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.

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.

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.

See more of Logan at www.LoganThompson.me

This is pretty late for an earnings update. My wife and I went to England and Paris from the 3rd to the 13th of November. At the beginning of November, I was too busy getting ready to be gone to blog much.
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October was about what I expected. I had been making most of my money from Yahoo Search Marketing paid search. As they were taken over by MSN Adcenter I saw a decline in profit.
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October 2010 internet marketing earnings totals:
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Total Spent:  $11,206.51
Gross Profit: $22,975.72
Net Profit:     $11,769.21
ROI:                105%
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We’ll see what happens in November. Right now, I’m expecting it to be similar to October. Being gone for half the month isn’t helping much. I’m now working hard though to boost earnings.

I was honored to be included in Jon’s affiliate interviews friday. Thanks Jon! If by some incredible chance you don’t already know who he is, he has a wonderful blog sharing the secrets of the internet money making universe. Check it out. The interview I gave is an 18 minute long video. He has lots of questions. I tried to keep it short.
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Yesterday, I got a pile of emails…. my phone was ringing. I didn’t get one bit of regular work done. Couldn’t even get this blog post out. A contributing factor is that my entire family has a cold. I just want to stay in bed.
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So if you’re curious about the technical details of shooting the video for that interview read on. Warning!! Boring stuff ahead. Disclaimer: Those are affiliate links. I get paid a bit if you buy one of these things.
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I bought a Kodak Playtouch which shoots HD video. It worked OK as I shot a few videos for work and personal, but after less than 2 hours recording it failed. Screen freezes up and nothing works. You have to take the battery out to turn it off. I returned it for that reason. So I don’t recommend purchasing it. To be fair though, the product was only just released, and a firmware upgrade would probably have solved the problem.
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Anyway, I had never shot or edited HD video before. I wound up buying Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 10.0 after trying 4 other editing programs I already had. Nothing could handle the larger file sizes.  Also, note that I first tried Sony Vegas 9 and it didn’t work for some reason. But 10.0 worked great. It’s pretty impressive software with a lot of capability.
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Then in order to send the file to Jon and his crew I had to shrink it down from the initial 4GB to 1.2GB. It needed to be under 2GB to upload to Vimeo.
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Good news for the future, my wife just bought a Canon Rebel T2i. With extra lenses and cases it wound up being about $1550 all together. It’s a regular camera, but has a reputation for shooting superb HD video. It even has an external microphone jack making for better audio. I’ll be using that for future video blog posts.
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But if you’re on a budget consider a Flip Ultra HD. It’ll work best in environments without a lot of background noise though. It’s internal microphone has it’s limitations.

Reminder: There may be serious legal/tax consequences for applying for a separate TIN. It is my assumption that you may very well be required to file an extra state and federal tax return just like I will for each LLC I own.

Here is the link to the IRS application to apply for an EIN. If your are a home based affiliate marketer and have confirmed through your own research that you want a TIN without getting an LLC, then the process is this:

1. Visit the IRS EIN application page

2. Click ‘Begin Application’

3. Probably click ‘Sole Proprietor’ unless you are a partnership or something. Note that this is the same form for people who just filed for an LLC and need an EIN to go with that LLC. That’s how I found out about it.

4. Click ‘Sole Proprietor’ again, assuming that it applies to your situation.

5. Confirm your choice for ‘Sole Proprietor’

6. Probably choose ‘Started a new business’ although other choices may apply to some.

7. Fill out your current Name, SSN etc.

8. Continue. That’s as far as I can instruct you as it’s not a process I completed myself. Again, I remind you that it is not my advice that you do this. I just wanted to inform some people that the option exists. My advice would be for you to establish an LLC.