So Governor Brown signed the new tax bill on Wednesday after the state assembly and senate passed the bill. I hoped Gov. Brown would veto the bill. He ruined the state the last time he was the governor, and here he goes again.

Amazon to Terminate over 10,000 Associates Accounts

Because of this bill, over 10,000 affiliate accounts are being closed, which means no more affiliate marketing with Amazon for Californians. This new law will not only cause job loss, but also decrease in state tax revenue.

This is a good reason to live in a business-friendly state if you run a home business. Running a business in a state where everything’s controlled by liberal politicians is the last thing I would do, because they will always try to get more money from your business.

I just hope there are enough complaints among the citizens that this ridiculous law gets repealed. Amazon even quoted this law “unconstitutional”. Read Amazon’s offical letter to the Board of Equalization. It is a very interesting reading.

Amazon respectfully opposes the new tax collection schemes proposed in AB 153 (Skinner), AB 155 (Calderon), SB 234 (Hancock), and SB 655 (Steinberg), because they are either facially unconstitutional or would construct Trojan horses for functionally identical unconstitutional regulation. Similar legislation in other states has, counterproductively, led to job and income losses and little, if any, new tax revenue.

Continue reading… Amazon Position on Sales Tax Nexus Bills

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UPDATE : Pat over at SmartPassiveIncome.com posted an excellent piece about this issue. I recommend that you go read his post. Alternatives for Amazon Affiliates.

After reading Lynn’s “Virtual Tour of My Home Office” few weeks ago, I was motivated to do my own, but with a twist. It is almost embarrassing to show my home office because of so much crap in my office. It is just a mess. I admire what Baker is doing over at “Man vs Debt” He basically sold all of his crap and living a simple life with minimum stuff.

So the twist is… I’ve taken some photos of my current office for some reality check for myself, and I will be selling most of the stuff I have piled up. I will be spending next few days organizing and cleaning up my home office. Anyway, let’s take a look at my messy office. This should be fun :)

What a Mess!

My office is in 3rd floor of my house.  It is tiny and hot all the time.  Absolutely no air flow.  From the left bookcase, you can see I’m a big fan of Sitepoint.  I own about 10 books and few expensive courses which I rarely looked at.  Right next to the Sitepoint books (orange books) you can see like 20 US tax files.  I really don’t know why I have my business tax return files right next to my desk.  These need to go somewhere else.  And more junk on the top.

In the center, you will see my PC and iPad 2.  I built the PC myself using clearance parts from Newegg some time ago.  I think I spent around 1k on it and it’s working great.  Two monitors you see up there are both from Samsung, my favorite brand.  I used to own three monitors, but sold one just because my desk is smaller now.  iPad 2 is great for managing my business and time.  It is something I can’t live without :)

I got my chair from BizChair.com about 5 years ago for something like $120, from a clearance sale.  I grabbed few at the time and it is the most solid chair I’ve ever used.  Most of the chairs I owned previously, even more expensive ones, they didn’t last more than a year.  But this monster is just as solid as new.

More Crap

Yikes! that’s the office closet.  90% of the stuff piled up there aren’t used at all.  I can probably sell or donate them all.  Oh yeah… pink flowers… this room used to be my daughter’s playroom. :)

Books! Books!

I admit.  I’m addicted to collecting books.  Before we moved to this new house, I used to own just about double the amount I own now.  I donated most of the books I used to own, but I still need to get rid of half of the books I now own.  I read most of them, so no need for keeping them.  Hmmm.. don’t ask me why I have 5 toothbrushes there.  I have no idea how they ended up there.

Even More..

This is the last photo.  That orange bed is where I take nap when I get tired from working.  I try to take rest every hour or so even when I’m not tired.  Putting a bed right next to me may not be the best idea, but it works for me.  By the way, a little stack of books on the 3rd shelf are the ones I’m currently reading.  Here are the titles.

• The Metabolic Effect Diet: Eat More, Work Out Less, and Actually Lose Weight While You Rest – I lost over 20 lbs so far.  20 lbs more to go!
• The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram your genes for effortless weight loss, vibrant health, and boundless energy
• Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World!
• The Notes: Ronald Reagan’s Private Collection of Stories and Wisdom – My favorite so far!

That’s about it.

In next few days, my home office will get a makeover.  I can’t get rid of the stuff in two days, but it will be cleaned and organized.  I will post “before” and “after” photos soon.  Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed the tour of my messy home office.

Here is a quick Fiverr update.  I really didn’t intend to make any money over at Fiverr, but obviously it worked.  Back in September of 2010, I talked about how to use Fiverr to get cheap backlinks and at the same time, I posted a simple Fiverr offer myself.  It was about posting a link for one year on my PR3 website.  Since then, I’ve sold 18 gigs, which generated $72.  Not bad for a gig! I basically did nothing except posting a gig, which is just a few sentences long.

I can be creative and probably able to sell more gigs of similar kind if I really wanted to. I might invest some time doing that in the near future. If I do, I will write a post about it. There are many people selling thousands of gigs selling weird stuff, so get into it if you have an idea.

Update Sept 6th, 2010
XFactor just posted that he is considering reopening the forum with new terms. He really didn’t have to do that, but as always, he is going the extra mile with his service.

Who would’ve thought this day would come? I’m really saddened by this. XFactor‘s private forum was one of the only few forums with real information for Adsense publishers. That was the only forum I visited every single day religiously, and now it’s gone because of some random jerk :(

The forum is permanently closed due to a legal issue I have been dragged into between a 3rd party seller and a 3rd party buyer of several websites that were advertised on this forum. Between this and many other member problems behind the scenes since the forum opened a year ago, it has totally soured my enthusiasm to continue a discussion group in any fashion from this point on. It essentially boils down to one member of the forum who paid another member thousands of dollars for some websites. The buyer never received his websites and went on a severe rampage on me personally, because he claimed since it was ‘my forum’ then I should be responsible. He then got a lawyer with a cease and desist involved, and its just too much stress for me to handle. This has become a very disheartening situation because the forum was designed to help people, not create personal liabilities due to the actions of others.

I don’t know where to find back those wonderful members of the private forum. I wish we had an alternative forum for XFactor’s Adsense Masters Course members.

As promised, I will share with you a case study which explains why choosing a high-paying keyword is still important when it comes to Adsense. In my last post, I explained how a 1 page website generated thousands of dollars for me with small traffic. Not only that, but it also generated one of the highest paying clicks I’ve ever seen in my entire IM career. As you can see on the bottom of my previous post, it also generated $20 clicks. That’s how it was able to produce so much money with little traffic.

Today, I want to show a website that brings in about 14,000 unique visitors every month with 180,000 page views a month. I can’t really tell you the URL, but here is a screen shot of Awstats to prove my point.

As you can see from the stats, that site is doing great in terms of traffic. But when it comes to Adsense earnings, it’s doing about $0.10-0.15 per click whereas my high-paying keyword niche site pays ten times as much per click. If anyone wants to make a living off of Adsense sites, integrating high-paying keywords would be a “must” for success.

So what did I do to maximize the revenue from my site that generates over 14,000 uniques?

In order to get more out of the traffic I get, I started building an email list. Once people sign-up for my newsletter, they get automated emails from me with affiliate links embedded. Sometimes, I give out link to my own site where the article page is optimized with high-paying keywords. Whenever I send out these emails, I get big boost on Adsense earnings on that day. This is one strategy that works all the time.

To do this, I just find a best article I can find on that subject from an article directory. Then I create a single webpage with 2 Adsense blocks integrated. That webpage has no other links. It works great. Right now, about 100-150 people sign-up for my newsletter every single day.

Conclusion

The ideal way to approach niche marketing is to find keywords that pays well and have low competition at the same time. But when you find a niche keyword that pays low, and yet has extreme low competition, you can always build a list and redirect your traffic to a webpage that is optimized with high-paying keywords.

In this post, I want to prove my point that micro-niche sites still do work and it is still a great way to make money online. Since I started building micro-niche websites, I saw people arguing back and forth whether micro-niche sites are dead or not. I really didn’t care about what people think. I just kept on building my sites as I used to when I started.

To prove my point, I’d like to share a story. Back in December of 2008, I’ve created a single page, a 54 word post website. I can’t really reveal what I wrote there, but the post was about a health condition of morbidly obese people. It is a extremely saturated market with high PR websites dominating all related search terms. After reviewing keywords, I found a few keywords that had few hundred searches done each day with low competition.

After researching those two keywords, I dropped one that had almost no advertisers in Adsense. So I used the other keyword and came up with a simple, 54 word post about that health condition. Exactly a month later, I had a $84.47 Adsense day from this website. There was a big spike in traffic. Since then, it has generated $2389.36 in 2009. The funny thing is that that website has no back-link at all. It is not linked from any websites, even now.

You may think what’s the big deal about making $2389.36 with a website, and I understand where you are coming from. I’m just trying to tell you that a well-researched keyword combined with high paying ads can still make you money even in highly saturated markets. That’s the beauty of niche marketing, which I love.

Here is what I did to make this website.
1) Domain name is “keyword-keyword-keyword-tips.com” It is a three word keyword.
2) Registered the domain for 3 years.
3) I installed WordPress. I meant to post more on this website, but ended up doing only 1 post.
4) Since then, it has over 80 comments. I think the comments really helped boost search engine rankings. But I didn’t have any comments for many months.
5) It has 1 block of Adsense on the top. I will attach a screen shot.

That’s about it. If you are thinking about giving up with niche marketing, give it a second thought. Focus on keyword research and delivering the right content for that keyword. It has always worked and still working. In the future post, I will explain why choosing a high paying keyword is very important by showing you one of my sites that generates thousands visitors more per month then above site and making 1/10th of income from Adsense. Thanks for reading.

P.S. Here is a bonus screen shot. :)

Since the big change in affiliate payout structure, my EPC has gone down the toilet. It is now hovering around $0.02 which is horrible. I miss the days when we had surprising $100-$200 commissions per sale here and there.

I know that many of the publishers are having problem with bot-clicks, but I don’t think it’s the cause of my poor EPC. My suspicion is that my EPN affiliate websites are built around high ticket items. For example, I have a website that sells used buses. Since the beginning, it sold only a few buses. With EPN’s quality click pricing structure, I think my sites will perform poorly.

What this tells me is that all my new sites will have to focus on the items that sells well in volume. I say anything around $20 – $100 products. Now, because I was away for so long, I might be totally wrong. I’m not sure which way is the best way to monetize EPN’s new payout structure. One thing for sure, my sites are not performing well with the current plan.

I’m going to test a few different niche website models for EPN and determine if I would stay with EPN or not.

EPN : Ebay Partner Network
EPC : Earning-Per-Click (In EPN’s case, EPC refers to earnings per 100 Clicks)