CPA Talking | CPA Networks Talking, Making Money Online!

The Performance Marketing Alliance (PMA) filed a brief yesterday in New York State Supreme Court in support of Amazon.com and Overstock.com in a pending lawsuit with the state. The case is over whether affiliate partners constitute a physical “nexus” in the state, and hence require online only retailers to charge consumers sales tax on online purchases. You can learn more on our blog posts tagged affiliate tax. There’s some more coverage on the WSJ Digits blog.

If enacted, bills like the one that became law in New York State impact entrepreneurs and small businesses that earn a living as an affiliate. Below you’ll find a few maps that illustrate the extent of affiliates in states that have considered the affiliate tax. Each red mark represents a zip code where affiliates reside in that state.

Tennessee

California

Florida

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Last week our clients came to New York City to enjoy networking, education, and some entertainment. Here is a list of the Top 10 things learned at LinkShare Symposium East:

10. Travel, Events, Music, and Books are popular shopping categories for “value shoppers” (PSB Research)

9. Joan Rivers “only shops on the Internet”

8. The meaning of the word “metacognition” (thinking about thinking, thanks Jonah Lehrer)

7. While the rate of online shopping growth has slowed, usage of coupon and reward sites has increased (PSB Research)

6. A LEGO pirate can also make a great guard for a Golden Link Award.

5. The Performance Marketing Alliance is a vocal supporter and information resource for the affiliate marketing industry

4. Easy, Fast, and Open are three core tenants of the LinkShare product development strategy

3. The Standard Hotel has a great view of the brand new High Line Park

2. Hotel Gansevort Rooftop Bar & Lounge, which was the exclusive after party for LinkShare Symposium East 2009, has   one of the best views of downtown Manhattan you’ll find

1. LinkShare customers continue to innovate and drive value for consumers

You can read more at our LinkShare Symposium Event Highlights and see some Symposium East photos on Flickr.

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According to Business Week, SEO clicks convert about 25% higher, than PPC clicks

Last week I gave a presentation on How to Get Better Conversions: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Publishers.  I thought it may be a good idea to give some brief pointers from the presentation, just to reiterate how following some of the basic practices can really provide great results.  I think of search engine optimization as little pieces of a puzzle. When you attach all those pieces of the puzzle together, you end up with the big picture.  There is really no ONE thing you can do to make your search efforts successful.  It’s all about making each little task effective and strong.

First of all, what is SEO anyway?  Well, it’s a way for people to find your website in search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Bing and so on.  It’s one thing to have a website up and running, but if someone does not know you or what you do, how are they going to find you?  Search engine optimization is the practice of implementing certain actions on and off your website so humans and search engines can find your website or blog.

So now you know what SEO is, next step is doing your research!

• Who wants what you’re selling?
• What keywords would THEY use to get to your site?
• Who are your competitors and how are those competitors getting people to their site?

Secondly, make sure your house is in order, and by that I mean, site structure.  These things are basically the outline of your website optimization.

301 Redirects - If you can type in yoursite.com and it does not change to www.yoursite.com, or vice versa, then you’ve got issues as your site is:

1. Seen as two sites which can be considered duplicate content
2. All the links that coming to your site are being diluted, because some are going to yoursite.com and others to, www.yoursite.com

The solution is to take one of those roots and do a 301 redirect.  This tells the search engine to focus all the content and inbound links under one domain.

Metadata -  Consists of:

1. Title Tag
2. Keyword Tag
3. Description Tag

This is the text that Google sees and what YOU see when you are shown the results in search engines.  This is your organic or natural advertisement in search engines.  If you are on your website and you click View>Source and cannot see any keywords within in any of these areas when your are in the ‘code view,’ then you need to add them.  These should all be unique to each page and really tell the person and search engine what that exact page is about.

Headings - This is the headline of your page and tells the person reading your content what the content is about.  Think of it like the headline of a newspaper. You can also have subheadings, but  this should remain tagged as H2- H6 (See in the code,) and the H1 remain only for the main heading of a page.

Website Design - Is your design search and spider friendly?  Some websites are GORGEOUS and have pretty pictures and video or flash, which is great except that search engines cannot really see any of this fabulous work.  If you have a site like this, I suggest adding content, and by that I mean text.  Make it compelling and unique.  Another effective idea is start a blog on your site and update it frequently.  Also, be a voice of education so people know you’re a out there trying to be helpful.  This way you can gain your visitors trust as you are there to share useful information, rather thank constantly posting information about your products or service.  Would you want your friends to always talk about themselves?  I think not, so talk about your industry and the latest news and trends.  You will gain interest and provide helpful information that people will want to share with others.

Internal Links - Lastly, is making sure your pages within your site link from one page to another.  Link to other pages within your site that relate to what the content is mentioning.  If you are talking about sneakers, rather than linking to t-shirts, I suggest you link to other types of sneakers or even a page that talks about the benefits of running.

So this was just a brief glimpse into what was discussed during the webinar.  There were many other SEO techniques I mentioned, such as:

• Types of content
• Different types of links
• How to promote your site

All in all, SEO and Search Engine Marketing done together will really give you the maximum benefits and exposure you need for your website.

Victoria Edwards, SEO/Search Marketing Specialist

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The Performance Marketing Alliance (PMA) is asking for a one-pager from North Carolina based affiliates that describes their business. They’ve also provided a form e-mail for publishers to fill in and send to Governor Bev Perdue.

Dear North Carolina Affiliates,

Your state legislature isn’t entirely convinced that a state/use tax nexus law is a bad idea. Since they have just postponed their budget vote for a couple of weeks, we need to make sure they hear how devastating this kind of law would be on affiliate marketing. We know your letters, calls and visits are working! We also know the story of how you will be personally impacted is the most effective. We need your help with another campaign. Please provide us a one-page description of your business and how this law would impact you. We will print out and hand deliver these pages to key leaders and the governor. Consistently, the primary message that resonates with lawmakers is the devastating impact on North Carolina businesses.

By Tuesday, July 7th,

• Create a one-pager about your business. It should be brief, describe your business and how you earn money from affiliate marketing, earnings and state sales taxes you paid, if you are willing to share, # of employees, and screen shots/links on your pages. Please be polite; our politicians are under a tremendous amount of pressure. A suggested template is below.

• E-mail it to rebecca at performancemarketingalliance dot com.

Here is a template that you can use:

The Honorable Governor Bev Perdue
Office of the Governor
20301 Mail Service Center
Raleigh, NC 27699-0301
Subject: I Oppose the Sales/Use Tax Nexus bill

Dear Governor Perdue:

My business will be devastated by the sales/use tax nexus bill. I am being discriminated against because I make my living by selling advertising on my website.

[Insert description of your business and how you earn a living from affiliate marketing. Include earnings state income taxes you paid last year, if you so choose, number of employees if applicable. And include links and screen shots. Keep it short!!! ]

This law would be futile: my partners will sever their advertising relationships with me; my income will be devastated and North Carolina will not collect sales tax anyway. I respectfully ask you to remove the sales/use tax nexus clause from the budget bill.

Sincerely,
[Include name, business name and address]

These letters will be hand delivered to Raleigh next week.

Governor Schwarzenegger vetoes online tax bill

Governor Schwarzenegger yesterday vetoed the online taxation (a.k.a. affiliate tax) bill. The PMA heard that Schwarzenegger had read the stories and they had a big effect on him. Thanks to all those who answered the call and contributed!

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Joomla is an open source Content Management System (CMS) that some Publishers use to help build and maintain websites. Joomla allows 3rd party developers to build “extensions” that add functionality to their Platform.  We’ve developed a Joomla extension that makes it easy to create commission-earning deep links right from the Joomla editor.

Here’s how to use Link Lookup in Joomla:

1) Install the two files, generator.xml and generator.php, in the content/plugins directory for your Joomla installation.
2) Go to Extensions/Plugin Manager and enable the plugin called LinkShare Link Generator.
3) Add your LinkShare token by clicking on the name of the plugin.
This will pull up the “edit” page. The token field should be on the right.
4) Add a link to your posting by adding the link between curly brackets in a format like this:

{ls id=http://this.is.the.url/for/the/merchant/page-you-want-to-create-a-link-to}

Download LinkShare Link Lookup for Joomla and try it out!

We have similar plug-ins forWordPress, and the Mac.

Ian Rosenwach, Product Manager

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