Healthy Blog Reviews

Unlike last time, there’ll be no snafu about whether the time is right to reveal the new MSN Homepage –it’s now officially live for all. New features include: TrendWatch – Highlights the day’s top trends and movers on Twitter Hyper-local Tweets – Uses the power of Bing to highlight tweets from your location, available on the new Local Edition My Cities – Personalize MSN Local Edition and save up to 3 cities to follow – making it easy to keep up with your friends or family across the entire country You should already see the new design at MSN.com or you can head here: http://www.msn.com/preview.aspx Thoughts? Join the Marketing Pilgrim Facebook Community

Tags: cities, design-at-msn, entire, highlights, local-edition, making-it-easy, marketing, MSN
Posted March 9, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

Flying under the radar with your affiliate income is about to get a lot harder for US tax payers. Starting next year, the IRS will be tracking all online payments made through credit, debit and electronic payment processing like PayPal. The new 1099-K form will be provided by any bank or payment settlement company operating in those areas. Even better, these forms will include only the gross amounts—i.e. the payments made excluding any fees these companies or other intermediaries may charge—or returns, chargebacks or refunds.. As most of us well know, a payment of $100 often doesn’t translate into a profit of $100, so it will be on the merchants’ shoulders to report all fees among other business expenses. Naturally, the IRS is worried that online merchants aren’t reporting their income, either through ignorance or willful tax evasion. Reporting forms like the W-2 and other 1099s help tax payers to know what they have to pay taxes on (um, everything) and exactly how much they earned. (It’s a heck of a lot easier than going through your records yourself, but you might still have to to get the fees.) According to Barbara Weltman for Auction Bytes , All merchants who accept payments through credit cards, debit cards, gift cards and PayPal will receive information returns telling them – and the IRS – the gross amount of the merchant card transactions. This will be broken down month by month. While the form uses the word “card,” the IRS has made it clear that this is interpreted broadly to include third-party network transactions (i.e., PayPal). There is at least one loophole: if you’re just not that good an online merchant. Small merchants, making $20,000 or less in 200 or fewer transactions, will not require 1099 reporting. Ultimately, there probably won’t be an effect if you’re already reporting your online income accurately. Will the new laws affect you? We are SO not tax lawyers or accountants, it’s not even funny. Please consult someone who is to learn about your tax responsibilities.

Tags: affiliate, auction, Barbara Weltman, income, intermediaries, legal, online, online-payments, returns-telling, uses-the-word
Posted March 9, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

According to a new study being published this week by Unica , European marketers trail their American cousins, when it comes to the adoption of social media marketing. While, 58% of marketers in North America are already engaged in social media marketing, only 34% of Europeans can say the same. That’s likely to change in the next 12 months: Some quick math suggests that this time next year, 76% of American marketers will be knee deep in social media marketing, with an impressive game of “catch-up” played by European counterparts–hitting 64% adoption. So what’s keeping Europe from making this a photo-finish? Well, the biggest set-back is the 20% of European marketers that don’t want anything to do with social media . Not, “we’re more than 12 months out” or “we not sure yet” but flat out “we have no plans for social media marketing.” I’d love to know what industries those marketers represent because I’d go and steal their lunch money!

Tags: adoption, being-published, biggest, european, impressive game, marketers-trail, north, North America, Research, Social, Social Media, the-adoption, time
Posted March 9, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

Being a resident of North Carolina I have had the experience of watching the state government take away an income stream for people in a time when income streams can be little more like a trickle. It did this through imposing a tax on Amazon affiliate sales in the state and Amazon essentially said “No problem, we’ll just remove the program from your residents reach”. I marveled at what can only be seen as utter stupidity on the surface (I say on the surface because that’s where I sit and have no other details) as the government pulled the rug out from under its own citizens thus removing dollars from the North Carolina economy over a dispute about the tax on those transactions. The state essentially threw out the baby, the bathwater and the tub. Way to go NC state government! Now we have another state that is entering the Pantheon of short-sightedness: Colorado. Techdirt reports You may remember last summer that Amazon shut down its affiliate programs in North Carolina, Hawaii and Rhode Island in response to new laws being put in place in those states, which would effectively make any Amazon affiliate an “official” representative of the company in that state, thus requiring that Amazon start collecting sales tax. This followed a similar mess in New York the year before. This is really short-sighted on the part of the states, pushing for additional tax revenue (of course). But it stretches the definition of what it means to have a physical presence in a state to the point where someone who is running an ad for you (all that an affiliate really is) is treated as an employee. I don’t know what to make of this quite honestly. I would need to hear the entire argument from each states’ side to see if there is any kind of logic here. You are essentially telling your citizens who may not have other viable income that they can’t perform their job in our state. The state is telling them, “If you are doing this as a significant part of your income please get up and move away because your money is no good here”. Huh? What are your thoughts on this kind of jockeying between states and Amazon? Is there a way that this could turn against Amazon? What if there is suddenly a slew of states who enact the same rules? Does Amazon keep removing itself from these states? Will Amazon affiliates need to secede from the Union or start their own state? How does Amazonia, the 51st state sound?

Tags: Amazon, definition, from-the-north, from-the-union, Hawaii, hear-the-entire, income, money, North Carolina, shopping, state, surface, thoughts
Posted March 9, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media