Wiseaff

Virginia Retailers Fighting with Affiliates

A recent Retail Merchants Association Newsletter gives us a more clear look at the opposing lobby's view point of SB 660 in Virginia.  What we like to call the "Advertising Tax Bill" and they like to call "The Amazon Loophole" legislation.

Today the bill passed the Senate 28-12, clearly showing that "their message" that this bill closes a loophole that enables Amazon and other large Internet retailers to avoid paying sales taxes on transactions occurring in Virginia. (The back and forth posted on GoReston.com is telling)

The newsletter though clearly shows that they don't understand affiliate marketing or the impact that this bill will have on Affiliates.  Here is what they say about the opposition:

The opposition, the Northern Virginia Technology Council and AOL, are pushing the message that the bill will cause loss of jobs for affiliates. Affiliates are those who have banner ads on their sites that direct consumers to sites such as Amazon.com.  The VRF contends that no job loss will occur IF those Virginia based internet retailers will collect the sales tax when they have a retail transaction with Virginia consumers.

That is a big IF!  It hasn't happened in other states:

• Overstock Drops Affiliates in NC, RI, HI, and CA
• Amazon cuts Rhode Island, Hawaii Affiliates – Is California Next?
• Amazon Ends Affiliate Program For North Carolina
• Another Internet retailer cuts RI ties over tax

So IF these Internet Retailers act differently in Virginia than they did in ALL the other states who passed similar legislation, THEN the Virginia affiliate companies won't be affected and income and jobs won't be lost.

Affiliate Marketers place advertisements for the Internet retailers, they are not party to any transactions in or out of the state.

This bill is about trying to pass a law that will try to force companies who do not have a physical location in Virginia to pay sales taxes on all transactions in the state by trying to say that their affiliate marketing relationships they have with Virginia affiliate marketing companies makes them a Virginia Retailer.

Many large Internet retailers have already put their Virginia affiliates on notice, if this bill passes, they are going to terminate those affiliates to avoid paying this tax. 

So, while I am all for having a level playing field for Virginia companies, I don't think this bill accomplishes that, and I am concerned about the thousands of Virginia companies who may get harmed in the process or be forced to move out of the state.

Perhaps the confusion lies in the broad use of the term "AFFILIATE" and if legislators understood more about affiliate / performance marketing companies, they would be excluded. 

This Whack-a-Mole game with Amazon is a slippery slope.  If using Affiliate Marketing relationships doesn't work and Amazon cuts their ties with affiliates what is next?  Advertising Agencies?  Direct Mailers?  Consultants?  Resident Employees?

Hopefully this bill will stop in the Congress, or be seriously amended like they did in Colorado to remove Affiliate Marketing Advertisers.  If not, we hope that Governor McDonnell will stay true to his words.

Commission Junction give affiliates more email control ....FINALLY!

For a while we (along with others) have been telling CJ that we need more control over the email notices that are distributed through their system.

There are certain emails I want to get personally, but I couldn't do that for fear that my inbox would instantly fill up with newsletters and offers to join programs.

We spoke with CJ about this in the past and again at Affiliate Summit West last month.  Either this was already in the works, or they are just really quick! 

When I logged in today I saw the following:

Get too much email?

Clients can login to update their communication preferences with our upgraded Mail Settings tab.

It’s easy – simply head to the Mail > Mail Settings tab.
 

So I checked it out.  When I got to the settings I found this screen:

 

So now I can filter what emails go to each email address based on roles.   This is a great enhancement and one that is long overdue!

So let me say to the whole CJ Crew......"Thank you for listening!" 

Adam Viener Interviewed by Rebecca Blacksmith on Leaders Portfolio in DC

I just wanted my Wiseaff.com readers know that your chief Wiseaff was interviewed on a local Washington DC Radio talk show.

The show will air at 11am on Wednesday February 3rd on Washington DC’s business talk Radio 1260AM WWRC, and then be available online at LeadersPortfolio.com thereafter. 

In this interview I talk about how I started Imwave, what effect the economy has had on performance marketing, and leadership.

I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Adam

P.S. I also posted some addional information about the show and my expericnce with Rebecca Blacksmith on the imwave blog.

Amazon Tax (Affiliate Tax) Revenue Generator or Small Business Killer?

I've been watching the issue of the "Amazon Tax" ever since it snowballed through New York.  In some cases, it has passed and in other cases (either publically or privately) it has been defeated.

For those of you who may not know what I mean here's a recap: 

Online businesses are ONLY required to collect sales tax in states where they have a physical presence, called a Nexus.  Recently New York, in its infinite wisdom has stated it is losing hundreds of millions of dollars because of sales to online businesses like Amazon.

As such, the state legislature has redefined nexus to not only include brick & mortar stores, but also to affiliates.  Affiliates are in essence commission only sales reps...they are small business run by entrepreneurs trying to make a living.  And guess what they pay TAX to the state on their income.

When NY enacted this tax, Amazon, instead of figuring out how to collect sales tax, simply discontinued working with all of its New York affiliates.  The same has happened in other states as well. 

Result?? 

1) States see $0 - THAT'S ZERO - new tax revenue from the people it went after like Amazon, Overstock etc.

2) Small Business is hurt badly since they can no longer market for companies like Amazon and Overstock which results on lost revenue.

3) States sees LOWER actual business revenue from these Affiliate Businesses who would pay taxes on business income.

There are a couple of thoughts and realizations I have come to:

1) Politicians tend to operate in sound bites and press releases.  What do I mean by this?  Well it's easy to propose a *new* tax when you are crying foul against a large retailer like Amazon and holding up a sign with a Giant Number like $220 Million.  The reality is that once these taxes pass, Politicos are not accountable to what the end result it.  Did it work, Did it hurt small business?  We don't know.  They don't go back and look at results.

2) Taxes are VERY RARELY repealed once passed.

From the Providence Business News:‘Amazon tax’ has not generated revenue

The Performance Marketing Association has done a good job of fighting these issues when they pop up, but one begins to wonder......should we be fighting this one state at a time?   The current administration has put focus on small innovative businesses perhaps there is a course of action there?

Excerpt from state of the Union 2010

 ....is there a way to take this fight to the federal level and oppose it ONCE rather than 50 times?  Perhaps our industry needs to engage some policy experts.  One thing is certain, with almost all 50 states facing huge budget deficits, this issue is sure to raise its ugly head everywhere this year. 

Bottom line:  This tax hurts (and is some cases Kills) small business. 

How to Recruit Super Affiliates - From Affiliate Summit West 2007

Here is an old panel discussion I moderated in 2007 on how to Recruit Super Affiliates.  Enjoy!

Twitter House Cleaning - Purging my Follower List and InBox

I decided my Twitter account had gotten out of control and had heard about others doing some house cleaning of their twitter accounts.  I decided to look into it.  Here is my problem.  I setup an auto follow tool some time ago, and can't remember where I had done it.  My follower list was over 3k people and my twitter timeline was useless.  Here is what I did.

1. Cancel AutoFollow - Since I couldn't remember which service was doing my auto-follow for me, and this is what created the bulk of my problem, I decided to just change my password.  Once I did this, I had to go back to the tools I was using like hootsuite and tweetdeck and give them my new password.


2. Purge my Twitter Follow List - I used a free service called UnFollowAll to purge out my follower list.  I had to run the tool several times to get it all done.  But you can't beat the price.  I have heard others paying $25 for this service.


3. Purge my Twitter In Box - The other problem with AutoFollow is your inbox can quickly get filled up, I used a free bookmarklet called DM Whacker to clean out my inbox and sent mailboxes.  With over 800 messages this would have taken me a while to do by hand.

Now I have a fresh twitter account and can begin to follow the people whose tweets I really want to see.  I still see all the messages that include @adamviener in the messages, so if you think I really should be following you, hit me up that way!

See you on Twitter!

Adam

Another Reason to Shop Online this Year

As if you needed one more reason to shop online this year, other than the great deals and web coupon codes you can find at sites like dealzam and twitter feeds like @dealtwit <grin>, now you have to watch out for sales reps doing dance routines like this microsoft store:

Tracking202 Acquired

Congratulations to Steven and Wes on their recently announced sale of their Tracking202 product!

Great job guys!

Google Forgiveness... hard to achieve?

A few weeks ago I received an email from Google suggesting that 1 or more of the ads in an AdWords account were disapproved.  In looking at that account, I discovered that they were showing disapprovals for ads that had been deleted.

As anyone who works with Google knows, their notices can be somewhat ominous and sometimes suggest that upon any further disapproval that your account will be suspended.

Obviously concerned, I contacted them and was told that this notice was sent regarding ads that were disapproved in 2007.  

Now, I'm no rocket scientist, but I think it's now 2009…almost 2010?  Why in the world would I be getting this email for ads that had been disapproved 2 + years ago?

I dig further......

So these ads were in fact disapproved in 2007, and paused, where they sat until May 2009.  In May 2009, they were deleted (well at least the best delete you can do in AdWords).

So here it is 5 months later and the ads were: paused 2 years ago, DELETED 5 months ago....why in the world would the policy team even be looking at these in a review process?  They are gone, deleted, not active.  Well here is the response I got:

…Thank you for your email. I understand that you are concerned about deleted ads resulting in a policy warning. Please be assured that our policy team and I understand completely that the ads from 2007 that violated policies were later deleted.

Our policy team reviews accounts based on past disapprovals: the fact that you paused and deleted the ads from 2007 does not erase the fact that the ads were submitted and violated policies in 2007.

If our policy team did not look at all disapprovals, and only looked at undeleted disapproved ads, then it would create a situation where advertisers could violate policies and effectively delete the fact that they violated any policies.

Our policy team will look at the full history of an account when issuing suspension warnings as well. The fact that two years have elapsed since the violation does not remove the policy violation from our policy team's consideration….

Never mind, that this was 2 years ago,

Never mind that the ads have since been deleted

Never mind that there have not been not other since then

Apparently any disapproval you may received, just sits out there…forever and at any time, paused, deleted or not, you can be forced to pay for past sins. 

BlogProfitz Launches - Auto Monitizing your Blogs

I was intrigued when I heard about the new BlogProfitz application, a tool that promises to combine affiliate marketing and blogging to create an automated site around specific topics and themes.

In addition, BlogProfitz leverages the power of on-line video(YouTube), RSS feeds and over 15,000 articles (direct from our own private archive and covering hundreds of topics) to ensure your web properties are bigger, more helpful and more powerful to your readers than any other websites in your niche.

I have found in the past that tools that promise to automate content, don't often live up to their hype, the best way to generate content for your site is to create it yourself, put your passion behind it, and that is what drives real long term value. 

As with most things in life, the amount of effort you put into things typically determines the amount of returns you generate.

That being said, I'm always interested in testing new applications to see what people are creating and if there might be ways to leverage tools to increase my business.  I have found interesting ways to utilize rss to blog tools for my blogs and those of others to auto-generate ideas and then create content around them.

So I decided to take BlogProfitz for a test drive.  (I apologize for the affiliate links, but heck, I am an affiliate, and you are reading an affiliate blog, so if you decide to take the software out for a test drive on your own, we would appreciate if you used our link, if not you can head over to blogprofitz.com directly).

First BlogProfitz only currently works with WordPress blogs, they are not too hard to setup, I learned how to do it and had a WP blog up and running in about 20 mins.  I grabbed an old domain we had through a domain expiration auction, shopping-today.com, and started playing with BlogProfitz.

I had some problems with their blog templates, but easily found another one on-line that I liked and it was easy to connect it to my blog, and give it some categories to start posting too. With some quick keyword research to find out what people were typing in to search engines along with the term "shop for", I choose Ugg Boots, Stiletto's, Strollers, and Panties.  

When setting up the product, video, and content feeds, I was a little disappointed that many of the CJ merchant's data feeds were missing.  I know Zappos and Shoes.com, for example, have good feeds, and they would have been a good fit for the shoe categories.  I was able to find some other merchants that had product, and in about 24 hours the content started rolling in.

Like most systems that pull from data feeds, you have the crap in crap our problem.  Many of these data feeds need to be scrubbed before being utilized, who would buy this Graco Stroller?  The content choices can be a little strange too, I'm not sure what this Motorcycle Weekend Triphas to do with ugg boots, the term ugg isn't even in the article.  The program seems to have a similar problem when it tries to match up youtube videos, for a category I setup on Versace, it pulled this Diss Video.

It is still too early to tell if the site will get any significant traffic, but even if it did get some traffic, I am not sure I would get too many repeat visitors.  Perhaps a broad shopping site wasn't the best route to go, but works for testing.

I do think that if you have a niche blog around a specific product or product category, that BlogProfitz could be an excellent tool for finding and bringing in some good content and product information, but I would set it to post in draft mode, and then do some work cleaning things up, adding your own comments and personality, and then you might have some real good content that your readers would love. 

BlogProfitz just launched today, and will be open for 1,000 members.  So if you want to give it a spin, don't wait around.  Their trial deal lets you monetize 3 bogs for $19 / month.

Let me know how it turns out!

BlogProfitz is brought to you from Scott Trimble, creator of the Affiliate Marketing PHD and following tools:

• StoreStacker - build a complete, commission ready affiliate web site, featuring thousands of targeted products, relevant articles, and related videos.
• The Content Club - 500 freshly written, researched and keyword targetted articles monthly.
• BlogSolution - advanced blogging / pinging / SEO tool

• RSS Evolution - produce a full website from any RSS feed.

• ContentSolution - create thousands of unique articles for any niche or market,
• RSSMagician - an RSS feed re-writer to avoid duplicate content.
• VideoStacker - FREE software enables anyone to quickly and easily add powerful, niche videos to any website or blog. Any topic, any market.