There’s a great book out about goal setting called “Goals: Setting and Achieving Them on Schedule” by Zig Ziglar. Take a look at it if you feel you could use some extra help in this department. In fact, set a goal to purchase the book and read it if you have to!

Another important goal for you to set: if you are really looking to augment your earnings with affiliate programs, or plan on becoming a full-time marketer, you have to get out there and make connections.

Built in Support Group

By all accounts, the professional affiliate marketing community is a tight-knit group of people who are constantly in contact with one another.

There is a large amount of information sharing, helping one another as a support group, and a general belief that by pitching in and helping out everyone can be successful in their new role as an affiliate marketer and learn from each others mistakes.

It would be extremely shallow to suggest getting out there and making friends simply to help your business along, and people tend to not look kindly upon those who do (and we all know someone like that, don’t we?). Instead, get out there and introduce yourself. Start by seeing where you can help others with their business, and in return people will be more inclined to help you when you need it.

Get out there and enjoy yourself, and get to know these people personally. You won’t only be better off from a business standpoint, but your life will be far richer for making good friends who can relate to the trials and tribulations of your business woes and successes.

Just being able to relate to like-minded people will relieve tons of work stress. You will always be able to discuss your new career and problems you are facing with people who understand what you’re talking bout and don’t simply see your job as “foolin’ around on the ‘puter”.

Of course, they’ll have no choice but to take you a little more seriously when you invest a little money and a lot of effort in your own affiliate marketing business and really make your image shine.

Personal Growth is Part of the Process!

It’s a well known truism that states, “It takes money to make money.” These words couldn’t be truer in the world of affiliate marketing.

Although affiliate marketing is relatively cheap to set up as a home business, there are still some costs involved in getting up and running smoothly. Things like home office accessories (remember that trip to Home Depot?) Can set you back large sums of money depending on how far you are willing to go at once.

There are also costs involved within the industry itself. For example, finding affordable web space ($8-$15 per month) and registering your own domain names ($10-15 per year) does add up.

You will also need to look at web site template options if you hope to save time by having your websites “pre-planned”. Low-cost templates, such as those found at www.affiliate-marketing-templates.com can greatly affect the way others view your site. Is it professional? Is it clean? A good web development company selling low cost affiliate website templates will be able to accomplish all of this and more.

You are also going to want to invest both time and effort into setting yourself up with quality content. Writing for the web is a skill that takes practice and patience, like any other, and must be clean and easy to read while still fulfilling the needs of your affiliate site.

You can always go out and find professional writers to do this for you, but remember that they can be costly and deserve to be well-paid for their services. After all, they are going to make or break your web site!

Investing in your affiliate marketing business is more than just covering costs, though. It is really about you stepping up to the plate and making a commitment to become a success. It is an investment in your own success, as well as an investment in your future.

Hopefully, this article has given you some ideas about the direction you need to take in order to earn extra income as a successful affiliate marketer. Remember that it takes time to become succeed at anything. Rome wasn’t built in a day. You’re affiliate marketing business isn’t going to be built in a day either.

Just keep at it, and before long you’ll have people coming to you for advice on how to get started.

Guest Author Bill Schnarr is a successful freelance writer and a seasoned work at home professional providing valuable insight and advice to those looking to start a homebased business at home. His numerous articles offer real-life tips and techniques for getting the most out of a homebased business.

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Make no mistake, although affiliate marketing can be an easy and fun way to earn additional income, it is work, and just like any other job, requires effort, perseverance, and above all, a clear line of sight from start to finish line.

Things like setting up your home office properly, getting some know-how, setting realistic goals, making connections, and investing in your business will not only ensure that you have a leg-up on your competition, but it will also ensure you are firmly standing head and shoulders above them.

You Get to Work at Home

Perhaps the most important first step you can take to becoming a professional affiliate marketer is to set up your home base – that little home office you’ve always dreamed about!

There are many good articles on the internet about ergonomic design, and with good reason. Anyone who is going to be spending a large amount of time on their computers needs a space that promotes good posture, positive environments, and takes care of safety issues revolving around the office workspace.

The best place to start might be to head down to your local Home Depot and touch base with a professional sales representative. They are trained to show you how to set up a first-rate ergonomic office while saving you some serious cash.

Ergonomics is the science behind preventing office workplace injuries, and office designers now make tables, chairs, and desktop accessories that reduce stress on your back, limbs, wrists, and tendons, and reduce stress injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome which can occur from long hours of doing small repetitive tasks.

You’ll want to start with an ergonomically designed desk that puts everything within easy reach, a good computer with a screen that won’t hurt your eyes, non-glaring lamps placed far enough away that your eyes won’t be soaking in light while you are trying to work on the computer screen, and a chair that is comfortable and promotes circulation to your legs and rest of your body.

Of course, having the greatest home office in the world won’t matter if you don’t take the next step to becoming a successful affiliate marketer: getting some good, professional training.

Simple Learning Curve

Nobody goes onto a worksite cold. You can’t walk into a restaurant and expect to become the head chef just because you dressed like one that morning. And no construction company in the world is going to put you in charge just because you want the extra money but lack any real training.

The trick, then, is getting some professional training and learning how to become a professional affiliate marketer.

The first step in this road to success is to find a professional affiliate marketer and see what they can do to help you get on your feet and get moving. Thankfully, there are a few affiliate marketing pros out there who supplement their income by fulfilling another dream for many of them: being able to teach their trade to other enthusiastic marketers and passing their collective knowledge on to others.

In fact, simply typing “Affiliate Marketing Training” into www.yahoo.com or some other search engine will find dozens and dozens of sites promoting quality affiliate marketing conferences that you can attend.

One of affiliate marketing’s brightest stars and biggest success stories is James Martell, and chances are pretty good that if you’ve looked into affiliate marketing at all you’ve seen his name pop up more than once. His downloadable home-study course and twice monthly audio newsletter for students of his program make him the good place to start looking for a great course and learning the inner workings of affiliate marketing.

Become a student of the business. Start by setting some realistic income goals and working to achieve them.

Reachable Goals with Consistant Effort

One problem with some affiliate marketers is that many tend to overshoot both their skills and their plans by setting unrealistic income goals and becoming disenchanted when they are unable to attain them.

Certainly a goal of $5,000 a month is attainable, but the first time affiliate marketer is most likely not going to make that kind of money when they step into the ring for the first time.

Make no mistake; $5,000 dollars a month is a goal that can be achieved through affiliate marketing, but beginners should look for something more modest. Start small. Start with, “I’m going to earn an extra $50-$100 a day, by learning how to create my own great looking websites, that get free traffic from the search engines, by taking the time to learn how to do it, from someone who already does the same thing.”

As an income goal, it’s certainly achievable, and you would be doing yourself a favour by setting aside the extra time you will need to learn how to do things right, the first time. Like any skill, it takes time and experience before you really get good at what you are doing.

Part two of  “The Benefits of Affiliate Marketing” series in the next couple days.

Guest Author Bill Schnarr is a successful freelance writer and a seasoned work at home professional providing valuable insight and advice to those looking to start a homebased business at home. His numerous articles offer real-life tips and techniques for getting the most out of a homebased business.

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When I saw these posts on Matt Cutts’ blog [is it just me or does he desperately need a new WordPress template?], I thought I’d stop by and add my 2 cents to the call for feedback. If you’re going to ban a site, and possibly dramatically affect someone’s livelihood, how about shooting off an email with a list of things that are “breaking the rules”? Anyways, while reading through replies to the comments, this one in response to a similar post to mine, stuck out:

…First, you are linking to a site or sites which are banned. You need to either remove them entirely, or add the rel=”nofollow” tag, otherwise, you’re getting banned as well (by association). It sucks, I know, but you have to check all your outgoing links (and on a big site, that can be very, VERY tedious)…[Source]

Now I do a lot of link exchanges on that sites and no I don’t check to make sure all my partners are “clean”. That seems like a hell of a lot of work…so off I went to find something to help with the task. My theory is that I’m not a very original thinker so someone else has probably thought of, and created, everything I need; and in fact I was correct.

On the SEOChat forum, one of the moderators had written Is Banned By Google? which is a cool little free app that will validate all your link partners and tell you if any of them are banned from Google. Sure enough I found about 10 sites that I was linked to that had been banned, so I was able to easily give them the heave-ho and hopefully untarnish my reputation with the mighty Google. [Next step is to file an reinclusion request].

The devious part of me says something like this in response to this particular section of the Google algorithm….”so why don’t you, for your next niche, set up 2 sites, one is the good site with clean links from only loosely related sites. The other one is a throw away site and you set up link exchanges with all of your competitors in the niche. Then you go on a rampage and break every rule in the Google guidelines and get banned. Wait a week and all your competition will be banned by association. Now your ‘clean’ site is king of the niche!”

Mmmm, seem like a silly rule to me, but if your SEO hat is a little less than snowy white, it may be worth a go. Otherwise grab the checking tool and start polishing those links up a little.

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Sometimes being a click happy and easily distracted web surfer pays off. I was over at 43 Folders a couple days ago looking for productivity tips and I noticed the little store link waaaaay down at the bottom of their home page. If you click into the store at first you are presented with a directory of topics…nothing too special, but if you click into one of the categories you come to a pretty nifty looking store, that has cool features like a shopping cart, “live” prices and sales and product reviews. Are you thinking this sounds a lot like Amazon? Well it is!

It’s the Associate-O-Matic instant Amazon store for your website. I spent last night installing the Smart Money Shop [update: I've closed the shop] and, I’ve got a ways to go with customization and tweaking, but overall I’m pretty happy with it.

Here are the features that I’ve discovered so far:

• Free and Paid versions
• Use for one or many sites
• Configurable to match your site’s look and feel

As far as ease of install it gets about 6.5 out of 10. You’ll need to be a slight techie to set permissions on the files when you upload them to your server. They do have good instructions on their site [ Associate-O-Matic ].

The part I really like is that it allows you to customize the set of products that you pull from Amazon. So for example I created a Rich Dad section [natch] by choosing Amazon’s book category and sending the keyword “Rich Dad”. I could create a Business Books category using the same method. One of the things that I don’t like about the way 43 Folders has it set up is that have the whole Amazon catalogue in their store, which I personally found confusing. I think products that are related to the site topics are better for the visitor’s experience.

The one you see running on my site is the full version, which they allow you to test drive for free for 30 days. At that time I will need to pay the $99 dollars to buy a license or get downgraded to the free version. The free version takes 1/10 of your sales and puts them under Associate-O-Matic’s Amazon ID, so probably better to pay for the full version.

Another huge bonus with the paid version is that the license allows you to install it on as many sites as want as long as the Amazon ID associated with the installs belongs to you. So if you have 5 sites…that’s $20 per site and you can have a customized store with a related product set for each site.

A great idea, that’s been well executed and I’m looking forward to seeing how it works out.

[update: I've closed the shop]

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76.1% of consumers studied said they could remember the brand name of a company that gave them a promotional item in the past year — versus 53% who could remember a TV or print ad from the past month, and only 27% recalled an online ad.Promotional products — from logo t-shirts to brand-stamped rose petals — really work. And there’s plenty of research data to prove it.

Which explains why in a search-marketing-mad world the promo products industry is quietly raking in nearly three times more ad dollars.

Yes that’s right; they said 3 times as much spent on promo products as the online ad market. Read the rest of the article here until Feb 24.

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The Fall 2005 issue featured stories on topics such as click fraud, the future for search engines, how to capitalize on local search trends, blogging, problems with affiliates programs related to spyware, web analytics and the sale of LinkShare Referral Prg. Also featured was an article with Pedro Sostre who is one of Commission Junction’s top affiliates…some of the tips [like that he never pays any attention to keywords for his sites] were surprising. The issue gives some of his URLs so you can check out for yourself how he does it.

Probably the best story for me was called The Myths of Affiliate Marketing. The myths that they convincingly debunked:

• “It’s good to have white space around your ads”
• “Use short copy because people won’t read long copy”
• “Sell the sizzle, not the steak”
• “Affiliate marketing should entertain and amuse”
• “Marketing should be changed regularly to keep it fresh and new”
• “Bad publicity is better than no publicity”

An the last thing to point out in revenue magazineis the ads. For someone recently in the business I was astounded to see how many affiliate networks there were and the variety of programs being promoted. For ~$6 it was a pretty good crash course for some intermediate affiliate marketing concepts.

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I’m not big into Christmas so I mostly just wish the whole gift-giving thing would go away. Jscott, who woke on the 25^th to find his stocking filled with coal thinks it was a bad thing, but with the current price of heating fuels, I think he should reevaluate. As for me, dispite acting like Scrooge, I did find the latest edition of Entrepreneur magazine under the tree, which is cool, and I was pleasantly surprised to find my hero Robert Kiyosaki [a.k.a. "Rich Dad"] is now a regular columnist.

His column is called [RICH RETURNS] and you can find it on the last page of the January 2006 edition. This one is called Minding Your Business and he recalls a story about meeting a man who tried to tell him, after one of his talks, “Nice talk, but you can’t do what you talk about here in New York City.”

After calling the guy a wimp [one of the thing I truly love about Robert is that his has a very low tolerance for whining], he goes on to explain that he hears that argument and the familiar, “I would, if I had the money” a lot and he explains that the reason people limit themselves with these types of notions is that they are thinking like employees rather than entrepreneurs.

Simply put, entrepreneurs focus on opportunity, while employees focus on resources such as money, people and time. For example, a person who thinks like an employee will say “I can’t do it, because I don’t have the money.” A person who thinks like an entrepreneur will say “Let’s tie up the deal and find the money later.”

He goes on to say, noting his audience, that even if you are an entrepreneur you could still be thinking with an employee mindset. I know I have been guilty of that in my business. It can be very limiting and even destructive.

It reminds me of one of the jewels in the Rich Dad books. It is a simple exercise of being aware of every time you say something like “I can’t afford it”, and then reframing the question to “what can I do to afford it?” You can see that one is like a brake and the other like an accelerator.

You can’t expect old defeatist thought patterns to change overnight, but with the help of some excellent wisdom from Robert and his Rich Dad at least we can get things headed in the right direction.

Jon

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I was driving home from a mini vacation yesterday and happened to notice the reflection of the Maps booklet sitting on my dashboard. I think I’ve officially been assimilated by the web.

I swear every time I hit the “G” for Ground in the elevator at work, a little voice in the back of my mind whispers “Google”. I guess I’ll have to do a “top 10 ways to know you’re spending too much time online post”…does anyone have any others?

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Net Vibes is an Ajax based do-it-yourself portal where you can search 4 major search engines, add flicker modules, your favorite RSS feeds etc. What I also really like about it is the little notepads [I use them as to-do lists] and integration with Writely if you’re into document sharing [or you just don't like Microsoft ]. They’re adding cool new features all the time. If you’ve been using Yahoo for your portal, you may find that Net Vibes is a breath of fresh air.

The other one is Robin Good’s Master New Media site. The volume and quality of information on this site is staggering. His tag line is What Communication Experts Need To Know, and you’ll find a little of everything here. The common theme is cutting edge communications with a focus on web technologies. I’ve been a subscriber to the newsletter for 6 months now and it is always very informative.

Both of these sites may be a little geeky for the non-technos out there, but if you dive in they are both excellent tools.

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Once you find your possible topic, the article breaks down the process of deciding whether or not the topic is worth proceeding into a six step competition analysis. He provides excellent details about each of the steps, but on a high level they are:

1. Is the keyword phrase in the title of the listing?

2. Is the keyword phrase used in the Domain Name of the listing?

3. Is the keyword phrase used anywhere in the URL at all?

4. How many backward links are pointing at the URL?

5. Are the backward links pointing at the page mostly internal links or do the come from other quality websites?

6. Is the URL a top level domain or some obscure page buried deep within a larger website.?

If you can find a niche that has weak competition in a few of these areas, then you can definitely play ball against them. A lot of people don’t like to look at the web as a pure survival of the fittest competition, but that is in fact, exactly what it is.

One thing that I don’t ever hear mentioned, when it comes to these types of niche sites, is that it takes 8 – 10 months to well in Google. in my experience, no matter what you do, you won’t see anything but fringe traffic from Google for the length of time that it take to create a new human being [a coincidence?], so bear that in mind if you are trying out these kind of sites.

Please don’t work like a maniac for 6 months and then quit and pull your site offline because you aren’t paying for the hosting fees…you could be only a few weeks away from a big payday. On this site for example, I just reached the magic “term” and traffic and revenue have jumped dramatically since being freed from the infamous Google sandbox.

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The story that caught my eye was called Sony TV Targeted at Women and it was a critique of recent Sony ads that attempt to target women with the marketing of their new TVs. The article goes on to question the success of Sony’s approach, but for me, being a stereotypically ‘thick’ male, I really uncovered a key theme of the end of the article.

When women buy things they aren’t as concerned with the stats or technical specs as a man is! What else is there? Just kidding

In the story the example given is a husband and wife purchasing a 60″ TV. The man is wanting the 60″ thing, but the wife says he can only get if they can find a cabinet for it to go it that will hide it when it isn’t in use. If my wife ever this she’d be standing and shouting AMEN!

The story continues with a summary saying that a tool like the television advisor tool on Sony’s site is exactly the wrong way to market to women [too technical], while The Flat-Out Truth: 10 Things to Know Before You Buy, even though it is directed towards men, is a more on target sampling of the kinds of questions that women are looking to have answered before they buy.

If you’re interested in the topic of marketing to women, Holly’s blog is a must read.

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The question I’m trying to answer is, “Is it worth it to try and gear the marketing of high tech electronics gear to women?” I mean we all know that mostly men by those sorts of doodads, right?

From a 2004 CNN.com story:

Women actually spent more on technology last year than men, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. It says women accounted for $55 billion of the $96 billion spent on electronics gear.

…A meager 1 percent of women surveyed thought manufacturers had them in mind when creating products, according to the report, released at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show.

…Yet women are involved in almost 75 percent of all electronics purchases, and they are increasingly interested in gadgets, from DVD players to digital cameras, for themselves or their families, according to the survey, which was based on telephone interviews with 1,002 U.S. adults in October and done in association with the independent market research firm Rockbridge Associates Inc.

Radio Shack’s customers have shifted from 20 percent female seven years ago to 40 percent female today. In response, the 7,000-store chain began actively recruiting female store managers last year, and now one of every seven stores is managed by a woman.

It’s always worth questioning stereotypes and turning things that seem like solid assumptions on their heads to see if they look the same upside-down. From the same story…

Tri-City Electronics Inc., a high-end audio-video store in Conover, North Carolina, installed a children’s area, replaced the utilitarian atmosphere with a homier layout and burgundy paint, and even offered tours of the store owner’s home to show the products in a real-life setting. Revenues have been climbing since, said co-owner Sibyle Hager.

More to come…

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Have you ever done a search on a major search engine and noticed next to almost every result there is the Cached Page link? If you go to this search for Smart Money Daily on MSN you can see an example. If you click on the Cached Page link you’ll be take to a snapshot of my home page from a couple weeks ago [note: because of how I've done my stylesheet the cached page's display is a bit funky]. This is not a live page and it is not on my server. Which means that if my server is down, or my database has been deleted, this page will still be available [for a couple weeks only because when the search engines stop finding the real page on your site, they will drop the pages from the cache].

So, now I can retrieve my page’s content and stuff it back into my database. Copy, paste and repeat. All I need to do now is to find all of my pages. For that we can use the site:smartmoneydaily.com search and it will give a list of all the pages indexed by MSN [the same query works for Google and you may need to search both to get all of your pages]. Since my pages also have a date stamp on each story, I was able to back-date them into their original order. Yeah!

What happens if your pages aren’t in the search engines’ cache? You really only have one last resort: Archive.org the Internet Archive [which is, bar none, one of the crown jewels of the web BTW]. A couple years ago a client that I had built a website for called me, and told me their site was “gone.” After some investigation I found out that their had been a miscommunication and the web hosting company, who couldn’t reach my client, deleted all the site’s files. It had been a 2 years since I had done any work on the site and I didn’t have a backup, but even though they had all expired from the cache, I was able to find every page of that site on Archive.org.

The Internet Archive is a little hit-and-miss as to which sites they actually archive. Not a thing in there for this site, yet some garbage sites that I have had for a couple years have every page I’ve ever tossed onto a server in there.

All I can say is that I hope you never need this information, but hopefully if you do run into a lost website problem, [note to self and others: BACKUP YOUR FILES! In case of hard drive data recovery.]  you’ll be able to recover gracefully with the help of the search engines’ cache and/or the Internet Archive.

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Let’s dive in to the benefits.

#1. They have an affiliate program, so this link [Chitika Affiliate Program] and the others on this page are affiliate links. The payout is equal to 10% of the ad revenue for a year. The payout is paid from Chitika’s share, so you don’t lose anything by registering through an affiliate link. So the first bonus with these ads is the ability to earn revenue 2 ways. It would only take a couple of affiliates doing big clicks to generate a pretty good hunk of passive income.

#2. They look good. Many people, including me here, have written about the Adsense ‘hack’ of putting pictures next to Adsense ads as  way of drawing a reader’s attention to the ads and therefore increasing Click Through Rate. Well, eMiniMalls have the pictures built in!

#3 Like Adsense they can be customized to match the colors of your page and your links.

#4 They are dynamic and interactive. Here’s an image [not a live ad] to illustrate:

If this was a live ad as you moused over the tabs they would show different content. The search box is cool but unfortunately it is not allowed for use on the same page as Adsense. When you use the search, it actually retreives a different ad in the eMiniMall without leaving or refreshing the page. So users could do many searches and potentially click may ads without leaving your page.

#5 The last major benefit of these ads is that they are highly customizable.

Here’s some of the code from my ads to illustrate:

<script type="text/javascript"><!--

ch_client = "JigSaw";

ch_width = 468;

ch_height = 60;

ch_color_border = "#FFFFFF";

ch_color_title = "#000066";

ch_color_text = "#333333";

ch_nosearch = 1;

ch_sid = 'SmartMoneyDaily';

var ch_queries = new Array('laptop', 'ipod', 'electronics', 'pc laptop', 

'computer', 'magazine');

var ch_selected=Math.floor((Math.random()*ch_queries.length));

ch_query = ch_queries[ch_selected];

//--></script>

If you use them in stock form they are contextual, which is not allowed with Adsense, so you need to add a line of code to the ad to turn off that feature. It can be done in a couple different ways. By adding

ch_query = ‘Nikon Coolpix 8700′;

the eMiniMall wil only display ads for that product. In my code above I have implemented a version that allows you to target a range of products by specifying a list and then randomly chosing an item from the list to send as the query parameter.

var ch_queries = new Array('laptop', 'ipod', 'electronics', 'pc laptop', 

'computer', 'magazine'); //list of products

var ch_selected=Math.floor((Math.random()*ch_queries.length)); //chose a random one from list

ch_query = ch_queries[ch_selected]; //submit the random choice

Besides turning off the contextual feature you must disable the search tab to comply with Adsense use. You can do that with this line:

ch_nosearch = 1;

The ch_client line is the name of the account that you sign up with, it is just Chitika’s way of tracking which client is serving the ads, since, like Adsense, you can have one account and place the ads on any number of websites [as long as they all comply with the terms and conditions].

The last feature that I want to point out is the channels. Now they are not officially supported yet, which means that you don’t get any data yet, but when the stats kick in [soon we're told] the ability to have any number of custom defined channels will be really great.

ch_sid = 'SmartMoneyDaily';

This line tells them my code for this ad. Now I could ad another section that indicates which section of my page the ad is placed on. This kind of detailed reporting is very useful when you are testing ad placements and other parameters like colors, size and query targeting.

Overall, I’m beginning to really warm up to these ads. The biggest tip I can offer is to really have them targetted to the page content. For example, if you have a site about cars, resist the urge to make the query ‘cars’ and put the same code on every page. Make the query ‘Mazda RX8′ on the Mazda RX8 page and so on. I’ve had a noticeble jump in dollars per click and revenue by fine tuning the ads to the specific keywords of the host page.

The other thing you will want to do is go to the Live demo on the Chitika homepage and use the search box in the ad to find the keywords that you want to use in your queries. This way you can make sure you are getting good ads before you put them on your site. They don’t have ads for everything, mostly products, so if you have a site about Home Loans, you’ll be out of luck, but if you target pretty much anything that is sold on Amazon, you should find a good match.

So if you have a site, you may want to give these ads a try. They are a fresh and original approach to the banner ad. At the very least they offer a little bit of original dynamic content on your pages and with a little experimentation they can provide a nice supplement to Adsense. Think of it this way, you can add them to your existing pages and instantly you have 2 revenue streams on the page rather than one. Works for me, more money not much new effort!

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It turned out to be a very wise move. As he straight away set out a corporate structure that allows us to be protected from almost all legal and credit threat issues [see my story Online Marketing Perils for why this is important]. Please note as you read this that my accountant and I are both Canadian and that the law or the details of the information may not apply in your country / region. I’m hoping the concept does apply to where you if you have your own business.

The picture he drew looked something like this. The most important element of the image is the grey horizontal line in the middle of the two rectangles. That line represents the corporate veil. It is where the liability for corporate issues stops. I’ll explain more about how that works in a minute. First the other pieces of the image.

The Operating Company [ABC] is the one that does all the work. It is from this company that day to day activities are carried out.

The Holding Company [XYZ] holds 100% of the shares of the Operating Company and carries on no business activity. My partner and I are the shareholders of this company.

Let’s follow the money path through this structure. ABC collects all the revenue from business activities and pays all the expenses related to those activities. On a regular basis, probably monthly, it will pay a dividend to its shareholder [which is XYZ] of almost all of its profit or cash on hand. In Canada an inter corporation dividend is tax free so there are no tax issues with this dividend. As I mentioned above, once the money has been transferred to XYZ it is safe from being taken due to law suit or bankruptcy issues of the ABC company. Since XYZ does not carry out any business activity of its own, there should be no legal attacked pointed to it directly.

Once the money has made it to the XYZ company, it can now issue dividends to my partner and I and we can take our money out of the company. I was disappointed to find out that paying out dividends in this manner does not result in significant tax benefits for the shareholds. However, reinvesting the money before paying it out as a dividend does turn out to be a very smart tax strategy.

Those are the basics of the corporate structure that we have set up. If you are doing any type of business, especially on the Internet, I’d recommend at least contacting an accountant and getting their advice on how you can limit your personal liability through some sort of corporate structure. The whole process cost us less than $500, although it will require more work and costs in accounting, tax filings and bookkeeping. I’ll document some of the other specifics around having a proper corporate structure in future articles.

Disclaimer: I’m just presenting my own experieces here, if you want to set up a structure to protect your assets please be aware that you’ll need to contact professional advisors to guide you through the process.

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To Whom It May Concern:

It has come to our attention that your site [mysite.com] is using our company name to increase your rankings. If you would like to continue to use our name, we ask that you link any text which refers to XXXX Car Rental to our site [XXXXcarrental.com]. If not, we request that you remove all mention of XXXX from your domain. If neither is done within 30 days, we will turn this issue over to our legal department. If you have any question, feel free to contact me.

Being a former hockey player, my first reaction was; I’ll show you and set up some kind of googlebowling campaign. You know, what bugs me is not that they don’t want me to optimize pages using their name, that is completely understandable, what bugs me is the threat of the ‘legal department’. And also, the idea that it’s okay to do something bad enough to involve the ‘legal department’ but it’s completely okay if we can squeeze a backlink or two out of it. So, your lawyers are willing to look the other way if they can get a bit of SEO juice out of the offense?

I headed over to Web Master World and started this thread to see if any other web marketers have had the same experience. This reply by HttpWebWitch was probably the best:

…had the same thing happen to me, or rather, to a former employer. A major pharmaceutical company made a similar request. They wanted us to remove all references to their drug.

I’m sure what sparked it was that our page – a medical article written by a prominent surgeon – was ranking higher in Google than they were.

We did not remove the drug name or company’s name from our page. nor did we even offer to link to their site. Instead we put an asterisk* beside their name in the copy linked to a footnote showing the proper trademark citation. Having made those changes, we replied to their lawyers and asked them to review the site again. They never replied. The matter went away.
———–

* CorpoDrug is a registered trademark of ABC Pharma Inc

Another reponse that was interesting suggested that it could be trademark violation to add a company name to your site’s meta tags.

After I cooled down a bit, I just removed all the references to XXXX from the site and moved on with business. It’s clearly not worth any type of fight for me on this issue. My site has had very little traffic from their name as a keyword. It isn’t even worth a reply email pointing out the silliness of simultaneous legal threat and link mongering. I didn’t remove all the other car rental company names or other company names from other sites. I figured there are too many companies who don’t care or won’t bother, for me to remove all of them without being asked.

In general it has been a big-time heads up about doing business online. In general my approach to legal matters has always been the, severely naïve, belief that everyone was reasonable and fair and if I was too then nothing bad would happen. But I can’t help thinking, what if they didn’t send a warning letter? What if they just launched a law suit and I was under the gun for something without even realizing that I had done anything wrong?

That would be pretty scary, especially since all of my online businesses and assets are in my personal name. I’m begining to get why Robert Kiyosaki says that the rich don’t want to own anything, they want to have control of companies. As my online business continues to grow, it is only reasonable to expect this kind of thing to happen again.

Watch for my next article when I’ll tell you what my partner and I did to prevent being in a vulnerable legal position like this again. If you have a business, especially an online one where you could get sued from so many different directions, you’ll want to follow step.

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Wi-Fi, has not quite panned out. Why, does something as amazing as Wi-Fi practically died? Because, almost no-one understands that there are things that you can charge money for and things that you have to give away as a bonus. Most every one, including Starbucks, thought that they could make a bucket of cash from Wi-Fi. Starbucks has had to slash the price of its Wi-Fi service and still I doubt it is doing very well at all.

People won’t pay for it. It is just a nice to have while at the cafe, but it doesn’t offer any real value. I can go home and check my email for free, so why would I cough up 5 dollars for an hour of internet time? If I was something other than a complete marketing ignoramus I’d be able to tell you why this is, but sorry I don’t know. What I do know is that as a full-on internet addict, the only time I ever paid for public internet or Wi-Fi was once in an airport when I was desperate to check my mail. And I never will pay for it again.

Then last week it happened.

Last week, while at my local cafe [I don't always go to Starbucks] I was shocked to see the sign: Free Wireless Internet! Yeaah! They get it. Do you think I’ll come here more often and buy more $4 coffees and snacks now that they have free internet? Of course.

The funny thing is that it costs next to nothing to provide Wi-Fi. For about $70 bucks of hardware and an hour or two of any geeky 16 year-olds time and you’re in wired.

Most online businesses do get this concept. They understand that you need to give stuff away in order to build a relationship and trust with your customers that will pay off down the road. It really surprises me that it took so long for someone to understand the real business potential of Wi-Fi. Now if only I can get the manager of my favorite Starbucks to read this story.

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