I have been checking out some of the preseason videos for The 30 Day Challenge, and today was a particularly intriguing one. Check out this video about Google Subscribed Links.

Coincidentally, I have been asked to test out a product that could really help with this. I hope I’ll have permission to let you know about it in the next day or two.

In the meantime, why not subscribe to the Surf the Mind Subscribed Links feature!

Once you’ve subscribed, check out how it works by clicking this link. Or how about this one. Wouldn’t it be cool to have an image-highlighted link for every major product launch? Pretty exciting stuff.

I’ve recently been bombarded by links to Russell Brunson’s Affiliate Evolution offer from other marketers. For $10, the package certainly is a steal. I no more than glanced at what was offered for the price before I hit the buy now button.

And then I saw that the payment system was NOT Paypal.

Now, I don’t have anything particular against using my credit card for purchases like these. It’s just that I’ve noticed a lot of forced continuity offers popping up in the marketing arena recently, and if the marketer isn’t using Paypal, there’s no telling how insanely difficult it might be to unsubscribe from a costly subscription if you happen to get sucked in.

So as soon as I see a non-Paypal payment page, I take a second, or even third look, before entering my credit card.

Affiliate Evolution is actually ABOUT continuity offers so it’s obviously going to have one. To Brunson’s credit, the page does not have a FORCED continuity offer. It’s just a little sneaky.

When you get to the payment page, you’ll notice that the total on the shopping cart is not $10, but actually closer to $40 because of a shipping charge. The shipping fee is NOT for Affiliate Evolution, but rather for a “trial month” of a monthly newsletter plus a DVD. After the ‘free’ month (which you pay a huge shipping fee for), your credit card will be charged ANOTHER $40 a month until you unsubscribe. And remember, this isn’t a Paypal subscription, so you will have to do something that’s likely more onerous than going to Paypal and hitting the cancel button to ditch the extra fee.

I nearly stopped the purchase process right there, but I took another look, and below the cart, there is a checkmarked box where you can choose to select the bonuses.

If you deselect that checkbox, you can continue the payment process for only the $10 you wanted to pay for the products advertised.

Your shopping cart will immediately show only $10 once you do this. You’ll still be required to enter a shipping name and address, but since you’re not being shipped anything, you can just enter “NA” for the address, city and postal code.

Then all you’ve got to do is wade through the one time offers (yikes! are there really that many of them!?) and grab your files. For a mere $10 it is well worth the price, even if you’ve got to jump over a few minefields to get them.

After all, you can learn about continuity offers without getting sucked into them, can’t ya?

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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