Have you ever heard or read the phrase “multiple streams of income” before?  Do you know what this phrase means?  For many businessmen, creating multiple streams of income online or offline is one way of securing themselves as well as their businesses in the future.  They also believe that it can also save them from the so-called famine effect in the business industry.  Once you are engaged in affiliate marketing business, it is advisable if you have multiple streams of affiliate marketing income so that if one of those income streams vanished, it will not upset you the way losing your sole stream would.  If you depend on just one source of income and this single stream has been downsized or has lain off, you’ll surely find yourself bankrupted and hopeless.  Try to ask the most successful online entrepreneurs, and you’ll discover that they have established multiple streams of online income.

Being involved in affiliate marketing is one of the most desirable ways to make multiple sources of income.  It is because affiliate marketing programs come in various shapes and forms.  There are a large number of affiliate marketing programs that you can sign on with and start gaining bucks right away.  In affiliate marketing, you can make money by promoting and reselling your affiliate products and by recruiting new affiliates.  What’s good about this is that you can find widest array of training materials that can enhance your marketing abilities.  In affiliate marketing, you can be sure that there are genuine products to promote and sell and there is real income to make.

Either part time or full time, being an affiliate marketer is an excellent way to create multiple income streams by means of promoting products and services from web merchants.  Here, you can get affiliate commission without investing big bucks in making your own product and without worrying about book keeping, customer support and ecommerce.  All you have to do is to promote and resell the products and services in your site and pass on potential customers to the merchant’s site.

In affiliate marketing, it is advisable to promote more merchants in your site so that your visitors will have variety of destinations to choose from.  Using multiple merchants in the same site or niche means only one thing – you have multiple streams of affiliate income.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with this business strategy because this is one of the best ways to protect your business and expanding your horizons.  Through this, you can be assured that you won’t experience crisis if ever one of your web merchants closed his/her program.

However, you should choose only those affiliate programs that interest you so that you can effectively advertise and promote them.  Don’t ever be tempted into signing up for numerous affiliate programs in the hope that one of them will bring income.  Select wisely and don’t be engaged in selling products you know nothing about.  Go with the stuff that jives with your enthusiasm; your passion can capture your client by the nose and guide him/her to your affiliate link.

You should also work hard to make your multiple streams of income more stable.  You can do this by embracing some strategies and tactics and by developing within yourself, some traits that can help you become successful in any kind of business such as patience, persistence and thirst for knowledge.

Lastly, just remember the adage that says “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”  So that if one of them is lost, you can still have some to make omelets.  And what do these eggs have to do with multiple streams of affiliate income?  Well, it goes without saying that the more streams of income you possess, the bigger and better your money lake becomes.

Recently I tried to become an affiliate marketer with the online retailer giant – Amazon.  However, when I was setting up an account at the Amazon website, there was a note saying that “Residents of Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, North Carolina or Rhode Island are not eligible to participate in the Associate program”.  I also got rejected by BuyCostumes.com when I tried to promote their Halloween costumes.  Through communicating with BuyCostumes program manager, I realized that the rejection was due to the Affiliate Nexus Tax Law of Connecticut.

There are totally nine states across the country that have passed such kind of “affiliate nexus tax” Law:

  • Arkansas
  • California (the law has been suspended for a year but went back into effect on September, 15, 2012)
  • Connecticut
  • Georgia
  • Illinois (The Performance Marketing Associate won its lawsuit against the state, but Illinois has refused to suspend enforcement of the law during the appeals process)
  • North Carolina
  • Pennsylvania (the law was suspended early this year, but got back into effect on September 1, 2012)
  • Rhode Island

The so-called “affiliate nexus tax” laws that have devastated affiliate marketers state that companies would have nexus, and the obligation to collect sales tax, if they have agreements with affiliate marketers in the state.  The overwhelming response to those laws has been that about 1,000 online advertisers have terminated their advertising agreements with affiliate marketers in these 9 states, to avoid having to collect sales tax.  This has devastated the income of 76,000 affiliate marketers.

Some analysts and journalists have used the term “affiliate nexus tax” to describe a different scenario that does not have an impact on the performance marketing industry.  The term “affiliate” has a legal meaning that often defines two companies with shared ownership or a contractual relationship to sell or be an agent of another company.  It does not define an affiliate marketing company.  In this scenario, a company would have ‘nexus’ (a physical presence that requires collection of sales tax) if they have an affiliated corporation in the state, like a sister company or subsidiary or agent.  This type of scheme does not impact affiliate marketing companies.  We should support this clarification because Hawaii recently passed what reporters have called an “affiliate nexus tax” law, but which in fact describes this other scheme and does not impact affiliate marketers in Hawaii.

Writing Articles is a great way to promote your home business website and it’s very easy to do.  You can write articles that are related to your business and submit them to article directories.  All it takes is take time to create the article and submit them.  The pay off though can be an increase in website traffic and more sales opportunities.

The article process is as follows: You create the article, proof read and correct the article, and submit the article.

One way articles create traffic to your website is from the reader.  The reader can find your website address from a link in your article resource box.  You have to make sure the article resource box contains a link to your website.

Article marketing is also known to be a method of viral marketing.  Meaning popularity of your article has the potential to grow.  For example, webmasters from other sites can use your articles to use as content on their websites.  In return for allowing the webmaster for using your article, your article will include the resource box you created containing a link back to your site.

As you create more articles and more sites keep using them, the total number of links to your site increases also.  Search engines place value on incoming links to your website.  This determines how relevant your website is.  The more relevant your site becomes, the higher it may place in the search engine results.

Articles can also build trust between your business and potential customers.  For example, with more people buying online, writing articles gives you an opportunity to present yourself as an expert on the product people are looking for.

I consider an article as a warm lead generator.  You see, people are actually looking for the information you are writing about.

Article marketing is a great way of having your site on the search engines.  When writing articles, you must understand that the propagation of the article takes time.  While no marketing method is guaranteed, in time you may see desirable results from this method of marketing.

There are many advantages to marketing your home business on the internet by writing articles.  The best part about article writing is that it doesn’t cost anything.  It does take time to write the article correctly and submit them to your favorite article directories.  When done correctly, the payoff will benefit your home business.