Is it Going to be Good News Week?
Posted On: 2009-01-19
Many years ago ... way back when Steve was a teenager and I was too young to crawl there was a pop group that had song out about it being good news week. Someone dropped a bomb somewhere polluting all the atmosphere etc. etc. etc.
Well this week has all the potential of being one of those weeks for affiliate marketers ... and even more so for those of us here in adult.
Affiliate tax
Some time last year I talked about the new tax that the State of New York was going to bring in. It was aimed at any online retailer - but particularly Amazon - that had an affiliate in the state and imposed the usual sales tax for any sales that Amazon might make via those affiliates.
When you think about it you'll soon see that was not going to be good news for any merchant's affiliate marketers who resided in the State of New York because it wasn't just Amazon that was going to have to start paying the sales tax. A lot of online retailers weren't very happy about it either and both Amazon and Overstock challenged the new law in the courts.
The bad Monday news is that they lost and the law was upheld. Reports indicate that both retailers are going to appeal and let's hope that this time they're successful because that is a real can of worms that will open up for affiliates and the merchants that they market for.
But wait, there's more ... yes, there's always more when it comes to bad news and this bad news is that the State of Illinois has a similar law in the pipeline to the one that New York introduced and it could appear sometime early this year.
As I said last year, the New York tax was going to be just the tip of the iceberg and many more states in the US and countries in the rest of the world are going to want to start taxing online affiliate sales.
Those 2257 regulations
Earlier this month I wrote about the new 2257 regulations that had been published by Justice Department back on December 18. Well those regulations are set to come into force on January 20.
According to the Free Speech Coalition we should all be thankful that these new regulations are coming because under the old regulations record keeping was much tougher. Under the new regulations it seems that the record keeping provisions will not be enforced on any content shot before July 27, 2006.
I'm glad that the Free Speech Coalition thinks that the new regulations aren't as bad as the old ones but I think I'll want to see what happens once the regulations are in place before I make a decision on whether they're better or worse.
There's more to it than what you might read here ... or there.
When you hit the Internet to look for information about something that is really important to your business where do you look and where do you stop looking?
If you're looking for information about search engines and what changes are likely to be having an effect on us in the future you might go to look at webmaster boards, blogs and columns like this one and maybe even some of the search engine boards that are out there. But is that enough?
Some discussion that's been going on over the last few months might suggest that it isn't.
A while ago Google introduced a metric to their Google Analytics program that they called 'bounce rate' - the length of time someone stays on a web page before going back to the search engine for more information.
People have begun taking that as a sign that pages with high bounce rates are not going to rank well in the search engines and some big names in the search industry have joined in the discussion and loudly promoted bounce rate as one of the metrics that Google must be using.
If you were interested in bounce rate and only took what you read on the message boards as the gospel truth then you would be looking at ways of keeping people on your site for longer. However, if were to look a little deeper and go back to read some of the papers that researchers have been publishing about things like bounce rate you would have seen that it's impossible to ascertain what the genuine bounce rates really are.
The search engines all consider that bounce rate is one of the more 'noisy' signals and not a metric that can give a genuine indication of the value of a web page. So all the waffle about bounce rates that you may have seen around on message boards and blogs is just a lot of hot air and if you really want the truth then dig a little deeper than those message boards.
Now I'm off to do a little research for a new client