I don’t know how this affects my status with merchants that have already terminated their association with me, such as Backcountry.com, but for now this hopefully means that other merchants will hold off on terminating affiliates.

On a side note, I recently received an email from an affiliate manager at AvantLink and one at Backcountry stating that they wanted to set up a special pay per click program to work with affiliates in states such as Pennsylvania. Here is an excerpt from the email:

Recently, AvantLink created the capability for Merchants such as Backcountry.com, to work with Affiliates on a Cost per Click basis. Ideally, they would work with you on a Rev/Share Model, but are restricted by the recent affiliate tax legislation that has been passed in your state and others. As a result, large Online Retailers including Backcountry.com, had to sever ties with Affiliates in these states. Luckily, Backcountry.com is now able to work with Affiliates outside a Rev/Share Model and would like to start working with you on a CPC Model. Through AvantLink, Backcountry.com is able to send you an agreed upon CPC rate – all tracking, payments, reports, etc. are the same as if you were a traditional Affiliate of Backcountry.com.

Sounds like a decent alternative, depending on what the CPC ends up being. It would basically make some of the my Avantlink ads the equivalent of Adsense or EPN – except that the CPC would be fixed.

However, I’m still waiting on the call from Backcountry, which was supposed to come earlier this past week. Perhaps the delay by the state of PA has changed the plans. Or maybe he just forgot to call. It would be nice to get back to promoting their products through my outdoor gear deal site – but either way, the site is starting to do quite well with other merchants that I’ve plugged in place of Backcountry.

And here is a copy of the press release from the state Department of Revenue:

HARRISBURG, Pa., Jan. 27, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — The Department of Revenue today extended the deadline by which remote sellers with physical presence in Pennsylvania must become licensed and begin collecting sales tax. These steps now must be completed by Sept. 1.

“We heard from a number of e-commerce businesses that companies are willing to comply with their Pennsylvania sales tax obligations, but our original Feb. 1 compliance deadline is impractical from operational and technical standpoints,” said Revenue Secretary Dan Meuser. “In the interest of being reasonable and respecting the difficulty of tailoring sales tax software to Pennsylvania’s complicated sales tax rules, we believe extending the compliance deadline is the fair thing to do.”

Meuser noted the Sept. 1 compliance deadline comes well before the next holiday sales season, reflecting an effort to enforce uniform sales tax collection and foster fair competition among e-commerce and brick-and-mortar businesses in advance of the busiest retail season of the year.

“This is the only deadline extension that will be offered,” Meuser clarified. “Businesses with Pennsylvania nexus that do not become registered and begin collecting Pennsylvania sales tax by Sept. 1 will face a variety of escalating enforcement options over time, including assessment, audit, lien or referral to a collection agency or the Office of Attorney General.

“It’s simply a matter of fairness under the existing law, and it’s essential that both e-commerce retailers with nexus and brick-and-mortar stores in Pennsylvania, many of which are small businesses employing thousands of Pennsylvanians with retail jobs, are treated equally.”

This deadline extension follows a Tax Bulletin issued Dec. 1, 2011, which explains existing sales tax nexus law for remote sellers, clarifying the law and the department’s authority to require e-commerce and other out-of-state sellers with physical presence in Pennsylvania to collect sales tax.

Sales and Use Tax Bulletin 2011-01 relies on in-state activity to establish nexus, as required by the U.S. Constitution, and provides examples of in-state activity sufficient to require sales tax registration and collection.

In cases where companies with nexus blatantly disregard the Tax Bulletin and their obligations to begin collecting sales tax, the department has the statutory authority to look back at least three years for audit and assessment purposes.

Companies with legal questions regarding establishment of nexus are encouraged to contact the department’s Office of Chief Counsel at RA-nexus@pa.gov or 717-787-1382.

Companies with questions regarding sales tax registration, collection and reporting requirements are encouraged to call the business tax Taxpayer Service and Information Center at 717-787-1064.

Media contact: Elizabeth Brassell, 717-787-6960

Related posts:

1. Pennsylvania Affiliate Marketers Just Got Screwed
2. Pennsylvania Affiliate Tax Law Update: What You Can Do To Help
3. Income Report November 2011 and the PA Affiliate Tax Law

Well I made it through another year of earning online passive affiliate income AND my blog is just over one year old (my first post was on Jan 13th of 2011)!

Although the year started out slow, it really picked up over the summer, but things kind of fizzled out around the middle of October. Since then, it has been a downward spiral – which is part of the reason that it has taken me so long to get around to writing this post. I was also out of town from Dec 28 to Jan 5, as I was visiting my Dad in Montreal, so I did not really have access to a computer while I was gone.

When I returned from my vacation, it took me quite awhile to get back into the groove. I actually enjoyed my time away from the computer, so it was kind of a slow process to get back into the swing of things and re-motivate myself to start working again.

As you’ve probably guessed, my December numbers were pretty bad and continued the downward trend that started in October. Let’s take a look, and then I’ll talk about the numbers and try to summarize my entire year, as well as look forward to 2012.

What’s Going On?

Without looking back at every month, I’m pretty sure this was my worst month of the year. I’ve mentioned in previous months that I need to diversify my income. Unfortunately that has not yet totally happened and the majority of my Adsense money is still earned from one site. That one site was Panda slapped in the middle of October (ok, I don’t know if it was Panda or not, but something bad happened) – and traffic has been declining ever since. January is shaping up to be even worse, so at this point I’m just waiting for a bottom, so that I can start my climb back up.

If you look at the Adsense income for my #1 site: In September of 2011 the site alone earned $597.66. In December of 2011, it earned a measly $172.61. That pretty much tells the story right there. I’m doing my best to throw some more links at the site and hopefully get it back onto the front page of google for my main keywords, as well as continue working on new sites.

Accomplishments in 2011

Despite the crappy news, I did spend a lot of time on my computer (just ask my girlfriend) so I did accomplish a lot in 2011, which will hopefully lead to some profits in 2012.

Started the Blog and Created an Ebook – Around this time last year I started this blog and I’m proud to say that I stuck with it for over a year. It has been a struggle at times and I have had some lapses, but I’m glad that I made it through at least one year. I’d previously attempted a blog about this same topic (nichestorenow.com) but I stuck with it for about a month before I blew it up.

In addition to writing the blog and attempting to track my own progress, I also wrote a short ebook which I give away for free on the site. The book is nothing ground breaking, but it still gives a nice incentive for people to sign up for my mailing list.

Created an Authority Niche Website – Following in the footsteps of Pat Flynn’s “nice site duel”, I created my own authority niche website, which has seen mixed success. I’ve reached the front page of google a few times for certain keywords and even #1, and then dropped back out and off of the front page. I’ve had some really good spikes in traffic and Adsense income, but nothing consistent. Regardless, I think it was a good learning experience, and something different from my other affiliate websites and smaller niche websites.

Created Several Deal of the Day Websites Using Avantlink – I’m big into outdoor sports – running, skiing, and surfing – so when I found the Avantlink affiliate website in 2011, I was happy to see that they featured many merchants that I’ve actually bought products from in the past (Backcountry.com, Whiskey Militia, SteepAndCheap.com, etc.) Once I dug a little deeper I found out that I really enjoyed working with Avantlink and all of the cool affiliate tools and resources that they have to offer. My favorite tool of all was the “deal of the day” feeds. This inspired me to create several daily deal type affiliate sites which have been moderately successful thus far. Despite the fact that Pennsylvania’s sales tax laws have caused some merchants to terminate their relationship with me, the sites are still up and running for the time being – as I was able to still find merchants to work with.

Created 5 new Adsense niche websites using Market Samurai – I’ve created many small niche website over the last 3 or 4 years, but I’ve never had as great as success as I would ultimately like to have. I decided to try to improve my keyword research skills, so I’ve been following some keyword strategies provided by the guys at Adsense Flippers to try to improve my Adsense income. You can read more about my efforts and the five sites that I’ve recently created here. I hope to have an update on these sites soon. They are coming along more slowly than I had hoped for.

Created an Authority Blog / Travel Guide About Pittsburgh – This was kind of a spur of the moment thing.  I got the idea after reading the Nerdy Nomad blog, which I found via the awesome income report leader board.  Kirsty earns a good income by creating local travel guides for various cities that she had lived in and then selling advertising spots and links throughout her site.  I decided to attempt the same thing by creating StuckinPittsburgh.com.  The site is a work in progress.  Thus far I only have Adsense adverts and some random Amazon links, but I’m having fun writing about different places to visit, drink, and eat in the Burgh.  If you ever plan to visit, check out my blog for some tips and ideas.  I actually have another Pittsburgh site in the works which I have not yet gone public with.

Goals for 2012

• I’d still like to earn $2000 per month and do it consistently.   I was steadily increasing for most of 2011 and came close, but I hit a downward spiral that I have yet to recover from.  I need to turn it around in 2012.
• Quit my day job.  This is the ultimate goal.  $2000 a month probably isn’t enough to live on for me, so I would need to meet and exceed goal #1.  But in order to meet the first goal, I might have to take a risk and first achieve goal #2.  Dive in head first kind of like Tom from Leaving Work Behind just did.
• Totally unrelated to online income, but I’d like to lose 15-20lbs and get in better physical shape.  I’m not over weight by any means and I keep in pretty good shape by playing sports.  But I’d like to start 2012 by getting into the best shape of my life.  At 6 ft, I think I should be around 180lb, rather than flirting with 200lbs.  It’d be different if I were covered in 200lbs of muscle, but I’m not.  So I’ve started the slow carb diet from Tim Ferriss’ book The 4 Hour Body AND I’ve started doing the Insanity workout DVDs with my girlfriend.  If all goes well, maybe I will do a followup post with my progress.  If you don’t hear from me, then I probably failed and I am sitting on the couch eating donuts and drinking beer.  Let’s hope that will not be the case

I think that wraps it up.  It was a fun year with some ups and downs.  Here’s hoping that 2012 will be just as exciting, with more ups than downs.  Good luck to you all.

Related posts:

1. Income Report January 2011
2. Income Report July 2011
3. Income Report June 2011

To clarify a bit from my previous post, this is not a new law, rather a new interpretation on an existing law. The state sent a bulletin telling all merchants that they have until the start of Feb 2012 to register to collect sales tax on all sales made by PA affiliates – which in turn has caused many merchants to terminate their association with PA affiliates. This has devastated many small online business and will most likely put some people out of business completely.

Personally, the only merchant that has dropped me to date is Backcountry.com and some other stores which are owned by Backcountry. This has affected sales on one of my “daily deal” sites, but only to a small degree because that site is still not getting much traffic yet. So far Ebay and Amazon have not taken any action, and I don’t think this law has any affect on pay per click advertisers such as Adsense (at least not yet).

If you are a PA affiliate, I urge you to follow the steps listed at the Performance Marketing Association website. You can also join this google group with more discussion on the topic.

In other vaguely related news, I started a new local blog about living in Pittsburgh. Check it out if you are from the area or thinking about visiting in the future.

Merry Christmas!

Related posts:

1. Income Report November 2011 and the PA Affiliate Tax Law
2. Pennsylvania Affiliate Marketers Just Got Screwed
3. Clickbank Update

I’ll start off by stating that I have achieved my original first goal! I’ve reached #1 in Google for the original keywords that I chose: “become private investigator” (I actually own the top 4 spots).

Edit: I took this screen shot on 12/2/2011, which is when I initially started writing this post.  I still do seem to own the top 4 spots, though it looks like some of my links have jumped around a bit.

I’m also currently #8 for “become a private investigator” (exact match search). Edit: I’m now up to #7.

If you remove the quotes and do a broad phrase search, I am still #1 for become private investigator and #6 for become a private investigator (not sure why I am #7 for the exact phrase and #6 for the broad search, but I’ll take it.)

My Mistake

However, if you read part 3 of my niche series, I realized that my original keywords were not as good as I thought and actually receive a very low exact phrase search volume per month. Incidentally, the broad phrase search does much better, so reaching #1 for that is still a pretty good achievement.

Revised Keyword Goals

The new search phrase that I am now going to target is “private investigator training”.  I am currently #6 for that phrase at the time of this writing (for both the exact phrase and broad phrase search).

Plugging this search phrase into Market Samurai gives us these numbers:

This phrase gets double the number of searches that the phrase “become a private investigator” gets. Since the Adwords CPC is half the amount, the doubled search traffic compensates for it and thus the monthly search engine value is about the same.

Finding and Writing Content

For a general reference on how to find good content for your niche website, start by checking out my article How to You Can Find Quality Content for Your Niche Website.

For this specific niche website I used various sources and methods to find and write my content. Similar to Pat Flynn’s security guard website, private investigators also have different training and licensing requirements per state, so this immediately gave me 50 article topics to write about. Ehow.com was a great research resource for this task, as I was able to find information on the requirements for all 50 states. I then rewrote the articles in my own words or in some cases I used the Best Spinner to help spin the articles so that they were unique.

Using Amazon Books to Get Ideas
One great method for finding topics for your articles is to search popular books on Amazon. In my case I found the book “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Private Investigating” for this example. Note that not all books will have this feature, but you should look for the text “Look Inside!” above the book’s thumbnail image.

This gives you a look inside at a select few pages of the book, including the table of contents. Actually in this case, it looks like you can read the entire book! But assuming you could only view the table of contents, this can be a great resource for finding ideas for new articles. Some chapters from this book that would make great articles for the website include: “Techniques of Interview and Interrogation”, “Moving Surveillance”, “Conducting Your Own Crime Scene Investigation”, and “Clues to Infidelity”.

In most cases you are probably not an expert on your particular niche site, so writing unique and informative content off of the top of your head is probably not an option. Therefore Google is a great tool for finding articles related to the chapter topics that you may have found in your Amazon books. Once you’ve found the articles, it’s then up to you to rewrite the content that you find or use a tool such as the Best Spinner to make the content unique. Two important things to keep in mind when finding and rewriting other people’s content:

1. Make sure you actually rewrite it! Copying the content word for word will be seen by Google as duplicate content and can potentially penalize your site.
2. If you do decide to spin the content, make sure that the spun content is still readable and makes sense! It is important that the actual content on your site is quality content and spinning software can spit out some real crap, if you don’t pay attention to detail and make sure it reads correctly.

Paying for Content
Some time ago, I wrote about using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to have content written. While this is a great way to find cheap articles, it is not usually the best quality of writing, so I would not suggest using it for your niche website (especially for a larger authority niche site). This type of cheap content is better used for article and blog marketing while building backlinks for your niche site, which I’ll discuss more in depth in the next part of this series.

The best place that I have found to pay for top quality content is without a doubt Elance. Many of the top writers on Elance make their living by writing as a full time job. You will definitely pay a premium for the articles that you find on Elance, but you will be assured to get well written, proofread, keyword rich content that will get the attention of your readers. Additionally, Elance is a great source to have a short report or eBook written, which can then be given away for free as an incentive to have users join your email list. (I’m currently tossing around the idea of having a short report written for BecomePrivateInvestigator.com so that I can begin compiling an email list.)

And finally, a site that I’ve just recently begun to use is iwriter.com. This is a newer site but I’ve found the quality of writing to be above average and the costs are reasonable.

But be warned.. Writers are rated on a scale of 1 to 5. When you post a job, you have the option of submitting to all writers, submitting to writers rated 4 or above, or submitting only to the top article writers (rated 4.8 or above). The price per keyword increases depending which group of writers you decide to submit to. You can pay as little as $3 per 500 words, up to $8 per 500 words if you choose the top writers. You also have the option to raise the price and tip writers, which will most likely get you the most attention for you article and probably the best quality writing. Also be prepared to reject some really poorly written / spun articles when you choose the minimum $3 articles. But once you have found a few good writers, you can post your jobs to those specific writers, and things move along pretty smoothly after that. The interface is very simple to use and you can fund your account quickly and easily with PayPal.

Summary

To date I’ve posted roughly 75 pages of content for my private investigator training website using all of the methods I’ve mentioned above. The majority of content was written by me, but I did pay for some of it toward the end in order to speed up the process.

Although it took a bit longer than expected, I did reach #1 in Google for my original keywords, so I am happy that was able to accomplish that goal. I am well on my way to reach #1 for my next set of keywords, and many of my long tail keywords are also beginning to rank very well.

In the next part of this series I plan to talk about the various methods that I’ve used to market my site and create backlinks to achieve the search engine rankings that I currently hold. Hopefully my findings will be helpful to you and will also carry over and help me with my next set of niche sites moving forward.

If I don’t write again in the next 2 weeks, have a Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays – whatever the case may be. I’ll be heading to Montreal from Dec 28th to Jan 4th, so you might not hear from my until after the New Year.

Related posts:

1. Can I Niche Duel Like Pat Flynn? – Part 3
2. Can I Niche Duel Like Pat Flynn? – Part 2
3. Can I Niche Duel Like Pat Flynn? – Part 1

Lately I’ve come across a few new blogs which have helped motivate me to start working harder once again. Plus these are all well written and interesting in one way or another. So with that said, here some of the blogs that I’ve been following of late.

Adsense Flippers

These are the guys you want to follow if you really want to focus on Adsense and learn how to grow an Adsense empire. I think I came across them from a recommended link on Twitter. Reading their blog has really gotten me back on track with trying to make more Adsense income.

Justin and Joe’s basic business model is that they do extensive keyword research and then whittle down that list to a manageable list of potentially profitable keywords. Then they get to work creating niche Adsense websites – keeping the ones that do really well and building them up to make even more money. The other sites that aren’t doing quite as well, they sell on Flippa or on their own website. Best of all, they share all of their methods for free. They’ve gone from making $30 in December of 2010 to $10,000 – $15,000 a month present day.

Favorite Post: Our Keyword Research Strategy
BONUS: Adam at Monthly Income Report (another cool new website) recently bought one of their niche sites and reviewed the entire process.

Tyler Cruz

I saw Twiends.com mentioned somewhere recently as a good source of finding new Twitter followers. I checked it out and somehow I ended up following Tyler Cruz (Ironically he recently wrote a post about gaining 10,000 twitter followers with the help of Twiends). After reading a few tweets, I ended up on his blog.

Tyler seems to be a jack of all trades. He makes money from his blog, as well as making money from other affiliate websites that he owns and from flipping some of his more successful sites. I like his stories because he is a risk taker. And to make a lot of money online, sometimes you have to spend some money and take some risks.

Favorite Post: Grasping Opportunities #2: How I Turned $2.3K Into $16.5K

Adem

I found Adem when he became a somewhat regular commenter on my blog.. Or maybe I commented on his blog first, I don’t really remember. I like Adem’s blog because I feel like we are pretty much in the same boat. We both work 9-5 full time jobs and just do the online income as a side gig for the time being.

However, unlike myself, Adem has only been doing this since May of 2011 (I started in 2008). He has already seen some relatively good success after only the first 3 months – and he has also experienced the roller coaster ride that is the world of Internet Marketing – as evidenced by his recent income report. While its always fun to follow the big, established guys that are making 5 figures a month, it’s also nice to get a fresh perspective from some of the newer guys on the scene.

Favorite Post: What I’ve learned after getting punished by Google

Niche Pursuits

It’s funny that when I started following other “make money online” blogs, I got so caught up in Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income blog, that I never really looked too far beyond it.

I found Spencer after following a link that was posted on Twitter from Adem above, and after reading through some income reports, I realized that Spencer is killing it almost as much as Pat. In fact, he’s currently #2 on the Monthly Income Report leader board.

Spencer actually quit his job in March and does IM full time. Similar to my recent post about my 5 new Adsense websites, he recently started a round of 20 new websites in August, so it has been fun to follow the progress of those.

Favorite Post: 5 Simple Adsense Layout Examples for Increasing Click Through Rates

So when I’m not working on my own niche websites, these are some of the blogs that I read to help keep me on top of my game. Did I miss any of your favorite blogs? Give me some ideas for my next post.

No related posts.

The concept isn’t new, but the process of making it work can be somewhat complicated if you aren’t a coder. There are several tutorials out there that explain how to do it, but to my knowledge I’ve never seen a WordPress plugin that makes it so simple.

I’ve been given the opportunity to check out a review copy of the new Facebook Viral Plugin, and that is exactly what this plugin was designed to do. Specifically you can easily hide content and then allow your readers to reveal the content by using 3 different facebook methods:

• They can simply “like” a link.
• The user can post a message (customizable by you) to their facebook wall.
• The user can send a facebook message to another user.

Each of those actions can be setup to reveal the hidden content and the method for revealing the content is totally up to you.  The plugin allows you to customize the link that is shared, customize the text on the reveal button, and also customize the hidden content that is revealed (I’ll show an example at the end of this post).

Setting up the Plugin

Installing the plugin is as simple as installing any other WordPress plugin.  If you are familiar with WordPress then installing it should be no problem.

Configuration is handled via a simple tabbed interface.  Just follow the progression of the tabs by entering your facebook app ID and then entering the various “shareable” information, such as the link, custom icon, custom text, etc.

You can then modify the colors of the button used to hide the content.

If anything doesn’t make sense or you have trouble, there is also youtube video provided on the plugin page which gives a step by step explanation of how to setup each piece of the plugin and then an example of placing the hidden content into your blog post.

Speaking of adding the content to your post…  That part is also easy thanks to 3 icons that have been integrated into the WYSIWYG editor.

Highlight the text that you want to hide and click one of the above icons to force the user to message, post, or like to see the content.

In Conclusion

There’s not much I can say bad about this plugin.  It is well designed.  It is simple to use.  And it does what it is intended to do.

My only suggestion would be to add Twitter integration.  And perhaps Google+ integration.  I know it is called the Facebook Viral Plugin, so perhaps new plugins for each system would be required, but if all 3 systems could be integrated into one plugin, that would be optimal.

So if you are looking for an easy way to start a viral marketing campaign via Facebook, give the FVP plugin a look.

The FVP Plugin in Action

As promised, here is an example of the plugin in action. Click the Like button to get my eBook “Up and Running with Niche Sites for Beginners” for free. No need to signup for my newsletter. Press Like and the download link will be revealed:

Related posts:

1. Comparipress Plugin Review: Easily Compare Affiliate Product Prices in WordPress
2. Google, Twitter, Facebook, Bieber, and Obama
3. Are You Sure You Wish to Proceed?

Well although this blog wasn’t around last year and I didn’t start posting income reports until January 2011, my November of 2010 was a really down month.  December of 2010 was so so and then things picked back up really strong in January.  I don’t know if the Holidays make people lazy and they don’t click ads quite as much, if the latest “panda update” is still having its affects, or maybe I am just slipping.  But my Adsense was down for the third straight month.

I have noticed that my main niche site is starting to pick back up some traffic after a big drop off in October.  However the CPC for my ads has dipped.  Perhaps advertisers for my particular niche product do not pay as much in the winter months and that could be part of the reason for the bad Novembers over the past 2 years.

To combat the recent poor performance of my Adsense sites, I’m going full speed ahead with 5 brand new domains, all of which I’ve done some in depth keyword research with Market Samurai.  I’m going to start a new series of blog posts over the next several months to track these 5 new sites and hopefully give a boost to my Adsense niche earnings.  I’ve completed 3 of the 5 sites thus far.  Just waiting on a few more articles to be written and I will be able to finish the final two sites..

On a positive note, my niche duel website is finally gaining some ground and earned $69.92 for the month of November.

So with that all out of the way, here are the (underwhelming) numbers for November 2011.

Affiliate Tax Law Update

I did a bit more research on the Pennsylvania affiliate tax law fiasco.

The issue has been debated by several states over the past several years. Apparently the argument centers around sales tax on items bought online. The person buying the item online is supposed to pay a use tax on their purchase when a state sales tax is not charged by the seller. In most cases online, the seller does not charge sales tax. However, in most cases the buyer also does not keep track of online purchases and pay a use tax at the end of the year. (Does anyone out their pay their use tax?)

Therefore, the states are mad that they are not getting their cut of these sales, so they are trying to force affiliate merchants to collect sales tax for all items sold online via an affiliate in their particular state (Pennsylvania in my case).

The merchants are saying “screw that” and rather than trying to deal with the hassle of collecting different state sales taxes for each and every affiliate, they are just dropping all affiliates that live in states that have enacted this affiliate sales tax law.

From everything I have been reading online, what the states are trying to do is unconstitutional. Furthermore, what they are doing is only going to hurt them more in the long run. If the state of PA prevents me from earning money, then the amount of income ta that I pay to them will be reduced. Additionally, I’m going to eventually incorporate a business in another state or pick up and move all together. So in the long run, they aren’t doing themselves any good and the whole thing is going to blow up in the face of each state that tries to pass this dumb law.

Ok, I’m done venting.

As of now it doesn’t look like Adsense will be affected. I’m not sure about EPN. The only merchants that have terminated my association thus far are all companies owned by BackCountry.com – but this has made my EverydayGearDeals.com deal website useless for me and I am thinking of trying to sell it on Flippa.

To be continued…

Related posts:

1. Pennsylvania Affiliate Marketers Just Got Screwed
2. Income Report February 2011
3. Income Report September 2011

In a surprise move, the State of Pennsylvania  just screwed me over.

I’m still digesting what the hell this all means, but I just came back from lunch to a long list of emails stating my association with most of my affiliate merchants on Avantlink.com have been terminated.  This pretty much ruins my entire daily outdoor gear website (EverydayGearDeals.com).  When I emailed for an explanation I received this email:

Unfortunately, PA passed the affiliate sales tax law requiring us to terminate partnerships with PA based publishers.  If you set your business up outside of PA please reach out and let us know.   http://performancemarketingassociation.com/pennsylvania-enacts-affiliate-nexus-tax-law  We are taking a preemptive approach to raise awareness of the issue, as you know you are still active for 7 days, if anything changes I will be sure to let you know.

I don’t yet know what the full ramifications of this all means yet, so if anyone else from PA has any insight, please leave a comment below.  Will this affect Adsense, Amazon, and Commission Junction as well?

I do still own a rental home in Ohio.  Can I simply change my affiliate account addresses to point to my Ohio address until this is straightened out?  Or would that be considered tax fraud?

I’m having a minor panic attack over here.

This sounds very similar to the whole Amazon / California tax law fiasco from earlier this year.  That dispute was eventually resolved and overturned.

Do I need to start selling my affiliate websites??  Just another reason for me to hate this state even more.

EDIT:  Now that I’ve had some time to research a little bit and take some of this in.  It looks like this may have been an existing law.  The state of Pennsylvania sent out a bulletin on Dec 1st, reminding merchants that they must collect sales tax from customers in PA.

So perhaps this has been on the books for some time, but merchants were just not following the rules?  It seems that some merchants got the bulletin and their immediate reaction was to terminate PA affiliates rather than play by the rules.

I think my best course of action will be to either sell the websites in questions OR look into creating a Delaware corporation and run my affiliate operations as a business in another state.  I will have to do some more research on that topic.  For now, I have 7 days to decide, so I will wait a few days and see how this plays out.  I’ve already sent an email to a state representative asking for some guidance.

No related posts.

As most WordPress users have probably done at some point or another, I accidentally pressed “Publish” instead of “Save Draft”. Some time long ago I set something up that automatically tweets my new blog posts (I can’t even remember where I set it up – I think in Feedburner), so about 15 minutes later I noticed my mistake when I saw the new blog post come through on my Twitter feed. Oops! Thankfully I caught that right away and I was able to delete the tweet, but it was too late for the RSS feed. Feedburner had already sent out a link to my RSS subscribers, complete with a few lines of text and my “test test test” post.

WordPress Plugin: Are You Sure?

The incident got me curious about how often this happens with other people and I wondered if there were a solution to prevent premature posts or a way to retract a post from your RSS feed.

A quick google search turned me on to the “Are You Sure? WordPress Plugin“.

Now I have yet to install it, but it looks like a pretty handy and simple WordPress add-on. It basically just adds a javascript confirmation each time you hit the Publish button your new post. A quick popup message box with the question: “Are you sure you wish to proceed?” – confirms that you actually wish to hit Publish rather than the Save Draft button.

So be careful. And if you want to try to prevent this from happening to you, give the Are You Sure plugin a try.

Other News

My November income report will be written up this weekend. I need another day for my EPN numbers to post and then I’ll just need to tally up the numbers.

In other upcoming news, I just received a review copy of Martin Njounkwe’s new facebook plugin called the Facebook Viral Plugin. I’m going to get that installed this weekend and try to write up a review of it next weekend. It looks pretty cool so head over there now and check it out if you can’t wait for the review.

That’s all for now. Thanks to everyone for reading.

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It’s time to take some action and to be more accountable for the work that I do!

In the past I’ve created a wide variety of niche sites.  I’ve created adsense sites.  I’ve created affiliate sites.  I’ve created sites geared specifically toward clickbank. 

I’ve done backlinking on my own by writing articles and commenting on blogs and trading links.  I’ve paid people to write content for me on fiverr, mechanical turk, elance, iwriter, and more…  I’ve bought .com, .net, and .info domains.  I’ve paid for many different backlinking packages. I’ve created graphics. I’ve bought graphics. I’ve even bought a niche site from Flippa (waste of $88).

But the one thing I’ve never really done is to track exactly how much I’ve spent on each individual site.  I have some sites that I’ve invested very little in (only the cost of the domain name) – and they continue to earn me money month after month.  And I’ve had sites that I’ve probably invested over $100 in and they most likely never even earned back the initial investment before I eventually dumped them.

If I want to be serious about this whole making money online thing, I need to become more organized and start keeping better track of where I spend my money. I need to be more accountable as far as figuring out exactly what works best and what doesn’t.  I’ve had some real winners (relatively speaking), but I’ve also had some real duds.

Time to Revise My Goals

My goal for 2011 was to earn $2000 a month by the end of the year. Unless I have an amazing December, it doesn’t look like I’m going to reach that goal this year.

My new goal for the next year is to become more consistent with finding the winners and figuring out what I am doing wrong with the sites that don’t make me any money. If I can achieve that goal, then I think I can reach my 2011 goal.

So tonight after several hours of research via Market Samurai, I bought 5 new domain names.  I’m going to keep a detailed spreadsheet of exactly how much money I spend on each site (something I should have started doing long ago).  And then I’ll track the earnings for each site from month to month once they are complete and indexed in Google and I’ll also keep a running tally in my monthly income report.

Here’s a sneak peek at the Google doc that I’ll use to track expenses and earnings (I’ll add columns for monthly earnings once I start making money in a month or two):

If you have a similar method or spreadsheet for tracking individual websites please share it in the comments below.

Adem, who comments on this blog quite often, posted this on Twitter today and I found it quite fitting because it pretty much sums up my thinking over the last few months.

I would love to be able to earn a decent living from my niche sites. I do think it’s a possibility but need more focus to get there.

So now is the time to focus and take some action.

The domain names have been purchased and I’ll start writing some articles and outsourcing some articles in the next few days and then begin building the sites next week. Once the sites are completed I’ll update you with my progress. (And if you don’t hear from me on this topic in a month or two, I expect someone to speak up and hold me accountable.)

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