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.

Part 3:

Build a blog for each niche you are in.  Fill that blog up with great information on the subject matter.  At least put up 15 solid posts before you start sending traffic to it.

If you can continue blogging 2 or 3 times a week your blog will start getting search engine traffic on its own.

Add your opt-in form to the blog to get more subscribers.

After you have picked a niche, built your blog and website(reviews and info).  Using Pay per Click advertising is a great way to get instant targeted visitors.  Yes it does cost money but doing only free traffic methods takes a long time.  Before you spend months on that.

Send some PPC traffic to your site and blog to see if you get any conversions.  This is testing to see if it is worthwhile before you spend months or years on something.

Some PPC tips:

Treat each keyword phrase as a separate business.  You need a special landing page for each phrase that is optimized and has some content in order to get a good quality score from google. This will keep your costs down.

Be careful and set a low budget.  It is easy to burn money with PPC.  Start slow and don’t try to get 100′s of visitors a day from each keyword.

The last method I want to discuss is article marketing.

This is one great way to send traffic to your websites and blog. And it costs little or no money at all.  IT’S FREE.  But remember it is free for all so there is competition for almost any product or niche.  You have to do more work than the others to win the battle.

What is article marketing?  You find a list of keywords for your niche and start writing small articles on them.  Then you submit them to article directories like Ezinearticles.com or goarticles.com.  Small 400 word articles that talk about a problem and offers tips and advice on that problem.

These articles have a great chance of getting high ranking on search engines and driving traffic to your websites.  Free traffic from the bio box at the bottom of your article.

It is free to submit all the articles you want.

You just write and submit to a bunch of article directories.  The link in your biobox will send traffic to you and earn you commissions on autopilot.  They are little salespeople working for you 24/7.

Don’t try to sell in the article.  Keep them as tip or advice givers with a link to your site at the bottom.  Make them curious to learn more.  Make your biobox offer something really cool for them to at least take a look at your website.

On your site, make sure the first thing they see is your freebie and opt-in box.  Commonly called a squeeze page.

Once you get someone on your list, you can send them lots of free related info and this is the best part… affiliate product offers so you can make money while helping them solve the problem they have.  And get this, you can email them forever if you keep them happy.