One thing about the affiliate marketing world. It changes constantly…

What worked well last month, last year can suddenly stop working.  You have to really keep up on what is going on.  Really track all your efforts to see if they are still earning you money.

An offer or niche can be hot and just die off.

Your CPA offer or merchant can change the rules at anytime.

Don’t give up.

Find something new to market and change your ads and links.

So Amazon is basically at war with the states that want to force them to collect sales taxes if they have affiliates in a particular state.  Up til now collecting sales tax was only required if a company had a physical presence in that state.

In the growing search for more money.  Several states have made laws that say simply having affiliates that live in a state is now considered a physical presence.  Even if the affiliates don’t sell anything to local residents.  The states want sales tax collected for all sales to residents that Amazon has.

This is a big burden for any company.  Which is why they don’t want to have to collect and keep track of taxes everywhere.  I can see their point, it is cheaper for them to simply ban affiliates who live in Colorado, North Carolina and New York.

It is a dangerous road once it gets rolling, all the states will try to do this for all companies.

What can you do?

I have seen some good suggestions…

A Nevada corporation- pretty inexpensive and gives you an address and bank account in Nevada.  A low tax state!

A mail forwarder address in another state- Don’t know how legal this is but it should work

Use a friend or family members address in another state.

Change your affiliate merchant.  Commission Junction has some other companies who offer the same products.  But you do lose the name recognition of Amazon.  This helps sales that is for sure.

One more thing to think about.

Remember to build your websites into assets. With good content for the niche and make product offers secondary and quickly interchangeable.  In case you have to change what you are marketing.

Your website will still be valuable if you haven’t overbranded it for one specific merchant.  All your work to get backlinks and build SEO traffic will still work if you have some good content by itself.

Once you have traffic, you can monetize in any way.

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