affiliate revenue Archive

Last week I posted a video from the affiliate meetup where Shawn Collins briefly discussed the discussions currently going on in the Texas Senate around taxing internet companies based on the companies having affiliates located in Texas. From what I gather, the issue is whether having an affiliate located in a state means that the company must pay taxes as if they are physically located in that state. Local merchants complain that Internet retailers are taking revenue from them because there is no tax which results in a lower overall price.

You may remember the same battle in New York back in late 2008. Online cash rebate service FatWallet recently moved 15 minutes away to a new state to avoid the same issue in Illinois.

David Gonzalez noted this morning, “The Texas Senate seems to have pulled a fast one. A senate bill was introduced yesterday (Fri) (regarding your basic affiliate nexus tax) and put on the agenda for first thing Monday morning. They’re playing a little dirty here.”

You can read more about senate bill SB 1798 on the Texas senate website.

Barry Harrell at the Statesman has a detailed explanation of the affiliate tax issues. He notes, “Amazon has said it will close its distribution center in Irving next month, following a demand from the Texas Comptroller’s Office for $269 million in uncollected sales taxes from 2005 to 2009.”

If you are interested in attending the senate discussion and/or testifying, check out the details on the meetup website.

This afternoon I attended the Affiliate Summit meetup in Austin. The Affiliate Summit monthly events take place around the world so you can locate the one nearest to you. The event included lunch and a talk by Affiliate Summit founder Shawn Collins. Unfortunately I got lost locating the pizza joint so I missed the lunch bit (of course as a real NY’er, I would never eat “Chicago” stuffed pizza, especially outside of Chicago).

I’ve embedded Shawn’s presentation below — the slides are somewhat hard to read in the video so download the slides here.

Shawn covers the following topics:

• Finding topics you care about
• How and where to find the best affiliate programs for your topic or niche
• Domain names and hosting
• The importance of patience

Lastly Shawn explained that instead of writing a book directly, he setup ExtraMoneyAnswer to create his book by blogging about how to make money online.
Continue reading “Shawn Collins on Affiliate Marketing for Newbies (video)” »

London-based Skimlinks announced today the beta release of their latest service, Skimwords.

We’ve covered SkimLinks several times before but if you are new to the service, here’s a simple description from my earlier post. Skimlinks provides a way to instantly turn all of your product links into affiliate links with no changes to individual content. You add one line of Javascript to your template and then, where Skimlinks has a relationship, the links automatically become affiliate links.

Skimwords is a bit different than the main Skimlinks product. The Skimwords service looks at the content on the page and creates links on-the-fly for products listed within the content. The goal is to drive additional affiliate sales through the newly-found product links. The service is similar to other in-text programs including Kontera and Intellitxt.

Skimlinks is looking for sites in the following categories to join their Skimwords beta: technology/electronics, sport/lifestyle, automotive and fashion.

Amazon ran a similar program several years ago — one line of Javascript allowed Amazon to automatically create affiliate product links from the text on a page. The Amazon service was closed about a year ago.

Check out our interview with Skimlinks CEO Alicia Navarro from earlier this year.

Last week London-based Skimlinks launched the SkimKit, a tool that helps publishers find products that have affiliate opportunities attached. Martin Bryant from Next Web has a good overview from the launch of the SkimKit service.

This morning I met with Skimlinks founder and CEO Alicia Navarro in NYC to learn more about her service and the new SkimKit launch. It was a great conversation because it combined a product demo/pitch with a good industry discussion.

We’ve covered SkimLinks several times before but if you are new to the service, here’s a simple description from my earlier post. Skimlinks provides a way to instantly turn all of your product links into affiliate links with no changes to individual content. You add one line of Javascript to your template and then, where Skimlinks has a relationship, the links automatically become affiliate links.

Alicia noted that one of the benefits (actually the main benefit) of using Skimlinks over signing up for affiliate programs yourself is that you will generally make more money because Skimlinks typically receives the highest commission levels while most affiliates will generally stay in the lowest bucket. Skimlinks takes a cut of the earned revenue (25%) but even with the split, you will most likely still earn more. You also only need to signup once with Skimlinks and then you can participate in all of the programs that Skimlinks supports – over 7,500 of them.

The SkimKit is an Adobe Air application that helps publishers find products for the stories they are writing. If you are familiar with how Zemanta helps you find links for your stories, the SkimKit does the same thing for products except that the SkimKit only shows products where there is an affiliate relationship.

The idea behind the SkimKit is to make it super easy for writers (especially teams of writers) to find product links to include in their blog posts and articles. The SkimKit also provides short URLs for sharing links in emails along with direct share links for Twitter and Facebook.

Skimlinks has grown from just Alicia to now 20 employees all based in London. Their widget is “loaded” to over 470 million unique visitors a month and the javascript that loads the Skimlinks service is loaded 300 times a second.

Also checkout Alicia’s guest post about building a startup in the UK.