Most people want to earn money from their blogs. They’re a lot of work – it’s good to see some payback.

The first thing I want you to have, however, is a realistic view. Most bloggers do not make a living from their blogs. It is possible to earn a good living blogging, but most do not.

This doesn’t mean you won’t earn a living as a blogger. It means only that you should expect to have to work at it. You might be one of the people who does far better blogging than they ever did at a regular job. You’ll never know unless you try, and try hard. Some people make a very good living at blogging, after all.

Expect to need some time to earn a living as a blogger. Some do well after a few months. Some do well after a year or several years. Some will continue to struggle for a long, long time. If you pin all your hopes on immediate success, it will be harder to keep trying when it takes longer than you hoped. Earning money slowly isn’t failure, it’s progress.

There are several possible sources of income for bloggers. Don’t overdo your attempts to earn money at first – you can chase readers away if you do nothing but promote product after product or monetize your blog too heavily. There’s a balance between earning money from your blog and keeping your readers happy (and possibly willing to buy).

Here are some of the possible income sources for bloggers.

Adsense

Adsense is run by Google, and is one of the simplest ways to monetize your blog. You have to get approved for Adsense, and you need to have several posts up first for them to consider.

Once you’re approved, you need to insert your ad code into your blog’s theme. From there, Adsense will place the ads for you. Once it’s up and running, it’s very simple for you.

One huge caution with Adsense is that you can never fool around with clicking your own ads or asking for clicks. They are very quick to ban people for that. They’re good at filtering the occasional accidental click, but if you give them regular problems, you’ll be thrown out of the program.

Earnings from Adsense can be quite respectable, but usually not as good as promoting products on your own, once you learn how.

Adsense is not the only alternative. You can also check out networks such as BlogHer and Media.net.

Affiliate Marketing

I compare affiliate marketing with being a commissioned salesperson. That’s approximately what you’re doing. You recommend a product, and if someone buys, you earn a commission on that sale.

There are many companies with affiliate programs. Amazon.com has a hugely popular Associate program, for example. Pretty much everyone knows Amazon, and if someone clicks through your link, it doesn’t matter what they buy there – you might earn a commission. Their cookie duration is relatively short, but many people earn a lot from Amazon.com as associates.

There are also companies that run affiliate programs for other companies, giving you a single place to find a lot of companies to affiliate with. Commission Junction, Clickbank, ShareASale, Rakuten Marketing and JVZoo are all worth considering.

Please note that you must clearly disclose affiliate relationships on your blog.

Sponsored Posts

A sponsored post is a post you have been paid to create or post on your site. The sponsorship may be as simple as a link placement or may have to do with the entire blog post. Izea is a popular place for bloggers to connect with companies that want to get the word out about something.

Some sponsored posts include a product for you to try. They may also allow you to do a giveaway of the product, which can be hugely popular with site visitors. There may or may not be money paid in addition to the product sent for review. Products sent for review count as income if they are not sent back to the company.

Just as with affiliate marketing, sponsored posts and links must be disclosed. Don’t overdo the sponsored posts on your blog – they can be annoying to readers.

Selling A Product

You can sell products through your blog as well. You can write an ebook, create an ecourse, sell physical products, and more. You can offer services such as social media marketing, website design, graphic design and so forth. It’s up to you.

Digital products are very popular on blogs because order fulfilment is so easy. You can use a service such as Clickbank or JVZoo to fulfill your orders automatically. These services also allow affiliates to sign up to promote your product. If your product is a good one, affiliates can greatly increase your sales.

Your blog can be one aspect of your business, a place to bring attention to what you have to offer.

Premium Content/Memberships

If you’re doing well with your blog, you may want to consider adding premium content that is only available to paying members. You can form a community that discusses things at a more challenging level than what is posted on your public blog. Members can share tips and get more personal advice from you.

There are WordPress plugins, such as Memberpress which you can use to add membership features directly to your blog, or you can select a software to run separately from your blog. aMember is a popular choice which has been around for quite a few years. A good membership site will produce a regular income for you so long as you make it worthwhile for people to remain members.

Read More

• How To Start A Blog, Part 1: Why Blog?
• How To Start A Blog, Part 2: Brainstorming
• How To Start A Blog, Part 3: Starting A WordPress Blog
• How To Start A Blog, Part 4: How To Get Traffic and Followers
• How To Start A Blog, Part 5: How To Earn Money From Your Blog
• How To Start A Blog, Part 6: Should You Add Video Or Podcasting?
• How To Start A Blog, Part 7: What Else Would You Like To Know?

The post How To Start A Blog, Part 5: How To Earn Money From Your Blog appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

Clickbank is preparing a color coded risk management tier system to be released January 2, 2013. It’s to help them decide how much to charge vendors and affiliates for refunds and chargebacks, a regular problem for Clickbank. As a lot of people fall into tiers where they can expect to pay higher fees, naturally they’re upset. After all, a part of the reason they get so many refunds on their accounts is that Clickbank makes refunds so easy to get.

Rankings depend upon how many refunds and chargebacks your products get. For vendors, that’s the products you created and are selling through the marketplace. For affiliates, that’s the products you promote, and the refunds and chargebacks the customers you referred request. Points are added or subtracted daily, to a maximum of 100 points to a minimum of 0 points. Only the sales you make are relevant – if you have a better refund rate as an affiliate than a particular vendor, your tier will not be impacted by them.

At this point, I’m not much impacted, although I’ll have to wait and see what happens with the few products I promote. I know some vendors are looking at leaving Clickbank over this, so it has the potential to be a big deal for me. The preview gives me an Excellent (violet) rating, which is the best you can get. Guess I’m choosing products to promote well.

Impact on Vendors

The impact of this may be huge for vendors. Just how much of a problem it will be depends on how they’re ranked. A vendor can be in the violet, blue or green tier, and not pay anything extra for refunds, but there will be an extra fee for chargebacks. Get a worse rating than that, however, and there are additional fees for refunds and chargeback fees increase. There are also transaction fees for the highest risk accounts.

If your risk becomes too high, you’re booted from Clickbank. This makes sense, as they don’t want to be dealing with all those problems either.

Now, a bad affiliate can have an impact on a vendor, as those are refunds on your product. Hopefully that sort of situation will be handled well by Clickbank.

Impact on Affiliates

Affiliates may have to pay fees as well if they get a lot of refunds or chargebacks on referrals they make. Affiliate fees max out at $5 for chargebacks in the red tier, but are $0 for violet tier. Some people don’t feel that it’s fair to charge affiliates for refunds or chargebacks, as they only referred the sale; they didn’t make the product and can’t control it’s quality, but there is a logic here. Some affiliates use better methods than others to promote products, and send more qualified customers. Affiliates who use misleading methods to promote products are naturally going to have higher refund rates than those who give more honest reviews.

On the plus side, there will also be stars rating vendors, which can be viewed in the marketplace. By default, new vendors will get three stars, but they can climb up to five stars. The stars come solely from the rating as a vendor, and does not take into account anything that vendor may promote as an affiliate. This should help you to find products worth promoting.

Just as with vendors, however, if you become too high risk an affiliate, your account is suspended.

Why Is This Happening?

The big question many people have is why is Clickbank making this change? The answer is pretty simple. They have to, for their own protection.

Credit card companies are looking very hard at certain types of products, as they tend to have high refund and chargeback rates. Make Money Online and Health products are very popular on Clickbank, and happen to be products with those high refund and chargeback rates. They’re also very commonly misrepresented by affiliates and vendors.

Some are, of course, perfectly legitimate, and Clickbank is not choosing to remove those topics entirely. Instead, they’re making it more difficult to continue to sell low quality or fraudulent products through their marketplace.

Pretty much all vendors are taking a good, hard look at these products and deciding whether or not to continue to allow them. It’s not just Clickbank. While some vendors are talking about moving to new payment processors, it may not be that simple a process.

What Will the Overall Impact Be?

It’s hard to predict exactly what will be the result of the risk management tiers. I certainly think there will be a number of vendors and affiliates leaving Clickbank, not all of them bad. I feel certain that some good people will leave for marketplaces that do not yet have such fees in place.

I also suspect that membership sites will be more popular. If you can keep people from buying your product then asking for a refund as soon as they’ve downloaded it, you can keep your refund rate down. Membership sites aren’t perfect protection from refunds, as you can be a member for the entire refund period, then request the entire amount back, but it’s something.

I don’t think anyone is going to be saying anything more than the minimum about Clickbank’s refund policy anymore. Who wants to emphasize how easy it is to get a refund when you’re hurting yourself by doing so? This policy is a part of why Clickbank products have such a high refund rate; it’s not entirely the fault of low quality products (although that’s in there too in certain cases). There are people out there who buy Clickbank products because they know that requesting a refund is very easy.

I don’t think this will be an entirely bad thing. Rough at the start, certainly, as vendors and affiliates decide what they’re going to do. But this is becoming a marketplace reality in general, not just at Clickbank. Give the system a bit of time to work out the lower quality vendors and affiliates, and the Clickbank Marketplace may be a better place. I hope. I much appreciate that they’re giving some warning, rather than just throwing it at us from nowhere.

Now, one can also hope that Clickbank will get strict with serial refunders, but that’s an entirely different challenge.

What Options Do Vendors Have?

There are plenty of other ways vendors can sell their products. Search Google for Clickbank alternatives, although none have the base of Clickbank. Still, it’s an option worth looking into if you don’t feel that Clickbank works for you anymore. Just be aware that this kind of problem is working its way around all payment processors. Take a look at what happened with 2Checkout, which was also once popular with internet marketers. They now have more restrictions on such products, because there was such a problem with refunds and chargebacks.

You can also open up your own merchant account and run your own affiliate program. Infusionsoft is a popular option for sales management. This will probably cause more headaches, as it’s more involved to handle such things on your own, and you do get fees for refunds and chargebacks when you have your own merchant account too. Get too many refunds and chargebacks, and they’ll shut you down too.

What Options Do Affiliates Have?

Affiliates can follow their preferred vendors to wherever they go, of course. It’s pretty easy to have a range of accounts as an affiliate; you just hope that things don’t get so spread out that it’s hard to hit the payment threshold on the different accounts.

Affiliates will need to keep an eye on products that remain on Clickbank to make sure they don’t disappear. There’s no point in continuing to promote something that has been suspended or moved to another marketplace. The sooner you catch these things, the better off you are.

You can certainly take advantage of the star rating system if you want to promote anything new on Clickbank. Take a look and see what’s getting five stars, and you know it’s a relatively safe product to promote, or so you can hope. High star products will at least be worth taking a good look at. Only time will tell how effective a tool they’ll be for affiliates, but I think it will be better than using gravity as a metric.

The post Will Clickbank’s Color Coded Risk Management Tiers Benefit You Or Hurt You? appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

Making product recommendations is a part of the routine for many bloggers. Done right it brings in viewers, builds trust and helps you make a living from your website. However, you have to be careful to handle your disclosures correctly, and the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) is working on further changes to their guide on social media marketing you should be aware of.

This update to the rules is still a draft, and they’re looking for comments on it, but it’s a good plan to be aware of what they’re looking at. It’s easier to comply sooner rather than later, and a lot of it makes sense when you think about it.

I don’t think it’s anything too hard. Clear disclosures are a must these days, not tiny hidden ones. The new proposal wants disclosures to be more prominent. They suggest that they be close to the mention of the product, not buried at the end or otherwise had to notice.

They also want disclosures on reviews and such that you post on YouTube, Flickr, Pinterest, podcasts, etc. Once again, this makes sense to me. If there’s a relationship to be disclosed, it shouldn’t matter where you’re marketing it or how. Just disclose it.

If you’re interested in commenting on the matter, you can do so on the WOMMA site. There’s a PDF you can download and read to get the exact details. It’s open until June 28, 2012.

This doesn’t have to be a complex thing, and it’s good form to let people know when you’re associated with the product or service you’re promoting. Keep it simple and clear, and it’s not going to put customers off. A good disclosure can even improve your image by showing how honest you are.

The post Keep Up On Your Content Marketing Disclosures appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

Clickbank products can be a lot of fun to promote if you find a good one. There are a few problems, however. The first is mostly a problem of internet marketing and health niches, which is that many of the products have questionable claims by FTC standards, but Clickbank is trying to improve that situation. Another problem is that some merchants’ pages are quite leaky from an affiliate perspective. You need to check the pages out before you start promoting any Clickbank product – any affiliate product, really.

1. Opt-in forms and mailing lists.

A good merchant who tries to get visitors to sign up on his or her mailing list is a wonderful thing for an affiliate. It can also be a terrible thing. Some merchants use that list to place one of their own cookies on the customer if they buy due to clicking through a newsletter link, rather than crediting the affiliate who brought the person to the list. Most recent affiliate gets the sale when it goes through Clickbank, so this is an easy and tempting switch for someone to make.

This isn’t entirely unreasonable some ways, as the merchant made some extra effort to make the sale by providing more information to his or her list, but at the same time, without the affiliate, that customer wouldn’t have been on the list in the first place. You don’t want to lose customers to the merchant’s list.

Check for this by signing up for their list through your own affiliate link. You’ll find out what they’re saying to their list, and you can see if your affiliate link continues to be good during it. Some merchants even program their list to include your link in mailings, but so long as there’s no other affiliate link used, you should get the credit for any sales. It’s a good practice as an affiliate to go through as much of the merchant’s sales funnel as you can. You need to know what you’re promoting.

2. Merchant sells other products on the sales page.

Some merchants aren’t all that focused on selling their own product. They want to sell other products too, and do so right on the sales page. It doesn’t bother me if they do that later on, that’s their business, but if it interferes with the sales of their own product that you’re trying to generate, it’s a problem.

This problem may also include ad units such as AdSense on the page. Some merchants feel that they aren’t getting enough sales of their products, and so they slap up some AdSense or other ad units to improve their earnings on their pages. The problem is that this can decrease the sales of their own product tremendously, which decreases your commissions.

Sometimes they even have links which don’t help them to earn anything. While these may be useful

Take a look and see if the sales page is focused on the product you’d like to promote or not. Links to other websites, whether they earn for the merchant or not, are leaks for your earnings. You may do better with products that don’t have so many leaks.

3. Merchant takes payments through other processors as well as Clickbank.

It’s a nice idea for the merchant, not so good for you when they take payments through other processors. The problem, quite simply, is that you won’t get a commission through any system that doesn’t have you as an affiliate. Those sales are lost to you.

What Can You Do to Avoid Affiliate Page Leaks?

You do have options to avoid these kinds of leaks. You can ask the merchant to set up a special landing page without all these leaks, for example. It shouldn’t be that hard, and they can continue to use their leaky page for people who come through non-affiliate sources. If you have a proven track record as a promoter, you have some leverage to encourage this.

Now, just because you’ve checked the product you’re promoting and found a page without any leaks doesn’t mean you’re in the clear. You should recheck periodically, as pages do change over time. Sign up for the newsletter again to make sure your links are still going through during that process. Look over the page. Generally keep an eye on things, especially if your conversion rates suddenly drop.

You can also start your own mailing list by signing people up on your own site, and then referring them to products. This is a generally good practice in any case, as it gives you the chance to make still more sales.

You can link directly to the Clickbank checkout page if you like. It’s recommended that you check to see if the merchant minds if you do this at all, and definitely keep your sales page honest about the product. You’ll have a furious vendor as well as customers of that vendor who bought through your link if you aren’t providing utterly accurate information while linking to the checkout page.

The format for linking to the checkout page is:

http://prodnumber.affiliate_vendor.pay.clickbank.net

You can get the product number and vendor name by looking at the checkout link on the sales page. Prodnumber is often 1, but some vendors have multiple products, so be sure you have the right number. Affiliate is your Clickbank ID, and vendor is the vendor’s Clickbank ID. Make sure to test the link before using it live on your site so that you can see if it’s working. This method is somewhat unofficial, but some affiliates like it not only to bypass leaky pages, but poorly written sales pages for products they think are otherwise good. Just keep an eye on it, and make sure your link continues to work.

The post How Do You Check Out a Clickbank Vendor to See If Your Affiliate Commissions Are Likely to Leak? appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

It’s official. Amazon should be reinstating California affiliates over the next few days as Governor Brown has signed the bill giving Amazon a break on collecting sales tax in California until September 2012. Amazon is to create 10,00 jobs in California, which makes it sound to me like we have some hope of affiliate marketing with Amazon lasting beyond that point, whether or not the Federal government acts.

I’m happy but antsy. I really want to see what happens next year, which is going to make me quite cautious about how I promote Amazon over the next year. I don’t want to be stuck in the scramble to change things over again. I mean, sure, there’s Skimlinks, but I prefer the regular Amazon program overall.

The post California Amazon Affiliates to be Reinstated appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

Things have certainly gotten interesting between Amazon.com and California. They’ve come to a new agreement that Amazon doesn’t need to collect sales taxes this year, but starting in September 2012, they will. As of this writing, it hasn’t been signed by the Governor, so it’s a matter of waiting to see what happens now for California affiliate marketers.

It’s been said that Amazon will let California affiliates back into the program if this is signed, although I haven’t had any official word on that from Amazon. That said, I don’t know that it will last beyond September 2012, as Amazon could take other steps to get out of needed to collect the taxes in the free year they now have. We’ll just have to wait and see on that one.

With that in mind, I’m going to be quite hesitant to create or promote new Amazon affiliate sites. I have some, which have suffered tremendously from the lack of Amazon links, and I had hoped to build more, but I won’t until I know things will last beyond a year. I’m really not into the short term stuff.

This deal also depends on whether there is action from Congress on the matter of sales tax on online purchases. This is what Amazon has been pushing for, as it has the potential to simplify the collection of such taxes.

Even with all that, I’m much annoyed with the people who keep insisting that it is only the lack of sales tax charged that makes people shop on Amazon. That’s the line we keep hearing, and it’s just not true.

I firmly believe most people shop on Amazon because the basic price is lower even before sales tax. They also go there because local stores can rarely compete with the selection. Add in the reviews and other information available about the products, and of course people love shopping online. Having to pay sales tax on online purchases won’t change that.

Even though I won’t be aggressively promoting Amazon until I know what’s in the works for next September, I still want this bill signed. It will put a stop to what otherwise will be a nasty fight.

The post What’s Up With Amazon and California? appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

Clickbank released some new rules recently for vendors (and affiliates) to be more in line with FTC requirements. They’ve made minor changes to their rules before, with minor effects, but these may be more serious. Whether you’re a vendor on Clickbank, an affiliate with them or you just want to see an example of how careful one should be in promoting products, you should check out their new rules. These apply especially to those promoting products about making money online, but it matters in other niches too, especially in areas such as health. While the guidelines page title says vendor, it’s important to note that affiliates are expected to follow these rules as well:

Screenshot from the Clickbank site:

Here are some of the big points:

• Specific advertising claims must be from real examples and actual experiences, and must be something you can substantiate. No making up stories.
• You can’t infer that the product is significantly easier to use than it really is.
• Affiliates are not to pose as neutral third parties comparing products just to make a commission when one is sold.
• Vendors must include a script to all sales videos for Clickbank to consider during the approval process.
• No false scarcity. If you say there are only 300 copies available, Clickbank will monitor sales and halt them at that number.
• No more claiming a sale price if you haven’t sold the product at that price before.
• No more than 3 upsells and two exit offers in the sales flow, with clear “no thanks” links.
• No corporate logos on sales pages without documented permission to use said logos.
• Prices, including rebill prices, must be clearly presented.

All in all, it’s what I would call pretty good stuff. Current vendors have until August 31, 2011 to get in line with these new terms. I think the start of September may be very interesting. If Clickbank enforces these strictly, I think there will be a lot of devastated vendors and affiliates scrambling to cope as noncompliant products get taken down. Just now, when you go through the e-marketing and e-business section, most of the top products don’t look particularly compliant.

Enforcement is going to be interesting. The basic way Clickbank has handled things in the past, you set up your sales page and send them your product for review, they check it and if it all looks good, you’re in the marketplace. The only problem is that it’s very easy to change both the page and the product after approval.

Policing sites for such changes would be difficult, but certainly not impossible. Makes things more expensive for Clickbank, I would imagine.

The other option is to rely on complaints, which I suspect won’t be good enough for the FTC. That there’s a chronic problem with exaggerated claims and full on false statements in the make money online industry is well known.

I’ve seen some people bemoan the loss of the “wild west” atmosphere of online marketing. Some feel that the right to free speech includes the right to claim whatever you want when you sell something.

That hasn’t been true for a long time. The only reason people are so used to it on the internet is because the internet is so much harder to regulate. That doesn’t make it right when people tell desperate buyers that they can make thousands of dollars in just a few mouse clicks. Being able to back up the claims you make about your product has been the law for a very long time.

Honestly, I don’t expect these changes to make a big difference. I’d like them to, but there are more payment processors out there, and plenty are willing to take on products places such as Clickbank may not want anymore.

This is, naturally, all about protecting Clickbank as a business. They want to have something they can point to saying that a vendor not obeying FTC rules was breaking their Terms of Service. I don’t know if that will be enough, but with the FTC stepping up enforcement and credit card companies looking harder at who they’re allowing to process payments, Clickbank has to do something to protect themselves. I don’t think it will remove their liability, but it might help.

I have no doubt in my mind that the vendors used to making big money off heavily hyped products and misleading claims know how they’re going to handle these changes. I expect a change in tactics, not so much a change in their business as a whole. I firmly believe that “buyer beware” will continue to be a good thought to keep in mind when you seek out ways to earn money from home.

Of course, if this works out, it would be wonderful. No more “As Seen On” lists of logos that really mean the product has been advertised on sites such as Google. No more products claiming to have just 9 more copies left for months on end while claiming tremendous popularity. Maybe even more products in the Clickbank Marketplace that I can feel good about promoting. I won’t even touch most of them because I loathe the typical sales letter so.

I’m also wanting to know how this will be enforced on affiliates. Vendors aren’t the only ones who make these wild claims, and by current FTC rules, vendors are responsible for what affiliates do too. Could get interesting, especially since Clickbank vendors don’t have direct contact with affiliates unless they get the affiliates to sign up with them directly. It’s rather difficult to be responsible for affiliates when you don’t know who they are or what they’re doing. Could this start a wave of Clickbank bans of affiliates?

The post Will Clickbank’s Latest Rule Changes Finally Decrease the Hype? appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

When you see ads and offers for data entry work at home jobs, they’re often really teaching you about how to earn money doing ad posting. All you have to do is pay for a membership or to download the course, whatever it is the site cares to call it, and you’ll have a chance to make big money, honest! Or so they say. But is this really data entry?

In my opinion, no, not at all. I would consider data entry work to be when you’re entering data specified by your employer into a database. That’s not what you do when you post ads. Usually you have to write them yourself, although sometimes there are resources to help you. Ad posting, as suggested by most of these supposed data entry opportunities, is quite simply affiliate marketing.

Let’s take a look at some of the common things they say.

List of 10,000 companies available, and none will refuse to hire you.

This usually translates to them giving you a link to Clickbank. There are a lot of merchants on Clickbank, and most have open affiliate programs, so you won’t be declined by an employer because they aren’t employing you or offering any sort of a job. You’ll be an affiliate marketer through Clickbank, not directly associated with or paid by the company which created the product you’re marketing.

Note that they aren’t maintaining the database themselves. They may have the Clickbank marketplace all nicely listed on their site, but they aren’t the ones getting merchants interested or dealing with the issues involved in having a database of that sort.

You’ll never have to sell anything.

Define sell. If you mean persuade someone to buy a product, then yes, you’re selling. How else are you going to earn affiliate commissions?

But if you mean sell as in process the payment for the product, no, you aren’t going to do that. Not handling payments is one of the great parts about being an affiliate.

You’ll never have to contact customers.

Sort of true, sort of not. If you place an ad somewhere where there’s an option to contact you rather than click through the affiliate link, some people will do that instead. Yes, you can ignore them, but it’s smarter to have an email template you can edit for their specific needs and try again for the click. They’re interested enough to contact you, that bit of extra effort could be worth your time. But you don’t have to if it’s not your thing.

Submit short forms for the companies.

In other words, fill out the forms for the ads you’re going to place. It’s common for these opportunities to suggest pay per click sites such as AdWords, but as that has become more challenging, they may also suggest posting ads on classified ad websites, forums and so forth. Not all may be welcoming of affiliate advertising.

Once again, you’ll probably be writing your own ads. Some Clickbank merchants are kind enough to write some basic material for you, but many don’t. Besides, if you used the prepared material you won’t stand out so well, and that can be a disadvantage if you ad is one of many on the page, especially if someone else is advertising the same product.

They don’t care about your typing speed.

This is one of the big hints that you aren’t looking at a real data entry job for an employer. Anyone who is going to pay you to do this work as work will care about your typing speed, as they want to get a ton of productivity out for what they pay you. A real data entry job listing will mention typing speed.

These guys don’t care because they’re talking about affiliate marketing, and you only get paid a commission if you make a sale. Typing speed is your own problem.

Earn hundreds of dollars for 15-30 minutes of work.

Or similar claims, of course. Even most affiliate marketers work longer than that to earn their commissions. There’s a learning curve, for one thing. It takes time to figure out what works for each product.

Most of these products will offer proof of earnings that will confirm it’s affiliate marketing through Clickbank once you know what to look for. Easy thing is the earnings screenshot, which is usually a screenshot of a Clickbank account.

Faking a Clickbank screenshot is ridiculously easy. This one took moments.

Trouble with that is you don’t know how those earnings came about. Clickbank has been working on that for products offered through their own marketplace, but in the past it has been common to use screenshots for sales unrelated to the method being discussed. Screenshots are also trivial to fake. They prove nothing. Videos can be faked as well.

What To Do If You Really Want to Do Data Entry or Online Typing

If you really and truly want to do data entry or a similar online typing job, it’s going to be kind of tough. These jobs aren’t entirely impossible to find, but they are difficult to find. There just aren’t that many companies out there hiring for these kinds of positions. I have a few listed on my data entry work at home jobs page, but it’s only a few because there are so few legit companies out there.

If you can cope with typing what you hear rather than what you see, consider general transcription as well. You may want to take a class on transcription just to get your skills built up, but general transcription doesn’t have the training requirements you see for medical or legal transcription in most cases, although many such positions still demand experience. You’ll be typing, it can be online and from home, and the pay rate isn’t bad if you have excellent speed.

What If You Don’t Mind the Idea of Ad Posting and Affiliate Marketing?

Done right, there’s nothing wrong with posting ads and doing affiliate marketing. It’s not the easy road to riches some imagine (how I wish it were otherwise!), but a good number of people do earn a living through affiliate marketing. It’s a part of my income I’d hate to give up, although I do affiliate marketing through my own websites, not ad posting. More fun to me.

Most important thing in this case is to find a legitimate resource to help you learn how to post ads… unless you’re up for the learning curve of puzzling it all out on your own. Even with help it gets expensive if you go the pay per click route, and the way things work with some sites now you may well have to set up your own website to link through, rather than linking directly to the product through your ad. That’s actually a good thing in the long run, but that’s another issue.

Don’t go for resources or programs that start talking it up as a data entry or home typing job. At that point they’ve already failed one important test, so why trust them to be up to date or honest about the actual work you’ll be doing, for yourself, no less. You want a resource that teaches you how to do the type of affiliate marketing you’re interested in because you want to do that kind of affiliate marketing, no data entry charade required.

The best resources are updated once in a while because rules change on the internet. That’s especially true if you do pay per click advertising such as through AdWords. You don’t want to have all your ads declined because you were given out of date advice on how to run your campaigns. Perry Marshall’s AdWords Guide has been a good choice for some time. Yes, that’s an affiliate link.

Whatever you do, don’t pick something that costs more than you can afford to spend. Keep it sensible, and when in doubt, start asking around.

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I was afraid this was going to happen, as certain California politicians have been pretty determined to get this done, despite the examples set in other states. California’s new budget includes a provision often called the “Amazon tax,” which means that qualifying businesses which use affiliate marketers in the state of California are now responsible for collecting California sales tax. Amazon is the big target, hence the nickname, but other businesses will be affected as well.

And it went as it did in every other state that has passed this kind of law, with the dropping of all affiliates in the state. No new sales tax income for California, affiliate incomes drop, some planning to leave California entirely, while others are talking lawsuit. Yep, great plan, California. Thanks a bunch.

The thing that annoys me most about Amazon dropping affiliates in California is that they may have to collect sales taxes here anyhow. They have subsidiaries in California, and the law includes that sort of presence. Seems to me that California might be a good place to fight these laws.

It’s early yet, so we’ll just have to see what the reaction is long term and how any lawsuits go. California’s a big state; I don’t expect things to go quietly.

As for me, I’m glad that I didn’t get going on too many ideas for affiliate sites based on income from Amazon. I don’t think my best program will be affected by this tax, but I’m not 100% positive. Either way, I have a lot of links to locate and change, and fast, as the law goes into effect on Friday. Gotta love the reasonable notice too, guys!

The post Affiliate Marketing Just Got Tougher in California appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

Writing reviews is a popular way for affiliates to earn money. Share your thoughts on the product, link to it, and you have a chance to earn money on the commissions from your referrals. It’s a model that makes giving every product a highly positive review tempting. But does this mean you should forget writing negative reviews on products that deserve one?

Reviewing a product negatively is actually a pretty good idea. If you rave about every product you review, it can be harder for people to decide if they can trust what you say. Honestly saying that you don’t like a product builds trust for those times you love the product.

Most reviews should get into both the positive and the negative aspects of the product. There just aren’t that many products that are 100% perfect. Maybe you would like to see one minor feature added or removed. Maybe it’s only good for beginners or for experts. Maybe it’s exactly the wrong shade of pink.

There are some important things to remember when you do a negative review. First and foremost is to keep things factual. No name calling or stuff like that which could get you in legal trouble. Stick to the features of the product. Be professional. You can still include your affiliate link if you so choose, even if you despise the product, since some people will buy anything, others will disagree with your review and like the product, and if the site has other products to buy, you may still benefit from the affiliate link.

This doesn’t mean you should choose products specifically because you can review them negatively. Look at the things that are interesting to people in your target market. If they don’t work the way your target market would want them to, those are the products that should get a negative review. If they’re good, give that positive review, with appropriate note of the parts that aren’t quite what you’d like.

Your time is probably best spent on reviewing products you can enthusiastically recommend. You want to keep offering value to your readers, and that most often means something they can use. But when there’s a product that a lot of your readers are interested in and you just can’t recommend it, say why! That’s giving value too

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