Tax Time Is Coming Affiliate Marketers

Lots of people jump into affiliate marketing without thinking first. Remember making money on the Internet is a business and the government will want their cut.
Even knowing we have 3 months plus to file now is the time to gather your information. I always gather my income first. Many affiliate programs only go back one year in their reports sections. Be sure to download all your income from each and every program you have used over the last year. At the very least print the reports from your affiliates.
Gather your expenses. Remember you are a business like it or not. One good thing about being a money making business is that you can write off just about everything you have purchased over the last year. Just some examples would be computers, back up hard drives, scripts, hosting accounts and even pens and pencils. Any service you use to run your business online can be written off.
Hopefully you have saved all your invoices and email receipts from online purchases. Don't just leave them on your CPU, Print each and everyone of them.
One thing about the IRS is you must at least file by 4/15 each year. Even if you send a incomplete form you must atleast declare your income by then.
Now don't quote me on this, but if you are disabled and on disability Making Money Online as a hobby can be considered residual income which you don't need to report to SS, but you must claim it with the IRS for income tax. Thats how SS explained it to me, but call them yourself. You can't be a LLC or incorporated but you can earn money online. From what I was told is the rules about making money kick in when FICA starts. Thats when you get a job at a business and they start the process of deducting money from your pay check. SS told me if I found a Rolex Watch in the trash everyday and sold it online that would not affect a disability status, but it dose need to be reported as income with the IRS. Again if your making Money Online due to being disabled call Social Security and ask for yourself.
Try to remember the basics. Money comes in and money go's out. The money's that go out can be deducted from the money that comes in which is your income. The total income is what you use to determine the amount you pay tax on.
Start now and save yourself a huge headache in March or April

eBay To Cut 1000 Jobs in Q4, What's Next ?

It's in all the papers and on CNBC today that eBay will cut 1000 jobs and reduce new hire positions. This only shows what we in the affiliate world have seen coming for months. With fee restricting every few month's and the loss of confidence from affiliate marketers and eBay sellers we are sure more news will be coming from the company. Look for eBay to cut back even more as the economy slides down. Common sense would dictate reducing expenses during hard times. That what all business's do. Whether it's your local builder or painter or a huge company reasoning says to cut back on money going out until money comes in. Basic business.
Who will suffer. Well eBay employee's for one and then stock holders. After those folks take a hit look for eBay to cut back in other place's. Were we don't know, but advertising is usually on the list when a company is having issues. According to a story on Cnet eBay just purchased a Danish classified service which would show us that they are continuing to try expanding world wide with hopes of generating revinue abroad.
Face it eBay isnt what it use to be. People don't spend hours browsing sites selling stuff. Internet users are becoming more sophisticated and tend to do more research before buying. With so many websites to choose products from their are only a few reasons a shopper would go directly to the site. One is close outs and another is buying used items. Also consumers are using their work computers to buy during their lunch hours or free time. Since most folks use the Internet at work these days they tend to turn their computers off at the end of the day and not turn on it back on till they need to. People are just getting sick of the same old thing online. The desire isnt there anymore to sit for hours and browse the site.

ePN Blocks Hostgator Check Your Webmaster Tools

What a day today was in the Internet Marketing world. If you use Hostgator as your host you may have had your servers blocked by ePN/eBay. Well know one knew for sure but 100s if not 1000's of website were not pulling the API from eBay. A API if you don't know is how products or RSS feeds propagate to websites. Now at 8 PM the sites I had down are all back, but showing warnings in Google Webmaster tools.
WARNING "Some URLs in the Sitemap have a high response time. Some URLs listed in this Sitemap have a high response time. This may indicate a problem with your server or with the content of the page."
Resubmitting them seams to have taken care of the warnings. This started with me at 7AM EST when I couldn't get into the ePN Dashboard. I even twittered about it TWITTER. Then finally after finding a way into the ePN forum I found others having issues getting into there dashboards. I shut down for a couple hours and came back and BAM I was in the ePN Dashboard. Then during a search I found that all my sites on my Hostgator Baby Croc account weren't pulling in the API feed from ebay. After reading some more I decided to send a ticket to HG and they responded as follows.
"Hello,This is happening because Ebay has temporarily blocked our server from connecting to their api:" The statement speaks for itself or so it seams. It turns out eBay making big changes this week and something on there servers was changed and some DNS needed time to propagate across the Web.
No sweat though my Hostgator reseller accounts where all fine all day. No issues at all. Problems like this can be avoided sometimes by having a reseller account. When you use a shared server your site are on the same server as 1000's of others. If there is someone doing bad things on that server you get bumped with everyone else on that server. I'm not saying ePN banned any server in fact they stated on the forum that they were not blocking users and that it was a routing issue.
This is a typical day for web masters and Internet Marketers. Some days its like walking on glass. As long as the sitemaps go through I think all is well for now. These are issues that happen all the time but can be avoided in some instances by Using a Reseller Account

Are You Ready For Changes At ePN

If you use EBay or ePN to monetize websites this past week as been very stressful and hectic. This week EBay announced that more changes are coming to the auction site. Lower upfront fee's and a huge change in search. But I'm not going to get into the changes on EBay auction though.
The biggest happening in the SEO & SEM community is ePN closing accounts arbitrarily. This is a though one. EBay affiliates with years with the program simply dropped Via Email and there CPanels being locked to 7 day warnings. These are trying times for those of us who use ePN for monetizing our sites. This work building websites isnt easy and takes lots of time to learn and implement. Now we are all waiting to see if ePN will be doing these, as they say "expiring" regularly. I think it will happen again, but when is the question.
Protect you ePN account is the 1st thing users should be doing. If you are a total newbie I do not recommend signing up for a ePN (Ebay Partner Network). Beginners really need to know exactly what they need to use ePN and keep there accounts.
A few things I am doing to protect myself from the axe is archive non performing campaigns. You will not get commissions from any sales, but this needs to be done. I don't know the metrics EBAY/EPN use in there decisions, but they have used statements like "tier is based at a publisher level not a campaign ID level" take what they say to heart. That quote is from the manual under value based pricing. Even though this is for value based pricing it would appear as they are possibly using it to evaluate users. If you have 25 campaigns and just one is not performing it will lower the quality rating of all the sites for that publisher. ePN says this is only for ACRU's but I'm taking no chances. As someone who has been with EBay for many years I know how valuable accounts are, so even if I have to archive all my campaigns to fell safe I will.
Remove all links to the sign up page. ePN said that they do no not want low performing new active registered users. This meaning users who sign up and only purchase one item then never come back or doesn't buy enough. Like today I checked my account and on one site I had 2 ACRU's but the fees Ebay charged the seller for the items sold was under $50 (2ACRU's). This scares me because if these people don't come back and spend more money I haven't generated income for the company (ebay). So I have decided to pull all the links to the sign up page on all my sites.
Last but not least make sure you engage your users with tons of content. Any site that is lacking should be archived as well.
All the ePN campaigns I have or will archive will be converted in one way or another. Some I will move to pepper Jam and some I will completely drop from ePN and find other ways to get items to my customers.
Once all this is done I will build specific sites that meet or beat ePN's mission. That is if I last that long. I could get the axe any minute. Doing all this may not protect me. After all some user are truly real SEM professionals with 10's of thousands of readers. I think I'm up to 50. Thanks for that you guys.
If you are archiving ePN Campaigns I can honestly recommend the affiliate programs in the sidebar. I use them all. Pepper Jam is the most important one for ePN now. That could change ! We all need to get backup if you haven't, start now !!!!. Sign up for some other affiliate programs NOW.