The state of New York just passed a bill that could cause no end of grief to marketers who use affiliates to promote products. Amazon is challenging the bill as unconstitutional, and New York based affiliate marketers should be on their knees praying Amazon wins.

In most states, a company only has to collect taxes if they have a physical presence in the state.

New York has passed legislation re-defining physical presence to mean a company has a physical presence if it has even a single affiliate based in the state, or if a New York based site “earns a referral fee for sending customers to an online retailer.” Think Google Adwords on the New York Times?

If Amazon.com fails to defeat the state, it isn’t far fetched to suggest that Amazon might cut off all New York affiliates rather than lose sales by effectively raising prices for all the customers in that well-populated state.

And if Amazon.com does lose, look to other states to follow with a tax grab of their own, making Affiliate programs a lot less appealing for a lot of larger companies that currently run them.

Related links on:

• Slashdot
• NY Times
• News.com
• Arstechnica.com
• ValleyWag
• Gothamist

I’ve been thinking, lately, about the possible ramifications of a rival or pissed off friend sabotaging my life by clickbombing Adsense links on my site.

It’s not that I regularly annoy my friends (I hope!), but there are certainly a few burned bridges in my past.

So, I was happy to find a solution when I Googled for possible solutions. I was even happier when I saw that AdSense Shield was free.

I’m going through the documentation now, and my understanding of the script is that it shows Adsense until the user clicks on one of them, after which the ads on your page are replaced by something other than Adsense — whether it be YPN ads or something you create yourself.

I’m going to install it on one of my sites tonight at 2am, when Google switches to the next day’s stats, and I’ll report on how and if it affects my earnings after a few days.

I had initially decided to use XSitePro for my new site but after beginning to read “How to Build An Affiliate Website with Wordpress” I’m reconsidering that decision. After all, there are a lot of advantages to using WordPress for any site - - from RSS to built in commenting abilities, to the myriad of plug-ins that could make life and expansion much easier. Templating WordPress, though, is harder for me than making a template for XSitePro, and it’s harder for me to wrap my head around the changes that’ll need to be made to a default Wordpress theme to make it work for what I’ve got planned.

Decisions, decisions….

So, I’m going to take tonight to study the WP Affiliate book, along with the free “Wordpress SEO for Beginners” from Blog Oh Blog and Teli Adlam’s free “Beginner’s Guide to Using and Building Traffic with Feedburner” report.

If I feel confident and enthusiastic enough to proceed with WordPress tomorrow, I’ll set up a blog and see where it leads. Otherwise, I’ll go back to my XSitePro plan and save WordPress for a future project.

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Add Ebay to YOUR blog

After a long hiatus, during which I accidentally deleted this blog in a spurt of hard drive purging, I’ve decided to get back on the blogging bandwagon.

The time away has been fun. I’ve taught my son how to read. I’ve read some wonderful books. I’ve built an igloo, gone horse back riding, flown kites, put up some new bookcases, slept in on Tuesdays, and learned to love my iPod.

But events have transpired to draw my attention back to Internet marketing and online promotion.

I can’t say I’m sad about it. There is something incredibly exiting about the immediacy of online sales. But now I’m a little behind the times with a lot to accomplish, so I think I’m going to miss sleeping in.

It’s an interesting phenomenon. I can write lots of things quite well, but when it comes to sales copy, I tend to hire a pro to do it for me.

Why?

Sometimes it’s because I’m too close to the project. Other times I just can’t find the right combination of words. There’s a balance that needs to be created between hype and salesmanship. There are words to stress, and words to avoid. And usually, my brain is too full to remember all those things when writing a sales letter.

But, today I downloaded a fascinating application called ScribeJuice that might just change my habits.

Within an hour of installing the program, I’ve improved three of my existing sales pages immensely, and begun a complete rewrite of another.

It’s like my regular web page editor, with all the features I need to create a nice looking page, along with tools to analyze all your copy, a scrolling bar filled with power words, and a way to measure your hype and power ratios.

And then I thought… does this just work for sales letters? Would it work for articles too?

So, I started a new page and pasted in a PLR article I was planning on using.

I ran the suggestion tool on the article text, and within minutes, I had changed the article for the better, and made my signature block zing. Not only will this help avoid duplicate content penalties in the search engines, but unlike other content spinners, this will actually improve your writing, making your articles more effective, and increasing your chances of receiving links from your signature or embedded links.

I know it’s cliche to say this, but I DON’T promote a lot of products. I NEVER promote anything I don’t think will be useful six months from now.

I KNOW ScribeJuice will be useful today, six months from now, and even years down the road. I’m certain I will be using it on emails, sales letters and articles every week.

Take a look. Give it a try. It’s got a solid guarantee, and some reputable folks behind it.

And it might be the most useful product you’ll buy all year.