been waiting all this time to work with us. Unfortunately, that is not really the case in reality. Affiliates get rejected by merchants on a daily basis. Some merchants do not like to work with affiliates who may not bring a whole lot to the table. If your application has been rejected, you still can take time to make your websites better and reapply in the future. Here are some of the things you want to do to get approved:

• make sure it is not a mistake: mistakes happen all the time. Merchants may miss your main site and reject you because of that. If you believe you have been rejected by mistake, there is no reason not to contact your merchant again.
• read the terms and conditions: many affiliate programs tell you beforehand what they expect you to do for them. By reading their requirements, you will have an easier time figuring out what to do to get approved.
• learn from other successful affiliates: the best way to figure out what you are doing wrong is by looking at what others are doing right. Looking up the top affiliates for the merchants you want to work with can give you some ideas.
• don’t cut corners: just getting approved to an affiliate program won’t make you a millionaire overtime. By not cutting corners, you will give your business the best chance to succeed over the long run.

Getting rejected by a merchant is not the end of the world. There are always many others you can work with. Learning lessons from each setback is the most important part of the process.

Many of us affiliates are honest about what we do. We work hard to build content, develop relationships, and set our businesses apart from our competitors. Most of us don’t even think about stealing other people’s content. When we borrow small sections of an article, we give a link back to the source (fair use). Not everyone acts like that though. Some people have no shame. They will steal your content and won’t even give you a link back. Google has no shame either. It does not hesitate to blindly rank sites that steal content above the ones that work so hard to create that content.

Relying on Google to help you with your stolen content is like wishing for Santa Claus to cure cancer. Google is making money from all these content thieves (through Adsense). The company may talk a big game but its algorithms keep rewarding thieves. There are some things you can do to get people to remove your stolen content though. You can always send a take-down notice to see if the thieves blink. Filing a DMCA complaint is the next step in the process though it could be time consuming at times. 

What I love to do with my content is using multiple internal links in my articles to thwart content thieves’ efforts. You may not want people to steal your content but if they are doing it, you may as well get some links back for your effort. Besides, your internal links can give Google and other search engines a good indication which site is the original owner. Don’t forget to use Copyscape to find out who is exactly copying you.

Fighting content thieves is not exactly the best way to spend your time doing business online. You don’t want to fight that fight all the time. By linking to your content extensively and sending copyright threats to those who steal your best articles, you can save yourself some time and protect your intellectual property.

It is so funny when people who preach about others having to start their newsletters start sending automated e-mails to their followers and subscribers. Many of these so called “marketing gurus” do it all the time. When you subscribe to 10 different newsletters and get the very same e-mail from all 10 of them at the same time, you know something is quite not right.

In reality, many of these so called gurus do not practice what they preach. They make money off of you but not mainly by doing what they claim you should be doing. Many of these folks don’t even try going outside the box. The have found the “teach get rich quick” formula and are sticking by it.

I am not suggesting that you should or should not automate your messages. For some businesses, it could very well work. The trouble arises when you do a poor job automating . If you are not getting the name of your subscribers right or are not sending unique messages to your audience, it could be a huge turn-off.

If you must automate your messages or use the ones others are already using, at least take time to change things around. Make sure you preview each and every email before sending a messy one to your subscribers. We are not talking about rocket science here. These are things everyone dealing with e-mails should do.