There’s power in numbers! Colorado defeated the Internet tax because of the combined efforts of the 4,200 affiliate marketing companies in the state.

Marc Braunstein owns one of those 4,200 affiliate marketing companies. Writing for Forbes.com, he said:

“Thanks to a concerted effort of Colorado’s 4,200 affiliate marketing companies voicing their concerns at the highest levels of government and the state’s willingness to listen, the ‘affiliate tax’ portion of the bill has been completely eliminated in the legislation that passed on Wednesday.”

State governments have been trying for years to figure out a way to legally level state sales tax on Internet sales. Fortunately, they haven’t had any luck so far — thanks to the Supreme Court.

In 1992 the Supreme Court ruled that companies can “only be required to collect and remit sales tax in a state if they actually have a physical ‘nexus,’ or presence, in the state.”

Affiliate marketers and affiliate marketing companies in other states need to take note of what happened in Colorado when their state government decided to fix the “tax shortfall” by collecting a sales tax on Internet sales.

Mr. Braunstein reports:

“Colorado’s online affiliate companies joined forces with bloggers, online retailers, business leaders and the Performance Marketing Association in a massive coordinated effort to educate legislatures on the pitfalls of the HB 1193 bill—spending many 15-hour days at the Capitol building testifying and lobbying against the proposed legislation.”

It worked! There will be no Internet sales tax in Colorado!

On Monday, we’re starting a three part series, “YouTube SEO Secrets for Affiliate Marketers.” In this series we’re going to reveal three YouTube SEO secrets.

One of the most effective advertising tools that you as an affiliate marketer have at your disposal today is posting videos on YouTube. It’s free, and the search engines are “in love” with videos. Why? Because users demand them!

YouTube is big and keeps getting bigger. More than 100 million videos are watched on YouTube every single day. If you could manage to get just a small fraction of that traffic, imagine the volume of the potential traffic you’d drive to your website.

Remember, no matter how informative, cute, cool, or funny the video is that you post, your objective when you post a video on YouTube is to drive traffic to your website. The search engines have to return links to your YouTube video in search results for your video to be an effective marketing tool.

The effectiveness of your YouTube video is determined by the effectiveness of your SEO.

In part one of “YouTube SEO Secrets for Affiliate Marketers,” you’ll find out how to avoid missing out on a golden SEO opportunity.

• NOTE: Even though Lurn, Inc. receives compensation for products and services promoted in our blog posts, we always give our honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experiences about those products and services.

We live in an “I-want-it-now” world. Instant gratification is the expected norm. But in the affiliate marketing world of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) “instant” isn’t even a remote possibility.

There just simply are no quick-fixes for SEO. Patience is a virtue and it’s one you must apply to your affiliate marketing SEO efforts.

If you approach SEO with the idea that you can just do all the little tricks, take all of the SEO steps recommended by every SEO guru out there and tomorrow (at the latest) your website will appear in the number one position in natural search results, you’re going to be sadly disappointed. You might even decide to quit … a lot of new affiliate marketers do.

But remember, patience is a virtue for affiliates … especially in SEO!

There are lots of reasons why it takes time for your SEO efforts to bear fruit, Here are three main reasons why we recommend that you continue to work on your SEO month after month and year after year:

You already know about the deals that have integrated Twitter into the search results of Google, Bing and Yahoo! But wait, there’s more!

Yahoo! is taking it to the next level. Tweeting from your Yahoo! home page itself is right around the corner.

The deal is done but as of now there’s no word on when the implementation of the new partnership will happen.

In addition to tweeting and retweeting from your Yahoo! homepage, you’ll also be able to access your Twitter mail.

Don’t think that only Yahoo! benefits from this deal. Twitter is growing by leaps and bounds but it will also profit from the millions of Yahoo! users around the world.

Biz Stone, a cofounder of Twitter, said, “The information in one single tweet can travel light-years farther with this Yahoo! integration.”

We couldn’t agree more!

This is the final post in the five part “Article Marketing 101 for Affiliate Marketers” series. If you missed them, you can read part one here, read part two here, read part three here and read part four here.

Now that you know what article marketing is, how it can help you as an affiliate marketer, the criteria for articles that will sell your affiliate products, and how to avoid the duplicate content trap, you’re ready to submit your original and well-written articles to article banks so that you can begin reaping the benefits of article marketing.

How to Efficiently Submit Articles to Article Directories