What are the most important factors to achieving high ranks in local search engines, such as Google Maps and Yahoo Local? SEO consultant David Mihm recently tried to answer that question by asking 20 local search experts to rank the importance of 47 criteria that determine a site’s placement in local search results.
Excitement over advertising revenues was palpable among the online publishers I talked to all last year. That’s not surprising, given the 26% annual growth reported for online advertising reported by the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
Then, early this year, fears over the impact of the economic slowdown began to raise concerns about online advertising’s continued growth among publishers who were increasingly basing their business models on ad-supported content.
Viral marketing is hard to nail down. It’s hardly a science, but there are recurring themes, like humor. Many successful viral campaigns are just friends sharing funny ads.
The problem is humor is hard, too. Jokes can walk a fine line between offensive and corny. And those are relative terms. Your audience decides if your ad is funny, stupid or appalling.
Online consumers want a personalized Web experience, according to a recent survey conducted by MyBuys/The E-tailing Group. Out of the 1,345 consumers surveyed, 77% said they have made additional purchases based on a merchant’s personalized recommendation. Read more…
While constantly doing a ton of detailed, cross-client deliverability research for his email services boutique, Internet-Tools.com, Mark David McCreary has come up with an alternative phrase for false-positives. He calls them “bogus bounces.”
Some of the most interesting moments during any MarketingSherpa Summit come when audience members begin debating an issue among themselves or with a speaker. This year’s Selling Online Subscriptions Summit was no different. Debate flared early on the first day over the best way to handle subscription cancellations.
The US Supreme Court has ruled that if a company does not have a physical location (a store, office, warehouse, etc.) within a particular state, that state can’t require the company to collect and remit sales tax on customers located in that state. For decades now, many state legislators have floated ideas about changing that law because they “lost” millions of dollars in potential tax revenues.
First, the catalog and TV direct response advertisement industries fought back via associations, such as the Direct Marketing Association and the Electronic Retailers Association. New state taxes were unconstitutional; plus, they placed an unfair requirement on merchants not located in that state. Who wants the burden of bookkeeping and paperwork for different state taxes across the United States?
I’ve actually experienced this first hand because Sherpa has had employees in many different states, and their home offices were considered to be “business premises,” so we had to collect and disburse local taxes for many states. Each had different rates, paperwork styles, red tape and typical errors. It was very much like having to deal with many different versions of the IRS. Can you say “massive pain”?
When the Internet took off, state legislators immediately saw it as a new area of taxation. Early attempts were beaten off by the same logic and by lawyers who stopped states from harassing direct mail and TV merchants. However, as you may know, since June 1, the state of New York began requiring state taxes from all ecommerce sites with affiliates based in New York state.
They’re estimating $50 million to $70 million in taxes per year. The costs, including battling lawsuits filed by such merchants as Amazon.com, not to mention the paperwork involved dealing with thousands of merchants, won’t be negligible.
Key: if this works, and if New York manages to keep and enforce this legislation effectively, you can expect dozens of other states to follow; many might do so in time for the 2008 holiday rush. Who cares about federal law when it’s a recession year? And ecommerce should be bigger than ever this year because of gas prices. Who wants to drive to shop when they can surf at home?
Some merchants, including Overstock.com, are reacting by cutting their affiliates in New York until the law changes. Presumably they did the math and figured the cost of paperwork was greater than the profits they make from accounts brought in by New York affiliates. If the New York law stays on the books, the problem then comes when dozens more states start asking for taxes too. Should Overstock cut affiliates in every state?
According to Sherpa data, ecommerce sites rely on affiliates for roughly 45% of revenue. Although there are tens of thousands of active affiliates in the US, for most, it’s a part-time income. Roughly 1%-2% of affiliates are responsible for the lion’s share of all that merchant income. Will we see merchants begging their most profitable affiliates to move from state to state in order to flee the newly enacted taxes?
I can’t say whether the new law is right or wrong. The world has changed profoundly since federal law was written; now, brick-and-mortar stores are in competition (and cahoots) with websites. It almost doesn’t seem fair that a retailer who has taken the extra risk, expense, and trouble of launching a brick-and-mortar store in my state should have to deal with more tax administration than an Internet retailer should.
However, it also doesn’t seem fair to use affiliates as the loophole to zap taxes through. In my mind, affiliates are icons of the type of entrepreneurialism and clever small business ownership that has made this country great. They are also actual residents of the states in question. How can it be right to crush the livelihood of your own state’s residents to get your hands in the pocket of a business several states away?
If law changes, it should be on a federal level. And affiliates should not be affected.
If you want more info, my friend Shawn Collins at Affiliate Summit Inc. has been tracking the matter closely. He’s also working with colleagues to consider forming an industry association for affiliates. A guy worth knowing.
Affiliate Marketing Blog by Shawn Collins:
http://blog.affiliatetip.com/archives/new-york-affiliate-tax-recap/
Embedding video — you should try it. You can use any one of the millions of videos on YouTube to liven up a blog post for nothing. Just copy the “embed” HTML code, paste it into a blog and bam — content that doesn’t cost a dime.
YouTube’s TOS says you can embed videos in a blog as long as you’re not:
I recently talked with Natasha Funk, research director for Terra Networks. She has some interesting demographics to share on the online U.S. Hispanic market. We mostly talked about a content-engagement study Terra conducted with comScore.
You’d think we’d know everything about Baby Boomers by now, right? Wrong.
Here some insights about the demographic you may not know. I came across them while completing a case study about marketing to Baby Boomers. Read more…
