Tiffany Washko

I have said it before but it warrants a few more shouts… I LOVE seasonal affiliate sales! Well I love all affiliate sales but seasonal affiliate sales provide a huge boost in earnings a few times a year.

The back to school season is a big seasonal earner for me. I would guesstimate that I made AT LEAST an extra $1000 from late July to mid September. I celebrated by buying myself a new camera lens for my DSLR.

I also see increases during Halloween and Christmas, especially the latter. Remember my review of Info Product Killer last year? It teaches you how to create niche web sites, especially Christmas sites. I used the information to create one niche toy site and a Christmas gift guide on an existing site. Today I ran a couple reports to see how much I earned from these in total. I earned $122.52 from the Wall-e site and $804.55 from the gift guide. Since it only took me 5 hours to put them together I earned $185 per hour. Not bad! I Paid for a domain and the Info Product Killer product and made an $840 profit. Again.. not bad! It can pay to invest in quality learning materials. And remember this was in additition to the monthly income I usually bring in… it was a BONUS.

I really want to get on the ball and make a few more this year. Unfortunately, it is hard for me to be inspired by products I wouldn’t buy or use myself. Somehow I don’t see making dozens but that’s okay. AND instead of making whole sites I can take a shortcut and create a Squidoo page.. they do really well seasonally too. I am already seeing my monthly lens earnings go up.

I did a little research for this year and found one of the HOT toys for xmas 2009 will be the Twilight Barbie Dolls, so I threw together a site for them in less than an hour. Then I put together a quickie Squidoo page, and linked to the new site from a few existing ones. I may try to get an article or two up at ezine articles as well. So I am off to a running start and I love the product too. Now I just need to find the inspiration to make a few more, update my ones from last year, and I will be set to make a nice chunk of change again this Christmas…

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Are you an affiliate marketer? If so, you need to be aware that state governments are enacting legislation that could effectively kill your business. I am greatly concerned about this since I would say 50% or more of my monthly income stems from affiliate sales.

As an affiliate I post links and banner advertisements on my sites to Amazon and various other online companies. I send them traffic and potential sales and when a sale is made, they in turn pay me a commission… anywhere from 4% to 75% depending on the company and product. I get a big fat check every month from Amazon and smaller but still very nice checks form a host of other places. But my profession as an affiliate marketer is under attack in many states and sadly many affiliate marketers just got the axe.

First some background though. Online stores like Amazon, Zappos, or Barnes and Noble are only required by law to collect sales taxes in the states where their company resides. That is their tax “nexus”. If they are based in Idaho for example then they only have to collect sales taxes on purchases made by people in Idaho. Sales from Ohio would fall outside their tax nexus and they would not be required to collect sales taxes on those purchases. For years, states have been looking for a way to to get those taxes and the new economic crisis has given them the incentive to try and do it. Unfortunately for affiliate marketers they have decided to use us as the means to do this.

New York and North Carolina recently passed legislation that identifies affiliate relationships as something similar to an employee relationship. Using this logic North Carolina and New York can now require online companies to collect state sales based on the fact that they have “employees” (affiliates) in those states. Well, these companies are not stupid… they saw that they were being railroaded into a new tax nexus by way of their affiliate relationships and in response they are simply firing their affiliates and avoiding the taxes. They avoid a new tax nexus and affiliate marketers in those states are essentially without a job anymore.

Yesterday Amazon.com fired 1000 affiliates in North Carolina. Termination letters have been sent to affiliates in Hawaii from Zappos, Amazon, Endless and several other smaller merchants. This may very well be the sole source of income for these people and now due to a poorly written law they have no income anymore AND the companies avoid paying the taxes anyway. The affiliates lose, the states lose (the sales taxes AND your income taxes), and the companies go on with business as usual. Half a dozen other states are poised to pass similar legislation.

I am simply horrified that these laws are being passed and I am so sorry for affiliate marketers living in these states. I know several affiliate marketers that live in Hawaii and they can only afford to live their because they work online as affiliate marketers. Local jobs are almost non existent in their areas.

If you make any money from affiliate marketing, if you work online, or if you just hoped to make money affiliate marketing some day then you need to write the legislators behind these awful bills. Affiliates are not employees, they are advertisers. Does contracting with a radio station to buy advertising make them your employee? Heck no! The affiliate marketing profession is being used as a weapon to collect state revenue and we will be the ones hurt.

Talk about it, blog about it… we need to stop this before more states adopt it and affiliate marketing is dealt a death blow.

And now more then ever we should all find ways to diversify our income so that if this law passes in our state it will not leave us without any income.

Visit the Performance Marketing Alliance for details.

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I do a lot of affiliate promotion and one of my biggest pet peeves is joining an affiliate program with poor affiliate graphics or none at all. I mean if you want me to promote your product give me something to work with folks!

To get around a lack of quality promotion materials or the fact that I am using an indirect affiliate service like Amazon I have started to use my own affiliate banners.  They look good and they are unique to me so my visitors know I REALLY DO like these products. Here are some examples I just started using last month.

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