seobridges.com

By now, if you live in California, you’ve heard about this affiliate tax that caused Amazon to discontinue its affiliate program with 25,000 people. About 25% of those people made a full-time living off of Amazon’s affiliate program. Those are 6,250 people who are now going to be looking for unemployment, jobs, or move out of state.

Now, California may lose out on $124 million in taxes, which they generated in 2009 state taxes from affiliates. Governor Brown’s intent in signing the affiliate tax into law was to generate $317 million a year in taxes. Since Amazon discontinue it’s affiliate program with 25,000 people and 6,250 of those people earned a full-time income from Amazon’s affiliate program, California will lose out on $79,250,000, which is almost 64% of that $124 million.

Not to mention, the Constitution does not allow states to assert taxing authority outside of their borders, if the retailer does not maintain a physical presence in that state, which Amazon, Overstock, and other similar companies do not.

Sites like Amazon are like parking lots where swap meets are held. In other words, when you buy a product from “Joe’s Products” through Amazon, Amazon is just the conduit through which it is being sold. In the case of a swap meet, if the state wants tax revenue on the product, it doesn’t go to the parking lot owner, it goes to the individual retailers. Not only does California not have a right to tax Amazon, Overstock, and other similar companies, because they are out of state, but they are taxing the wrong entity. They are taxing the parking lot owner, rather than the retailer.

That’s just my opinion. Do you have any thoughts? I’d love to know.

Stay social my friends!

Erick

Authors, book reviews are a great way to let people get to know more about you and/or your book(s). Readers, if you’re an aspiring author, there are places online where you can post book reviews; and they’re a great way to let people get to know more about you. Here’s a short list of sites where you can read and post book reviews.

Amazon – For you readers who want to let people get to know you even better, Amazon lets you post video reviews. You can go through and edit your reviews at any time, and Google indexes reviews.

Goodreads – Whether you’re an author, aspiring author, or an avid reader, this social networking site should be one of your big three (Facebook and Twitter being the other two).  Not only can you write reviews, but you can also follow people and their reviews.

Barnes and Noble – They offer editorial and customer reviews.  Rather than only allowing you to give books a bulk rating, you can rate books according to 15 categories. They don’t connect with any type of social networking sites, but Google indexes reviews.

Powell’s Books – Along with editorial reviews, you can add reviews. The bad news is only editorial reviews connect with social networking sites. The good news is Powell’s Books connects with several social networking sites, along with Facebook and Twitter.

There are other Book Review sites, but those are the best ones where writers can market their books online for free and aspiring authors can begin marketing themselves. I’ll give honorable mention to RedRoom, but RedRoom is to GoodReads what Bing is to Google (a nuisance).

Stay social my friends,

Erick

Here are a few great videos on how to get your idea from thought to the bookstore shelf and into potential readers hands. The first video will give you some great insight as to the overall book marketing process, the second will give non-fiction authors a great outline for writing a book proposal, and the last one will help guide you through how to find out how your book’s doing on Amazon.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

If you want to go to John Grisham’s site, you can go to Jgrisham.com (JG) or Johngrishamonline.com (JGO). If you peruse those sites, you’ll probably notice the latter is the more up-to-date and well kept. Though, JG receives more traffic. Here’s the breakdown of where visitors to JG come from, according to Alexa:

Google: 59.26%
Facebook: 18.52%
Alexa: 11.11%
Yahoo!: 11.11%

Here’s the breakdown of where visitors to JGO come from, according to Alexa:

Amazon: 100%

Of course, visitors from elsewhere may go to those sites. Though, a major reason JG receives more visitors is because of links. Until a website links to another website, it remains an island.

There is a second, more obscure, lesson we can learn. RandomHouse owns JG, but a small company owns JGO. The company that designed JGO started a Twitter page for Grisham, which consists of more than 2,500 followers (a dismal amount compared to other best-selling authors), and they last Tweeted on that account on 3/31/2010. All in all, it appears the company that designed JGO put it up and let it go.

According to Compete, JGO only received 1,150 visitors in December (.0012% of Amazon’s 92,531,925) compared to 19,118 visitors to JG. Chances are unless you’re John Grisham or someone of his caliber, RandomHouse won’t design a website for you. But you want to do business with a company that will pay attention to your needs, rather than just putting up a Twitter page, work on it for a while, and let it go.

Johngrishamonline.com’s presence compared to that of Jgrisham.com, or any other best-selling author’s site, is dismal. You make of it what you want, but I propose RandomHouse uses a strategy that works, whereas this other company either had no strategy or listened to an ominous voice that said, “If you build it, they will come.”  My advice—stop listening to ominous voices from 80′s Kevin Costner movies, and listen to the experts.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

It’s the last week of 2010, and that means it’s time to reflect.  Yesterday, I thought about why different people reflect at different times of the year.  I imagine most people think about how they can change themselves, their businesses, or anything else around this time of year.  When I went to school I looked at every September as a time of change.  Some business owners might look at each new fiscal year as a time of change.  Perhaps different religions look at significant holidays, such as Yom Kippur or Ramadan, as times for change.

Starting this week and going into the first weeks of 2011, you will see gradual changes to SEO Bridges.  First, you will see blogs from at least one regular guest blogger.  Jennifer Simpson (Jesais) is a friend of mine, and she will be blogging about managing your online identity.  Another change is affiliate marketing geared primarily to provide readers and writers with products in their area useful to them.  With that said, we will be integrating with Amazon.  Let us know whether you do or do not find the products advertise interesting in useful.  We want to make SEOBridges.com a place where you can come and find useful information.  We will also make minor changes to our page structure and content to make it easier for people to find the information they want to find.

I am sure you will enjoy these and other changes, as we enter a new year together.  For now, let’s make this last week of 2010 a week to remember.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

#Book#Reviews #Amazon #Amazon.com #Online#Book#Marketing #Authors #Marketing#Plan #Book#Marketing#Plan

I said last week that I’m going to write more blogs for our target audience.  Oh yeah, our target audience is authors.  So, if you’re an author, keep reading this blog.

The fact is that with so many ways to publish to become a published author is no longer good enough.  You want to develop a book marketing plan, and you want to implement your online book marketing tactics before you begin to write your book.  That includes getting to know the right people, researching your audience, and just making your name known.

Now, how do you make your name known?  That is, how do you let others know that you exist and that you are writing a book?  Well, Twitter and Facebook are great ways.  And, of course, you want to start a blog.  But there is something else you can do, and that is that you can write reviews about other books on Amazon.

Amazon is especially great for authors who have websites, but it is great for any author who wants to connect with their audience.  Find books that are in the same genre that you write, read those books, and write reviews about those books.  Mention that you are an author, are working on a book, or whatever other credentials you have.  Writing reviews for Amazon is a great way to get links to your site and get people familiar with your name.

Just like anything else, people are more apt to buy books from names they trust.  And the more you build your credibility the more people will trust you and buy from you.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

Every company wants to listen to their customer base, and Squidoo allows them to do that. When you create a lens, you have a plethora of options of modules.

Among those modules is a poll module to ask your customer base what they do or don’t want. This module only allows users to ask multiple choice questions, but it’s a good way to listen to your audience in a fun environment.

Another popular module is the Amazon module, which allows you to become a virtual distributor of Amazon products. Let Amazon suggest products to sell or pick products out from a list. Either way, when someone buys an Amazon product through your Squidoo page, you receive a commission.

Also, you can pull from various Twitter feeds. Use Twitter Search to search for tweets by keyword, Twitter Follow to follow particular people, Twitter Storm to follow a debate, or Twitter List to follow your Tweets. There are many other feeds you can pull from, including Deli.cio.us, your blog, Yelp, Youtube, and more.

There’re so many other ways you can use Squidoo, but the purpose is to allow you and your audience to engage with one other in a fun environment. People may not want to sign up for various social networking services, find you on those websites, and follow you and everyone else. Squidoo allows them to engage with you on many of those sites without signing up for or logging into all those sites.

We’re busy creating lenses, so keep watching.

Stay social,

Erick

For those of you who follow me on Twitter, you might have seen my snide remark about the Kindle’s black and white screen. I think I said something about it being 2010, not 1910.  Let’s just say, they’re a little behind, asthetically.  Since it’s too late for Amazon’s Kindle to lead the charge, they at least need to take the hint and catch up.

For now, there’s a new kid . . . er . . . I mean e-reader on the block, and this one rivals the iPad. Or as I like to call it, the iFad. I’d like to introduce ‘Novel‘ by Pandigital.

So, let me tell you about some of the cool features. Starting with the built in dictionary. One of my pet peeves is when authors insist on using big words that require dictionaries. Apparently, Pandigital gets frustrated with that also, because this e-reader comes with a dictionary.

Another great feature is for people like me, who actually enjoy 19th century Russian literature (i.e. Doestoevsky), but sometimes get confused with the names and places (not the words, though). Just search for a name or place by keyword and Novel will let you know who’s who, what’s what, and where’s where.

Okay, so you want more, and this e-reader gives you more. Pandigital teamed up with Barnes & Noble to bring you over 1,000,000 e-book titles to select from Novel. Each title includes a book summary, plot overviews, and more.

Now, if you’re anything like me, you can’t go for long without checking your e-mail and various social networking sites. Pandigital understands it’s important to keep up with what’s going on in the world of social media marketing, so they equipped this e-reader with a Web browser. And some of the features integrate your experience with social media.

Among a few of the other features of the Novel is the built-in camera, digital audio player (yes, there’s a place for your headphones), and more.

For now, if you really reall really must have the latest in technology, you might want to get the iFad, because the Novel by Pandigital won’t come out until sometime in June.

But, here’s the good news for those who can wait. It runs on Google’s Android, and it starts at just $199.

For more information, check out this great vid by Cnet.