It’s now roughly 1 week (10 days actually) since Amazon terminated the business relationship with affiliates in Colorado. I have spent a lot of hours replacing links to Amazon’s website with product links of other merchants. I still have hundreds of links to go through. That’s what you get for going deep and dirty into niche markets – it works great as you go, but if the merchant underneath pulls out, you’re stuck in the shithole.
In many affiliate forums and blogs where people talked about this scenario they said to replace Amazon links with links of other merchants. So, I went out to Shareasale and CJ and Linkshare looking for merchants with matching products. With many merchants I was already active and with other ones I had to apply for their affiliate program. For my most successful websites where I had links to Amazon I was able to cover roughly 80% of the links – for the remaining 20% of the product links I did not find a replacement.
Now a week after this Amazongeddon thing happened I have to declare that replacing Amazon links with links for other merchants is bad move. As a matter of fact I have ZERO conversions to record. Zero. Null. Nada. Zipp. Zilch.
I still have some merchant product links I can use to replace the merchants that were supposed to see the best conversion rates; pretty much the next tier down following the generic stats of each network (and a lot of guessing). While 1 week is still short, having zero conversions is pretty depressing. I have started removing affiliate links altogether from 2 sites now and rather redirect the links side-internally. Those sites are now running Google Adsense ads instead which is at least making up for some of the losses.
If you are an affiliate in one of the other states that is still fighting active attempts of those darn lawmakers to tax the Internet, you a) better get involved and b) you better start working on a real plan B. If you depend a lot on Amazon.com for your business income, you might face the same fate that my sites have experienced. I am sure some of the merchants have converting products, but are those the products you successfully promoted through Amazon.com’s affiliate product?!
Not only has this Amazongeddon cost me dozens of hours of time where I was writing emails to stupid politicians or waited 12 hours at the Colorado State Capitol to testify in front of the Senate’s Finance Committee, it has also cost me dearly financially. Hundreds of hours of work vaporized instantly. Hundreds of dollars of software investments now sitting useless on my computer’s hard drive. In this case I have nothing positive to put against this issue.
I am not easily to demotivate and so this is a bump in the road, but not the end of the world. What frustrates me a bit is the time I lost. The time could have been spent so much more productive growing my business to the next level. That’s the part that bothers me most. I am diversified to a certain degree and I can make up for the loss of income, but I do hate wasting my time. It’s hard to focus when you’re full of anger.
I am slowly getting back into the right work mood and I hope that I will laugh at Amazon and those stupid Colorado Democrats and show them the finger. One thing they can be sure of is that I will also work towards a goal of not giving them what they are after. At one point I might just move myself and all business operations out of the state of Colorado with satisfaction on my mind. 
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