Amazon Associates Cuts Off Colorado Affiliates Over New Sales Tax Law

by Dollars.
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MC900189265[1] A new Colorado law to force Amazon to collect sales taxes resulted in Amazon Associates being terminated in Colorado.

The law was crafted to get around a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that states that a retailer need collect state imposed taxes on sales only if the retailer has a significant enough physical presence in the state, or a “nexus” of business in the state. Since Colorado can not directly compel Amazon to collect sales taxes, the state instead passed a law deliberately making it nuisance to do business with residents of Colorado.

Technically, whenever a person makes an online purchase, they still owe the sales tax due on that purchase even if the online vendor does not collect the tax directly. The customer is legally obligated to voluntarily forward the appropriate sales tax payment directly to the state, which, of course, never happens. The new Colorado sales tax law states that for any sales made via Colorado residents who participate in the Amazon Associates program to customers whose purchases are shipped to a Colorado address, Amazon must mail a letter to the customer stating the amount of sales tax the customer owes.

Colorado Sales Tax Law Designed To “Get Around” The Constitution

What makes this new Colorado law so slimy and underhanded is how disingenuous it is. Both the State of Colorado and Amazon know that sending these letters will not result in any significant increase in the amount of sales taxes collected by the state. In fact, the only real effect of the legally required letters will be to waste more paper, and increase the cost of doing business in Colorado for Amazon. The legislation’s supporters hoped the law would be such a burden that Amazon would choose to just collect the sales taxes for the state instead. In other words, the legislature deliberately passed a law that they didn’t want anyone to follow in order to make companies do something that the state cannot legally force them to do. It’s a trick worthy of the sneakiest con artist.

The law is also decidedly self-serving since it only compels online retailers to notify residents of how much state sales tax they owe. There is no requirement to notify residents of any city or local taxes that they might owe on their purchases!

Of course, Amazon has no intention of implementing such a burdensome procedure. To track which sales were made via Colorado based Amazon affiliates, and then match those sales to shipping addresses in Colorado, and then to mail those residents letters telling them how much state sales tax they owed, would be a big logistical challenge, even if the company did want to comply with the law.

Instead, Amazon responded the same way it has in the past, by terminating the participation of Colorado residents in the Amazon Associates program, just like it did in Rhode Island and North Carolina. (A similar law in New York was challenged with a lawsuit. Presumably, Amazon would end its New York program if they lose the lawsuit.) Colorado lawmakers seemed surprised or dismissive of the program termination in their state, calling it a publicity stunt. Apparently, these legislators can’t be bothered to research the laws they are passing before they vote on them or they would have seen what happened in the other states that did the same thing.

Posted in: Online Writing Tips.
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Wedding DJ Costs or How Much Power Does It Take To Rank High In Google Search Results?

by Dollars.
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wedding-dj-dance-playlist-graphic At the request of a friend I recently wrote up an article about the wedding DJ business. More specifically, I wrote a Hub about wedding DJ prices. The idea was that since so many people want to know what a wedding DJ costs, but so few DJ companies actually will say on their websites what they charge to DJ a wedding reception or other event, that he could refer them over to the webpage with the data.

The wedding reception DJ rate piece did pretty well while it sat on top of some of the topics pages on HubPages itself and generated a little bit of traffic organically. However, the article doesn’t really show up anywhere in main Google search results pages. The SERPs are, of course, loaded with long-established webpages that ironically, do not answer the question most people are asking when they search for wedding DJ prices or wedding DJ rates or something similar.

Instead these searches return webpages with information about wedding DJs who will do a wedding reception for you, but not pages that actually have any price or rates on them. In fact, most of the top search results flatly state something like, contact us for rates, or fill out this form for a rate quote.

This is one of the area where Google and all Internet search engines fail miserably. They are unable to detect the difference between a webpage that actually lists rates or prices and one that points you somewhere else for that same information. This is obviously a very tough programming challenge both from the perspective of being able to discern when someone wants actual pricing information, and from the perspective of knowing which content delivers an actual rate or price. Then, there is the even more difficult task of determining which pages best serve the searcher. For example, a highly regarded webpage about wedding reception DJs that does not list a solid dollar amount might still be a better resource than a thinly populated webpage with dollar signs all over it, but filled with less than useful information.

Out of curiosity, I have typed up this post which both exceeds the commonly excepted minimum word requirement to be taken seriously by Google (300 words) and that has two links with different anchor text to the webpage in question. The homepage of this site sits at around a 3 on the fabled PageRank scale based on various toolbars, so we aren’t talking about huge fire power, but it has been known to push up a page into the top 10 results for lesser used keyword searches. Thus, we’ll get to see two things. One, how far, if at all can these links push my Hub (which stands on the shoulders of HubPages and its "authority") and, two, what alternate searches might be less competitive, and potentially more profitable?

Stay tuned, or just grab the Make Money Writing Online RSS Feed.

Posted in: Earn Money Online.
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Finding Profitable Niches Keywords

by Dollars.
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earn-money-online-graphic Sometimes, finding profitable niches can be tougher than it seems. Just because a keyword has a lot of searches, like wedding DJs, or low competition, doesn’t mean it is going to be a money maker. High cost-per-click, or CPC, can be helpful, but there still have to be enough clicks to make it work out. Just remember the old joke about the kid selling his artwork on the sidewalk for $1 million each. A guy comes by and says, "You won’t sell very much that way." To which the kid replies, "Yeah, but I only have to sell ONE!"

It’s a funny joke, but it is also illuminating to the Internet marketer looking to make money by writing online. Too many writers see big dollar signs when they find a keyword paying $25 per click or more. That sounds great on paper, but if you only get one click per month, that’s a whopping $25 of monthly income. You won’t be quitting your job to live on passive income at that rate.

On the other hand, if you have decent traffic to a $1 CPC keyword and get 5 clicks every day, that works out to $150 of monthly revenue. That is a much better deal even though the CPC is lower for that particular keyword.

Of course, knowing which of the above scenarios will come true at any CPC or CPM is tricky. Sometimes everything looks perfect: high-paying CPC, high monthly searches, low competition, and still, it turns out to be a bust.

One of the easy ways to find out how a keyword will play out is to write a good quality page about the keyword. Use several variations throughout the post in order to "trap" as many keyword searches as possible. The goal is not to rank #1 for any particular keyword (not yet, anyway), but rather to see if there is any value in chasing the rankings for some or all of the well researched keywords you have discovered.

If the topic fits in with one of your established websites, put it on there and link it from as many places as possible. Then, sit back and watch your Google Analytics. See which keywords show up not just for visitors to the website, but from those who actually end up clicking on ads. Don’t forget, some ads pay high CPC because the get very low click volumes. That makes the high pay rates cheap overall for advertisers. You will earn higher AdSense income with ads that get 10 clicks per day and pay $0.50 than ones that pay $3.00 per click but are lucky to net even one click per day.

If the topic does not fit in with one of your existing websites, consider writing an article for another website like HubPages. A content article based website like this one gives you some built in traction for getting your page indexed quickly and seeing what the traffic looks like. If it looks like you have a winner, then you can put the time and effort into building a new site around the profitable keyword you found. If it looks like a dud you can move on to your next promising keyword.

Don’t forget to check back in with your published article every once and a while. Sometimes, pages build up momentum and become profitable after being published for a longer period of time.

Posted in: Earn Money Online.

Earn Money With HubPages Tips

by Dollars.
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Back when I first became a professional freelance writer, I spent a lot of time reading about how to make money online. I read pretty much every big make money online blogger out there and a lot of the smaller ones too. In fact, one of the reasons I started Make Money Writing Online was that almost all of those blogs, websites, and experts were focused on making money on the web with tricks, secrets, link building, SEO, article spinning, and so on. Very few, if any of them took the angle of how could a talented writer use their skills to earn money with writing online.

That does not mean that none of those sites about earning money online had nothing to offer. In fact, quite the opposite. Many of the search engine optimization tips, the keyword tricks, and the explanations about what makes money, what doesn’t make money, and how to get started earning money online, were very useful to helping me get my freelance writing business started. In addition, those same tips gave me some insight into how to build my own websites and online properties in a way that could generate passive income for me in order to compliment how much I earn as a freelance writer.

To Make Money With HubPages Do All The Steps

One of the more intriguing writers I used to read went relatively quiet not long after I found them and read through their massive archive of writing information and web income strategies. More accurately, they created a for-pay service called the Keyword Academy which based on what I have heard is relatively successful. And, while I certainly do not begrudge anyone who finds a way to earn money from their talents, I do miss having more frequent updates from them, primarily because I learned that what is said on that website tends to be true, whether it is popular or not.

Court (who I go back and forth about whether male or female, so forgive the pronouns if I get them wrong) turned me onto HubPages last year with the idea that writing a critical mass of good Hubs could:

  • a) Provide useful backlinks to other webpages and properties in order to increase their value and visibility in search engine results pages, or SERPs;
  • b) Actually provide their own revenue stream via the AdSense sharing program that HubPages uses to allow authors to monetize their earnings.

Apparently Court has gotten some criticism / complaints / whiners about whether or not HubPage is a good way to earn money online. In response, she posted an article titled How to Improve Your HubPages Earnings. Her primary contention in the article is that too many people do not do “all of the steps” required to generate profits from HubPages.

The best part is the analogy used of driving around the block. Basically, if you drive out of your driveway and turn right, you have drive to the next turn and then turn right again four more times before returning home. You cannot stop after fewer turns and expect to have accomplished your goal. If you stop too soon, your only real hope is to try and use hot girls to get more HubPages traffic.

Many writers trying to make money online by writing, whether on HubPages or elsewhere, Court says, stop before doing everything required in order to earn money with writing. It’s an interesting read, and if you are having trouble making money with HubPages, probably a good start.

However, like many make money online articles, it makes a lot of assumptions, and leaves out a lot of details. Not that is in any way insufficient. There is simply too much to cover in a single article of a reasonable length. Just covering the barest of basics about HubPages SEO Tips could take a handful of posts.

However, I thought I would help address one point and that is the issue of building links to promote your hubs. Don’t over think this. You aren’t trying to get your Hubs to rank #1 on Google for a hugely profitable keyword. (You should be doing that on your own websites instead of splitting the money with HubPages.) Remember that the whole point of using HubPages or eZine Articles or Squidoo or Associated Content and the like is to stand on the shoulders of their PageRank, so to speak. HubPages traffic volume gets hubs indexed fast without the writer having to do anything.

How To Link Promote Hubs on HubPages and Websites

In other words, you don’t need to build 900 backlinks to your Hubs in order to get anywhere. Frankly, if the topic isn’t too competitive, a dozen is enough to at least see what the Hub can do for you, or what it cannot do for you. Getting a dozen backlinks is not as hard as it sounds. You should already have a blog or website for your writing business. Throw a post up with some links there. Then add some bookmarks to Delicious or whatever you like, and then link some of your other Hubs to each new Hub and vice versa. Build a Squidoo Lens with links back to your Hubs and you should be well on your way.

At this point, watch your statistics and see which sites are attracting hits. Go out and give those sites another dozen links. Tweak the sites that are not getting any traffic and see if you can get them to build up some numbers. Once you have traffic, start watching your AdSense reports to see which hubs are generating revenue and then build secondary hubs that are related. Make sure to interlink them all.

Now, this won’t make you rich fast, or even earn $1,000 a month with HubPages, but it will give you a taste of what you can do, and that is what will push you to do the rest of those steps. A hub that I punched out with little research and just ten or so links about the best Chicago pizza now generates earnings despite having been all but abandoned months ago.

Once you see a hub generating $7.14 a day in AdSense earnings, it’s actually hard to NOT do more to make it perform better. Success is addictive. Don’t get caught up in an all or nothing mentality. Remember $10 a day in AdSense earnings is $300 a month in free money. Reinvest that money in your online writing business. Buy new domains, pay for better webhosting, get a notebook to write anyplace, anytime, whatever you need to keep going.

Before you know it, you’ll be making the decision about whether to quit your job and become a full-time Internet entrepreneur.

Posted in: Earn Money Online.
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