MYAP9 is Now Available
Are you still waiting for the perfect affiliate management solution to start and run your affiliate program? If so, you’ll be interested in the new version of My Affiliate Program from KowaBunga! Technologies - MYAPv9. For details and a demo visit the MYAPv9 site and sign up for their newsletter as they plan to hold a Webex presentation to offer even more details.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Foreign Affiliates: U.S. Tax Form Requirements
Greenie asked the following question via the NPT Forum:
As a foreign affiliate of merchants in the US, what “Tax Withholding Form” do I need to fill? There are so many of these forms I am really confused.
W-8BEN Forms
Foreign person, non-resident alien or foreign national performing working outside the U.S must fill out a W-8BEN.
Foreign persons are not subject to U.S. income tax withholding if performing the work outside the U.S.
If you receive certain types of income, including prize money won in affiliate program contests, you must provide a Form W-8BEN to establish that you are not a U.S. person, and claim that you are the beneficial owner of the income for which Form W-8BEN is being provided.
Forms and further information is available at:
Note: This is not official legal or accounting advice. For more information, please contact either your affiliate program manager or your accountant.
Happy accounting!
Cheers,
Ros
Popularity: 1% [?]
MORE Content for Non-Writers (or Lazy Writers) :-)
Need content for your site but hate to write?
Then you’ll be happy to hear that Michael Holland and Yanik Silver have just released “Public Domain Gold Mine volume 9“.
If you’re unfamiliar with how content in the public domain works, read my aritcle, “Old But NOT Decrepit“.
Happy content mining!
Popularity: 2% [?]
Warning to Typosquatters
If you’ve ever had the notion to do some typosquatting, you really must read Wayne Porter’s most recent blog post at Revenews.
For my more innocent readers - typosquatting is a form of cybersquatting which uses typographical errors made by surfers while typing a website address into a web browser. The surfer is then sent to an alternative address owned by the typo or cybersquatter.
For example, if you were a Brookstone affiliate, you might buy Broookstone.com, or Broostone.com and redirect traffic to the Brookstone.com site with your affiliate link.
Bad plan unless you want to end up in court.
Stay on the white side.
Cheers,
Ros
Popularity: 2% [?]
New Keyword Research Tool Available at Wordtracker
Wordtracker has a new Keyword Research tool in place that will eventually be used to replace the individual multiple searches, i.e.:
- Simple search
- Exact/Precise search
- Compressed search
- Comprehensive search
- Misspelling search
The new Wordtracker keyword research tool super simple to use.
First you input your keyword(s) or keyword phrase(s), and select matching, case and/or plural search options.
Next hit ‘Evaluate’ to find out how many pages are competing against your keywords at All the Web, Altavista, Ask, Google, Lycos, MSN, Yahoo, Open Directory, Yahoo Directory, Feedster, Google News and Yahoo News. Results from the evaluation show popularity, results and KEI.
From there you can Export to Excel as a comma separated, pipe separated, at (@) separated or tab separated file. Files can be shown on screen, downloaded or sent via email.
You can also store as many lists of keywords in a project as you want and keep them at Wordtracker.
The whole thing is SO much easier to use than having to do those multiple searches. Yeah!
Happy keyword researching!
Cheers,
Ros
Popularity: 4% [?]
Senate Targets Internet Gambling Ban as Top Priority
Back on July 17th, David Carruthers, CEO of BetOnSports.com, was detained while on a layover in Dallas, TX. The company subsequently stopped taking bets and Carruthers is currently under house arrest in St. Louis awaiting trial.
I was just wrapping up a presentation to take to next week’s Casino Affiliate Convention in Las Vegas, when more bad news broke on the Internet gambling scene.
On September 7th, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist targeted a ban on Internet gambling as a top priority for the U.S. Senate. U.S. Lawmakers are pushing for change, including a proposed law to prohibit U.S. bank and credit transactions with online gambling operations.
Also on Thursday, Peter Dicks, U.K.-based Sportingbet PLC Chairman was arrested at J.F.K. airport for contraventing LA R.S. 14:90.3(E), a law that prohibits “gambling by computer”. The felony is punishable by up to five years year in prison and a $25,000 fine.
Dicks made bail on Friday and is fighting extradition charges to Louisiana. Louisiana is one of eight states, including Nevada, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Louisiana, South Dakota and Washington have laws that prohibit online gambling.
The law applies to anyone who “designs, develops, manages, supervises, maintains, provides, or produces any computer services, computer system, computer network, computer software, or any server providing a Home Page, Web Site, or any other product accessing the Internet, World Wide Web, or any part thereof offering to any client for the primary purpose of the conducting as a business of any game, contest, lottery, or contrivance whereby a person risks the loss of anything of value in order to realize a profit.“.
How does this news affect gaming affiliates?
Just ask those affiliates who were promoting BetOnSports.com products at the time that it closed. BetOnSports.com’s players have not yet been re-imbursed.
Sportingbet also operates affiliate programs. Although Sportingbet remains open at the moment, will they be the next to go?
I don’t know. However, I may take a little time today to beef up the ‘need to diversify’ portion of my CAC talk.
Cheers ~ Ros
Popularity: 1% [?]
NPT Newsletter: Should You Promote that Product as an Affiliate?
A number of folks asked why I didn’t participate in a recent launch of a product for affiliate marketers.
That got me to thinking about how affiliate marketers choose the products they want to promote, or NOT promote… whatever the case may be.
In this week’s 732-word NPT article, “Affiliate Marketing: Should You Promote that Product?“, you’ll discover the 6 criteria I use to select the products I promote.
Also since last week’s ‘Beware of Some Site Builder Packages‘ NPT newsletter article, I’ve made the following posts to the NPT blog:
- August Issue of Affiliate Classroom Magazine Still Available
- Affiliate Scam Alert: Bogus Merchants
- SBI Pricing Clarification
- Cash in Your Old Notebook PC at Sony
- Secrets To Their Success - September 2006
- Do You Sell Books? Try out the Amazon aStore Beta
- How Does Your Site Appear in Firefox?
- Planning to Sell Through Clickbank? Think Again!
‘Til next time, promote and prosper!
Cheers ~ Ros
Popularity: 1% [?]
August Issue of Affiliate Classroom Magazine Still Available
I was talking to Anik Singal this morning and he mentioned that the September issue of Affiliate Classroom magazine should be available by the end of next week.
In the meantime, if you haven’t read the August issue, it features all sides of SEO - the good, bad, and in-between!
You’ll discover:
- Brad Callen’s (almost) foolproof tips for clean and ethical SEO.
- What black, white, and grey hat SEO are REALLY all about.
- How to learn from the black hatters by avoiding their shady ways.
Good stuff! Get the August issue of Affiliate Classroom now. As always, it’s free.
Cheers ~ Ros
Popularity: 1% [?]
Planning to Sell Through Clickbank? Think Again!
I’ve used Clickbank to promote the “Super Affiliate Handbook” since it was first published in May 2003. The built-in affiliate program and easy affiliate signup process was primary reason I chose Clickbank over other third-party payment processors. That ‘ease’ of affiliation is also the best reason NOT to use Clickbank as a merchant.
Learn more in “Merchants: One Good Reason NOT to Use Clickbank to Promote Your Products“.
Cheers ~ Ros
Popularity: 6% [?]
How Does Your Site Appear in Firefox?
Sometime ago, I received several email complaints that links in my newsletter and on the site were triggering DOWNLOADS of the linked pages to a “temporary directory” instead of opening NPT in the Firefox web browser.
This is what it looked like:
Note, this was ONLY happening in Firefox.
The links were all formatted correctly so I spent a number of hours going back and forth with different folks, then on the Firefox support forum. None of the suggested solutions worked.
Finally, I passed it on to Steve Hetrick, the braniac over a DataWebPro who runs my servers, and he had it resolved lickety-split.
Solution - he added the following line of code to my .htaccess file.
Action application/x-httpd-php “/php/php-cgi.exe
I was lucky to get those comments from site visitors about the Firefox issues, otherwise I wouldn’t have known.
Have you checked your site in the Firefox browser lately?
Cheers,
Ros
Popularity: 3% [?]
