Spelling errors might be costing you half of your sales.

I’ve been a closet spelling/grammar/punctuation nazi for years. When I read a blog post or sales page with what I consider significant errors, my mind is completely sidetracked. I stop thinking about your message, and start thinking about what needs to be fixed. If you have grave errors on your page, I think you are stupid and sloppy and won’t consider buying anything from you.

I know lots of affiliates with poor skills are successful, but you’d be more successful if you eliminated these mistakes.

I’m not the only one. This article from the BBC inspired me to finally say what I think. The article alleges that in one case, they saw sales double after correcting an error on a sales page. Of course, one split test is inadequate, but I’m confident that there is truth to it.

What are you going to do about it? If you want to improve yourself and your sales, follow my affiliate link here and educate yourself.

Amazon book: Grammatically Correct: The Essential Guide to Spelling, Style, Usage, Grammar, and Punctuation

P.S. I don’t claim to be perfect. I overuse commas and I know I sometimes make other writing mistakes.

It was inevitable that CA would pass this tax meant to increase tax revenue. As misguided as it is, you can’t expect a bunch of doddery old politicians to understand the economics of the internet.

Fuck California for taxing even more money from it’s people!

Fuck Amazon for dropping 1000′s of affiliates while still accepting traffic and sales from their sites. I think it’s often overlooked that there are countless online businesses which people have spent years building. These websites may have large volumes of visitors flowing through them to Amazon.com. Amazon is still accepting all the sales generated by affiliates but isn’t paying those affiliates for their hard work. It’s outright theft! I’m angrier at Amazon than California.

Enough ranting. Time to move on. Here in Colorado we faced the same thing many months ago. I remember reading news stories of Colorado based affiliates moving out of state to save their businesses. I didn’t move, but I still control an active Amazon affiliate account and they pay me from time to time. Here’s how:

1. Establish an out of state LLC or similar entity.

2. Use their registered agent service to forward your mail.

3. Open a bank account in the company’s name. It can still be a CA bank account.

That’s about it….and it’s a legit workaround. The LLC is a legal entity similar to a person for the purpose of opening an Amazon account. The LLC is the affiliate. You are merely an employee of said company. Amazon pays the company, then the company pays you. Because the LLC isn’t in CA, you shouldn’t have any troubles.

Now, where do you go from here? Well, out of state LLC’s have been very popular in Delaware, Nevada, and Wyoming. I’ve done some research on it and like Wyoming the best. Delaware is best for companies with stockholders. Nevada is OK but has occasionally thought about weakening some of it’s strong points. Wyoming has no state income tax and has never had legislation which threatened all the strong points of Wyoming LLCs.

I personally really like the “Wyoming Close LLC” entity and have 2 of them myself. The “Close LLC” is meant for family owned businesses and is well structured for estate planning. If you have lots of money, or plan on having lots of money, it might be a useful entity.

Remember that you need a registered agent service to forward your 1st class mail. They’ll forward your 1099′s and so forth. My personal experience is that the mail forwarding is marginal, so I won’t be recommending either of the 2 registered agents I currently use. But it still gets the job done.

Also, my experience of opening them was that it took FOREVER (7 weeks) with one of them. The other took about 2 weeks. If you have a serious Amazon business, you may want to pay to expedite service and would be well advised to  compare complaints that different agents have received. Check the Better Business Bureau.

I also shopped for the cheapest services over the long term and may be getting what I paid for. That being said, you can switch registered agents if you have trouble with one of them.

Here is an affiliate link to a pretty big outfit. I’ll get a few bucks if you choose these guys. But I haven’t tried them out myself. www.incorporate.com

P.S. It doesn’t have to be Wyoming. Maybe you have trusted friends or relatives out of state somewhere. You can set up an LLC in any state that Amazon still accepts. Several states have no state income tax. Costs vary state to state.

Did I leave something out? Got a question? Please comment and tell us what you think about the Ca affiliate tax.

March was a little better than the month before:

Total Spent:  $8,555.97
Gross Profit: $14,638.15
Net Profit:       $6,082.18
ROI:                        71%

So it’s not the bigtime, but I’m happy to have done better than the month before. On top of that, I basically took the month off.  I did do a little work here and there, but mostly I’ve been on sabbatical. I’ve been working on hobbies like brewing (honey mead, merlot wine, apple cider, dark beer), and fixing up an old RV I bought to take the family camping this summer. I’m really enjoying the intellectual challenges of fixing up the RV. This thing has been sitting for several years and has a lot of complicated systems that need to be brought back online. Maybe I’ll shoot some pics/video of it.

Anyway, I expect the next few months to be okay, but I’m planning on taking a lot of time off this summer to take the family to some camping events.

To your success!

Danger Brown

February has been the worst month yet for me in a long time. First some numbers:

Total Spent:  $6,580.07
Gross Profit: $10,242.92
Net Profit:       $3,662.85
ROI:                        55.7%

I really hate posting numbers like this. It’s embarrassing. But I made a commitment to share my results on this blog.

The 3 main reasons my income sucks right now:

1. I’ve been lazy

2. When I did work, I neglected my active campaigns to work on upcoming projects.

3. I have 5 kids and our 11 month old and my wife haven’t been sleeping well at night. So I wind up babysitting until 1 or 2 pm while my wife gets some shuteye. After that, I have trouble getting motivated feeling like the day is shot already.

I spent several days looking into and studying new niches and new traffic sources. Basically, it’s like I’ve been going back to school.

I spent about 7-10 days side-tracked working on developing a board game. Probably sounds silly to some people…. I’m a born entrepreneur and have always been easily side-tracked by whatever new idea infatuates me at the time. I’d put this as the #1 reason I’m not rich yet. A person really needs to focus on one thing to achieve great success in life. Learn from my experience. Focus on only 1 or 2 traffic sources and 1 or 2 niches.

To your success!

Danger Brown

My income is in the shitter. I’ll probably only net about $4K or so this month.

There are 3 reasons:

1. Normal cycles. I’ve been pushing financial related offers like payday loans. They always perform badly this time of year so I expected this to happen.

2. I’ve stuck with doing paid search and have started having trouble with MSN slapping campaigns or inexplicably not giving me volume. So I’ve had trouble scaling my campaigns.

3. I’m not building out new paid search campaigns right now. I’ve decided to switch to alternate traffic sources and new niches. Because I’m getting into doing completely new things, I’ve been spending time trying to figure out this new stuff and not doing things that will make me money today. Also, there will be a learning curve that’ll probably eat into my profit margins.

So you ask, “What is Danger going to do next?”

I’m thinking I’ll try some dating offers with small targeted media buys on individual sites. Later, after I understand media buys better, I’ll scale up with network and larger media buys and make a mountain of cash.

Why dating? Because it has the potential to go massive but also has low payouts which should allow for more efficient optimization of creatives, offers, etc. Example: A $30 payout diet rebill would require me to spend a bare minimum of $30 to test each new ad variation, but a $3 payout dating offer would require a minimum of only $3 per creative. So I figure with dating I’ll be able to throw a lot more shit at the wall and see what sticks.

Why small media buys? Because I’m sick of having a lack of control over my traffic. Most traffic sources involve a wildcard element. With search engine dependent traffic you can get a slap and be out of business in the blink of an eye. I know dating is big on Facebook, but they love to disapprove ads and even ban accounts over there. I figure that media buying gives the maximum amount of control over traffic and most especially traffic volume.

If you happen to know something about pushing dating offers via display, I’d love to hear from you (please comment). Right now I’m struggling to figure out the best sorts of sites to target.

January has been crap for me. It’s the worst month I’ve had since about 8 or 9 months ago.

Here are the totals for my January 2011 Affiliate marketing efforts.

Total Spent:  $6662.13
Gross Profit: $12,837.00
Net Profit:       $6,174.87
ROI:                        92.6%

Though I can make the excuse that my niche (financial) tends to crap out in the winter, I’d expected to scale things up to compensate for that. My MSN campaigns have suffered from several slaps and I’ve been trying to adjust my landing pages to keep MSN happy. Just about 7 days ago I implemented a change that has slightly hurt my ROI but has so far kept the slaps away.

I’m getting sick of these slaps and unpredictable volume. I’m getting real interested in moving into other traffic sources.

The first four clips are from the Affiliate Ball and the last video is from Shareasale’s party.

I rolled with some friends to a few other locations but didn’t think to take pictures most of the time. But of course, during the Affiliate Ball, there were something like 15 parties all at the same time. I shot these videos with my Motorola Droid X

An impromptu interview with Shoemoney at the airport in Las Vegas. It’s a nice overview of the newly launched Link Control. Initially, I messed up and uploaded the unfinished file with crappy audio. This version of the video is much improved.

OK folks. Here’s the big 2010 earnings update you’ve been waiting on the edge of your seat for. I spent about $114K and turned it into $229K. This is the most money I’ve ever made in 1 year and the first time I’ve had a 6 figure income. I’m pretty pleased with it, but not satisfied at all. I need to do much better in 2011.

4. Took my wife to tour England and Paris.

11. $2,000 extra applied to the principal owed on my mortgage. Plus $1k in supplies to put in a new drain field for the house.

In December vs November I’ve reduced my spending significantly and improved ROI from 65% to 98%. But due to having some campaigns slapped, I made a little less money overall. We’ll see how the slaps go over the next few months.

OK, so here are the totals for my December 2010 Affiliate marketing efforts.

Total Spent:  $8,205.50
Gross Profit: $16,297.00
Net Profit:       $8,091.50
ROI:                        98.6%

I suffered some slaps on my largest campaigns, so January is starting out slowly making only about $150/day net. Gotta hustle if I want to get back above $10K monthly.

Get ready! My total earnings for 2010 are in. Be watching for a new blog post with some decent numbers.