Why Bloggers Should Pay Attention to the New Affiliate Tax Laws

This guest post is by Yasmine Mustafa of 123LinkIt.com.

The Business Insider recently reported that ten thousand affiliates were recently dropped from Amazon’s Affiliate Program with little warning.

How much income would you lose if you were no longer permitted to use the program?

This is an issue that bloggers in California, Colorado, Illinois, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Connecticut are currently facing. They were instantly cut from Amazon’s affiliate program due to a new affiliate tax law.

Update: Amazon dropped the ballot fight last week and cut a deal with California on the collection of sales tax. According to CNN Money, they have not stated whether or not they will reinstate their CA affiliates.

How did it happen? What can you do to avoid this law from passing in your state?

Online retailers such as Amazon that do not have a physical presence are not required to collect sales tax like brick-and-mortar businesses. Big companies like Wal-Mart who are taxed see this as an unfair advantage and are paying lobbyists to push what is now called the “Amazon tax” or the “affiliate nexus tax.”

In short, this affiliate tax states that online merchants can in fact be taxed if they have a “nexus” or connection within the state. Affiliate marketers are one of the groups of people viewed as a connection. As a result, state governors in the above-mentioned states are signing a law that taxes Amazon and other online vendors through its affiliates. They are now being treated as having a physical presence and are subject to pay taxes.

Amazon has reacted immediately. Wanting to avoid being subject to costly tax inquiries from the government, they are cutting connections to every state that passes the affiliate tax by terminating agreements with all affiliate marketers, leaving many bloggers with decreased incomes and some with no incomes from their blog. As long as there are states that do not tax its sales, Amazon has stated that it will continue to avoid affiliate marketing in the states that do. As of June 30, 2011, California, Colorado, Illinois, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Connecticut have been affected by the nexus tax.

The war is not lost and bloggers can make a difference in fighting back or preventing the affiliate tax law from passing in their state.

Visit the Performance Marketing Association (PMA) Tax Nexus site to further educate yourself and join one of their state-specific Google groups.Join PMA’s fight in the reversal of the tax currently underway in certain states. To learn more, visit PMA’s contribution page.Bloggers can write their state representative and explain how the legislation will harm their income. The best letters are concise and honest, and include supporting examples. About.com has a great structure on how to write letters to Congress that is worth checking out beforehand.

If you have been affected by the affiliate tax, there are other options consider.

Find other affiliate programs to join. Some of the most popular that can fulfill Amazon’s inventory include Barnes and Noble, Buy.com, Best Buy, Newegg, the Apple Store, Wal-Mart, Target, and Sears.Sign up for an affiliate tool that aggregates all the affiliate programs and automatically embeds affiliate links in your blog. These include 123LinkIt (Disclaimer: I am the Founder of 123LinkIt), Skimlinks and Viglink.Relocate. This is a drastic step but worthwhile if your revenue warrants it.

Will national standards for taxing online retailers be implemented?  How will all this affect bloggers and small businesses? Let us know in the comments!

Yasmine Mustafa is the Founder of 123LinkIt.com, a service that allows WordPress bloggers to earn affiliate revenue from product keywords in their content. It is currently the #1 downloaded affiliate plugin in WordPress.

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4 Reasons Every Online Brand Should Explore Gamification Strategies

Elizabeth Shaw is an emerging media analyst at Forrester Research, serving interactive marketing professionals. Follow her on twitter @shaw_smith2.

Adding a few visual game elements to a brand’s site in order to “gamify” a marketing strategy and increase engagement just isn’t enough. To be done right, gamification must take a behavior-focused approach.

For instance, by offering rewards for user actions, consumers are more likely to engage with a brand — that is, visit the site more often, register, linger and invite friends. But while gamification is a major buzzword among interactive marketers today, game use isn’t new.

So what’s making gamification so popular today? Consider these four factors.

In general, consumers are looking for new ways to entertain themselves — 40% of U.S. online adults have expressed this interest in a recent survey. What’s more, consumers want game elements everywhere. 60% of consumers play a video game online in a typical week. Consumers (especially Gen Yers) are increasingly accessing games online and on mobile devices.

When consumers can share achievements like badges and trophies with their social networks, it enhances the innate human motivations that games have used for generations to keep people engaged (i.e. the desire for status, access, power, etc.) And, along with increasing user status, sharing creates a low-cost marketing campaign to lure in other participants.

Badgeville, BigDoor and Bunchball all offer SaaS platforms with mechanics, accessible consumer tracking and data, and the ability to easily iterate a gamification strategy as needed. These vendors are helping the process along by offering the right tools for specific goals.

Recent gamification efforts from brands like Chiquita, HP and Sephora have succeeded, increasing confidence that, if applied correctly, the right gamification strategy can work.

The biggest perk to incorporating gamification into a marketing strategy is its ability to boost brand engagement. So for marketers, the questions remains: How exactly does gamification help increase engagement?

Involvement: Gamification can foster participation by increasing site returns, new visitors and registrations through reward systems and incentivized word-of-mouth efforts. For example, when Chiquita sponsored the movie Rio, it worked with Bunchball to create a microsite where consumers could win badges by watching Rio movie clips. The company indicated it received 8,000 unique visitors after launch, dwarfing the success of past promotions. Interaction: Marketers need visitors to spend time with their content and brand in order to foster engagement. Using gamification, marketers can set up the action-reward dynamic for specific engagement they want to increase. For instance, a leading computer manufacturer launched a gamified Facebook app for college students with the goal of promoting its educational computer site — and six weeks after launch saw program participation increase 10 times, with one-in-six users submitting essays and one-in-three visiting the educational computing site. Intimacy: Consumers are able to connect with a brand more intimately when they’re interacting in real-time versus visiting a static brand website. And more importantly, gamification provides a fun and rewarding environment for consumers, which often increases brand affinity. For example, Allkpop, the Korean pop celebrity gossip and news site, worked with Badgeville to motivate behaviors such as commenting, sharing links and following Allkpop social sites. The result: All behaviors saw an uptick, as did consumer sentiment and excitement for the site. Influence: Word-of-mouth marketing has taken off recently, and companies have realized it can have a significant effect on brand visibility. Gamification taps into WOM by giving users incentives to include their friends. SCVNGR, the location-based mobile gaming platform, says that 42% of players broadcast their play to social networks. And with the metrics available, marketers can track not only the users who shared content on social networks, but also the percentage of their friends who click back to the brand.

There is a plethora of game mechanics available that marketers can use to increase consumer engagement. However, no matter what game mechanics are implemented into a marketing strategy, it’s important to remember that gamification will only deliver results if implemented correctly. This means ensuring that gamification complements the current strategy, and can be maintained in the long term. Founder of Bunchball Rajat Paharias says, “The core content experience needs to be good, compelling and meaningful. And as long as that is there, these tools drive actions around the content.”

Image courtesy of Flickr, andyburnfield

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Windows 8: The Top 4 Things You Should Know

Microsoft says it is “reinventing the OS” with Windows 8, the company’s next-generation operating system.

Microsoft fired off dozens of announcements and showed off countless features of the new OS at its Build conference in Anaheim, California. Features such as the Metro interface, support for touchscreens, improved performance and a Windows Store for apps are making headlines.

But which Windows 8 features are the most important ones?

We’ve scoured the Windows 8 feature list, played with Windows 8 devices (our first impressions coming soon), and come up with a list of features that we believe define Microsoft’s next-generation OS.

Without further ado, here are the top four things you need to know about Windows 8:

View As Slideshow » Microsoft demonstrated a lot of Windows 8 devices, including tablet devices, at its Build conference in Anaheim, CA. Windows 8 Devices: A Closer Look These are some of the devices running Windows 8 at Microsoft's Build conference.

"Your personalized lock screen shows you unread emails and other app notifications. The image shown here is a photo of the road leading to Mt. Cook National Park in New Zealand."

Courtesy of Microsoft

"See your apps and content in a glance on the start screen."

Courtesy of Microsoft

"Pick the files you want to send or share from one place."

Courtesy of Microsoft

"Touch browsing is fast, fluid and intuitive."

Courtesy of Microsoft

"The thumb keyboard feels natural and comfortable."

Courtesy of Microsoft

"Large buttons help you type on the touch keyboard."

Courtesy of Microsoft

Windows division President Steven Sinofsky Windows division President Steven Sinofsky takes the stage at Build.

Perhaps the biggest difference between Windows 8 and its predecessors is that this OS is designed to work on not just laptops and desktops, but on tablets as well. Microsoft is introducing the Metro interface it popularized with Windows Phone into Windows 8. Users can access the Metro view or the familiar desktop view with a simple click or tap.

To work well on tablets, Windows 8 has been designed for touchscreens. More importantly, it has been designed to work on ARM-based processors. ARM technology runs most of the smartphones and tablets in the world. ARM chips are simply better suited for these smaller form factors due to their energy efficiency. Even the Apple A5, the chip that powers the iPad 2, contains a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 CPU.

The result is that Windows 8 will work on almost any device you put it on. It works with keyboards and touchscreens, and it doesn’t matter if a device has an Intel, AMD or ARM processor. This makes Windows 8 a versatile OS in a world where the desktop no longer dominates.

Windows 8 boasts vast performance improvements over its predecessors. The memory footprint has been reduced, the boot time has been decreased (Windows 8 boots up in less than eight seconds) and the Metro UI launches apps almost instantly. The OS also supports USB 3.0 and Hyper-V.

The result is a slick OS that’s as fast as iOS and Mac OS X Lion. Most people will be surprised by how quickly Windows 8 starts up or runs apps. We certainly were surprised.

Windows 8 will have an app store. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody. The rise of Apple’s iOS App Store has launched a wave of app store mania across the tech ecosystem. Microsoft also gave away its intent to launch an app store in a leaked slide deck last year.

Still, the inclusion of a Windows Store provides new business opportunities for developers. It creates an incentive for developers to build Metro-style apps that could potentially sell well on the world’s most popular OS. And it’s a clear indication that Microsoft doesn’t intend to give up any ground to Apple and its App Store.

Windows 8 was designed with touchscreens in mind. And while the OS works just fine with a keyboard and a mouse, Microsoft touted the Metro UI as the future of the OS.

Yes, Windows 8 includes the familiar desktop UI. And yes, you can install your standard desktop apps (the first app I installed on my Windows 8 tablet? Firefox). However, the real magic of the OS occurs when you’re swiping through the tile interface, launching games, launching the Charms bar and interacting with the device via touch.

Microsoft isn’t allowing itself to be stuck in the Stone Age. It knows the future of computing is mobile. It knows less people will be sitting at desktops to do their work and will carry around ultralights or tablets instead.

That’s what Microsoft is betting on. If Apple’s trying to pioneer the touch-based OS with iOS, Microsoft is trying to perfect it. The company is making a radical bet with the next version of Windows. We have to give the company credit: It’s not afraid to take a big risk in order to make a comeback.

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