There are plenty of experts who are being too optimistic about the possibility of an Internet tax being legislated by the current administration and the upcoming Congress. We all want to believe that the legislators won’t make the mistake of taxing small businesses further in these economic times. But with the country’s deficit hitting astronomical highs, it’s almost inevitable that there will be such a tax to pay for some of the things the country is spending money on. It’s not an ideal situation, but that move could lead to some of affiliates going completely out of business.

Affiliates really have three choice about it. They can either complain and moan about how unfair life is, pray to God or whomever they worship to stop the Internet tax, or prepare for tough times ahead. While we are in an election year, the chances of such a bill passing are slim to none. But don’t hold your breath the next year or the year after that. There will be time when the government needs to find new sources of revenue (taxing marijuana use would be one way to do it). As an affiliate, you don’t want to sit around and wait for it all to come crashing down. Better be prepared than sorry. With that said, here are 5 ways affiliates can get prepared for the “soon-to-come” Internet tax:

• Focus on products not affected: not every product and affiliate program is going to be affected by Internet tax. Let’s hope not. Besides, there will be companies that will keep their affiliates around. It never hurts to explore new markets and affiliate programs to make sure you are ready when such a tax goes down.
• Start a membership site: as an affiliate, you don’t want to put yourself in a situation where you go out of business as soon as Internet tax is legislated. If you have a recurring source of income, you won’t be too desperate if your largest partner kicks you out. Starting a membership site can be your way out.
• Sell your own product: I have never considered affiliate marketing a career. Sure. There are plenty of people who make lots of money from affiliate programs. That does not mean that’s the best way to get rich. Selling your own product gives you control and makes sure you are not susceptible to sudden changes in your market.
• Build relationship with other affiliates: products and services go away. Money is lost and gained all the time. The relationship you build with your peers tend to last longer. They can open doors for you and help you handle disasters much more easily.
• Focus on quality on your blog: if you have been selling products through your blog, now’s the time to focus on the quality of your blog. Trying to sell a product everytime you post something may be tempting, but having a blog that people actually follow and subscribe too can give you yet another way to make money online and protect your business against major changes in your industry.

The so-called Internet tax is not here yet. That does not mean you can just relax and forget about expanding your business. It’d be nice if the affiliate community can stop such tax from going through but don’t bet your house on it.

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.

We all want to assume that affiliate programs will honor their agreements and pay up when their affiliates deliver sales for them. There are plenty of affiliate programs that do everything possible to reduce their affiliates’ commissions and avoid paying up. You certainly do not want to work with those programs. At the same time, sometimes even the largest affiliate programs fail to fully pay their affiliates. It’s easy to get stressed out and freak out over these incidents. But if you want to get paid, you want to keep a cool head.

Reputable affiliate programs are often easier to work with in these situations. They care about their reputation, so they do respond if you file your claim. Some large networks do take some time to get back to you, but if your case is valid, you are going to get paid. What you don’t want to do is pick a fight with your merchant. That could have terrible ramifications for your business.

If you have not been paid by your affiliate company, it does not mean that you won’t get paid. You just have to approach things calmly. Here are just a few steps you need to take to solve your non-payment issues:

1. Don’t panic: no matter how much money you have lost, losing it is not going to help you solve your issues. You may need your commission check to stay afloat, but you do not want to make rash decisions without thinking through your strategy first.

2. Be polite: always, and I mean always, be polite with your affiliate manager. A lot of people assume that if they raise their voice on the phone or write a nasty e-mail, they are going to get more attention from their partner. Nobody likes a nasty person. You are more likely to get the help and attention you need by being polite and nice.

3. Explain & follow up: clearly explain what has gone wrong and why you believe you should be paid for your efforts. Do not assume the worst case. Put all the facts on the table and follow up with your merchant.

4. Stay professional: your affiliate relationship is not some sort of information friendship. Remember, you are running a business. If you treat your business like a business, others will treat you more seriously. Write and speak like a professional when communicating with your partners.

5. Don’t burn bridges: in some cases, you may not get your way. I suppose it’s OK to lose it in that situation, especially if you never intend to work with that partner ever again. Sharing your experiences with the world and publicizing your situation with a company may help other affiliates avoid the same mistakes. If you intend to work with that partner ever again, you may want to think twice before burning all your bridges.

6. Further Action: if you happen to have been wronged and lost lots of money in the process, you can always consider a lawsuit or legal action against your merchant. You want to make sure you have tried everything before taking this approach as this is a costly approach. Don’t forget, your partnership could be dead as soon as you in this route.

I have had many non-payment issues in the past. Except in one case, every partner that I have worked with has paid up. You’d be surprised what you can achieve by being nice to your partners.

There are a lot of affiliates who assume that you can get everything they need to build a huge business without spending too much money to get it done. Many affiliates start their journey in the affiliate marketing world with free or cheap web hosts. There is nothing wrong with paying $5 a month for a shared hosting plans, but if you are running a business that people care about, you want to make sure your website is up all the time.

There are many shared hosting web hosting plans that promise you unlimited everything for only a few dollars a month. That would work fine if you only have a couple of sites and don’t drive too many people to your website. But shared hosting doesn’t work out too well if you are getting a decent amount of traffic. Imagine investing a lot of time and effort into your online business to drive people to your website through paid and organic search. Wouldn’t it be devastating if your site is somehow down when your visitors get to your website?

When signing up for a top web host, you want to make sure you know all the facts. You also want to make sure your host provides you with options to expand your business and build a more scalable business. If you are serious about your business, you should expect your traffic to grow and reach new heights every once in a while. It’s always better to be ready for your new visitors instead of subjecting them to error pages on your website.

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.

Google Adsense is an easy way to make a few bucks here or there. If you happen to have the right strategy going with your affiliate portal, you may actually be able to make a decent amount of money per month and make a living off of Google. At first, publishers and bloggers were the ones using Google Adsense to monetize their work. But recently affiliate marketers and product makers have also added Adsense to their landing pages. After all, if you are not going to get a conversion from your visitors, you may as well get paid for them to leave, right?

The issue of Adsense on affiliate landing pages is very controversial. As an affiliate, your goal is to drive traffic to your landing pages and optimize them in a way that helps your bottom line. If you are driving paid traffic to your website, the last thing you want is give your visitors an easy way to get out of your website. Google Adsense ads are a big exit sign. There is return mechanism to get back the visitors who have clicked on your ads. So you are at their mercy. In most cases, these people don’t come back to your website.

Many super affiliates who are using their own sales-letters to make money online are using their Google Adsense units at the very end of their newsletters. That is an interesting practice, as you give your visitors enough chance to take advantage of your offer. But in case they have read the whole newsletter and still are not ready to take you upon your offer, you may as well make a buck or two when they leave. The more controversial practice is using sidebar Adsense units and putting ads in a prominent position on your website. Can that possibly work?

It actually can. Affiliate marketing is a game of numbers. So if you can get $2 for every dollar you spend on advertising and promotional efforts, you are golden. The key with adding Adsense (and even Chitika) to your affiliate landing pages is how it affects your bottom line. It never hurts to test multiple versions of your landing pages to find out which one works for you the best. You can even run multivariate test cases on your landing pages and use Adsense as one of your test cases.

As an affiliate, your goal is to generate as much sale possible for your advertisers while staying within policies. But I have not seen any affiliate program that prohibits using Adsense ad on affiliate landing pages. At the end of the day, it’s all about testing and figuring out which version of your affiliate landing page gets you the most bang for your buck, with or without Adsense.

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?

There are a lot of ways to make online from affiliate marketing. You can always try CPA offers and play the PPC game. You can play the social media game and build killer apps for Facebook and Twitter and push affiliate products in the process. Or you can just focus on building portals and make money online that way. Portal building is one of the oldest ways to make money online. The whole portal development field has been around for years but a few years ago, people started realize the power of building a huge portal and optimizing for every keyword under the sun.

I remember watching a review from a conference in 2003 about how you can make money online with portal development. The person who was doing the presentation claimed at the time that he was making enough money from his website that he could quit his events and still have a comfortable life. That strategy may not be as novel as it used to  be, and it may take a lot of work, but it can still be done. With the explosion of the social media and search engines changing their indexes to provide more relevant results to their visitors, the opportunity is there for portal developers to make a killing online.

There are really two types of affiliate portals online. Not every affiliate approaches this business as a long term venture. A lot of people who are interested in quick cash use scripts to gather information from other sites and slap them together to build a data portal with thousands of pages. These pages do get ranked for long-tail keyword phrases and the traffic adds up. The goal with these portals is to make money from Adsense or other types of advertising.

Information portals are more descriptive than data portals. They provide unique value to visitors. There is a difference between listing all the computers in the world on a website than writing real reviews about each and every one. Sure, it’s more difficult to build an information portal with 10,000+ pages, but if you do manage to pull it off, you will have a great shot at making a lot of money online from advertising, affiliate marketing, and other revenue sources.

Using a script to grab data from retailer sites and slap together a portal actually does work. But that’s really in the gray area, and you do not get too much long term benefits from them. Google and other top sites will eventually reduce your rankings, and you’ll have to change your strategy and do it all over again. With informational portals, you not only create content that get ranked on search engines, you provide real value to your visitors. It’s much easier to encourage people to buy using your affiliate link when you are providing real value, and while you may still get slapped by Google, it won’t be due to your portal being flagged as a sportal. Perhaps the best way to go is to create a data portal and start building up your content bank step by step. That way you can go live fast and fix up your portal as you go.

Portal development is not as easy as most people think. It takes a lot of time and effort. Besides, it’s not something you can finish and put away for a year. You have to keep updating it. So it takes time and effort. But if you are looking for a no brainer way to make money from affiliate marketing, portal development is the way to go.

John Reese’s Opportunity.com is an affiliate training course for newbie to advanced affiliates who are looking to take their affiliate game to the next level.

Opportunity.com contains many modules that walk you through how to set up affiliate campaigns and create auto-pilot money making systems. List building is still one of the best ways to gain targeted followers that you can market affiliate products to. But not everyone knows how to set up a newsletter properly. You don’t want to go all in with your content, and you don’t want to spam your followers by constantly forwarding them affiliate products. Getting the right balance could take a lot of time, unless you go through training courses available on training sites such as Opportunity.com.

Another big factor in having success in this industry is your ability to follow trends and find profitable niches before everybody else. That’s exactly what you will learn in Opportunity.com. Finding profitable products are not that simple, which is why you should be testing and analyze your campaigns to optimize your conversion rates. Opportunity.com covers everything you need to set up profitable campaign and extract more money from them.

Here is what’s covered in Opportunity.com:

• Market Research: selecting the right affiliate market to enter to is a big part of the whole equation. You certainly don’t want to enter a market that doesn’t provide you with enough revenue or is not broad enough to let you take your business to the next level. The easiest way to fail in affiliate marketing is by choosing the wrong market to be a part of. Opportunity.com teaches you how to:
  • select a profitable market.
  • use multiple channels to push your affiliate promotions and make money online.
  • cross-promote products and make more money online.
• Trend Analysis: knowing where your market is heading to is the best way to develop new campaigns and even find new products to promote. You can’t expect to promote the same products and keep making money. Each product goes through a cycle. You want to make sure you catch products in their introduction or growth phases. By watching out for the trends, you can save yourself a lot of headaches and keep on the top of your industry.
• Niche Discovery: knowing what market to enter is only one part of the equation. You then need to define your own niche. You want to make sure your niche is not too broad, but at the same not too narrow to leave you struggling to make decent money. Believe it or not, there is a lot of money to be earned in micro-niches. But you’ve got to find the right ones.
• Campaign Management: knowing marketing well is one thing. Being able to manage your campaigns and business effectively is a whole other thing. Not many affiliates know what they are getting themselves into when they start an affiliate business. Running a business is not that easy, and you need to plan to avoid any major surprise. Thankfully, Opportunity.com has you covered. It comes with various models that teach you how to run every aspect of your business. Opportunity.com shows you how to:
  • track your affiliate campaigns and maximize your results.
  • build an e-mail list to push your affiliate products.
  • automate many aspects of your business.
  • drive lots of cheap but targeted traffic to your websites.
  • outsource and grow your business more effectively.
  • scale your business to handle growth.
  • learn from your competitors and use their knowledge to grow your business.

Opportunity.com is a modern affiliate marketing training course that is designed to help affiliates from all walks of life increase their commission checks and grow their business. If you are looking to master the art of market research and niche discovery and drive more traffic to your affiliate offers for less, you should give Opportunity.com a try. The course comes with a 30-day money back guarantee.

One of the biggest challenges that new affiliate marketers face is building their landing pages. I have heard from a lot of experts that you can make a lot of money from Google cash (direct linking). That may be true, but if you go in that route, you will be competing with top guns who have automated bid management systems that can overwhelm your bids and leave you with no real profit to show for. It’s never smart to get in a bidding war with super-affiliates. So, if you really want to make money in this business, you’ve got to create your landing pages, and you’ve got to be create a lot of them to test out and increase your conversion rate.

Building landing pages can prove too difficult for a lot of affiliate marketers. A lot of folks are scared of touching anything technical. A few others have no confidence in their web development abilities and often overestimate the obstacles in this area. Whichever group you belong you, you won’t have to worry about developing your own landing pages from scratch with Affiliate Theme. It’s a new theme that’s been released the help affiliate marketers build and test multiple affiliate landing pages fast.

Wordpress is an affiliate marketer’s best friend. With Wordpress you can set up your affiliate website in less than 5 minutes. But till now, you would have to program your landing page yourself, or use one of those dull themes that are available for free online. Affiliate Theme is a premium Wordpress theme that is designed specifically for marketers who want to test things out to improve their conversion rates. The theme comes with 6 different layouts, perfect for testing and figuring out what works for your niche.

You also get a color picker feature that allows you to change the look and feel of your website fast (in accordance to your niche). Let’s say you have a website about X-box. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could change the look and feel of your website to make it more attractive to your target audience, X-Box fans?

But what I like about Affiliate Theme is the fact that it’s highly optimized for PPC and SEO. Let’s say you want to start a new pay per click campaign on a cool new affiliate product. Wouldn’t it be nice if your landing page was optimized to give you the highest quality score possible? How about getting free traffic from search engines? Affiliate Theme comes with a clean HTML/CSS code, and the developers have used proper tagging to give you the best chance to get those high quality scores you need to run profitable PPC campaigns.

Affiliate Theme is highly customizable. Not only you get 6 layouts to work with, you can easily change the code to completely redesign your landing pages. The code is simple to understand and very easy to change. If you know any coding, you are going to find it very easy to create your very own layouts. You also have unlimited support, which means you can always ask if you are stuck.

Overall, Affiliate Theme is a great tool for affiliate marketers who want to spend less time coding and more time optimizing. By using Affiliate Theme, you can easily set up thousands of affiliate landing pages fast. And you can test them all too by changing the colors, fonts, and everything else in between. Talk about saving a lot of time and effort!

Download your copy here.