This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. If you want to ask a question, just write a comment below.

It is Friday, and as usual I was going to write the weekly Q&A column. I went to check my backlog of questions today, however, and I found that I had cleared it, so it is time for more questions. If you have one, just write it as a comment below.

The title says “blogging related” questions, but you reality you can ask about anything related to blogging, Internet marketing, SEO, web publishing, and so on. You can even ask personal questions if you want, provided it is something that our readers would also want to know.

Stay tuned for next Friday’s Q&A!

This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. Just use the contact form if you want to submit a question.

Allison asks:

I’m considering setting up a website. Do I have to register a business before being able to charge for advertising space or other services I might offer? Do I need to pay taxes on that revenue?

First of all keep in mind that I am not a lawyer (i.e., the content below should not be taken as legal advice), and that regulations will vary from country to country and even from state to state within your county. That being said, here is how it works generally around the world.

You don’t need to create a business entity to be able to make money with your website. You can operate it as a sole proprietorship, which means that there is no legal separation between yourself and your business. This type of business won’t require a formal registration, because all the profits you’ll earn with it are automatically associated with your person. The clear advantage of this model is that it is easy to setup. The disadvantage if that the owner has full liability over the business, which means that his personal assets can be used to pay eventual business debts.

The interesting thing is that with a sole proprietorship (in some countries) you can still get a business name, known as “doing business as” in the US, and “trading as” in the UK. This won’t create a legal entity for your business, but will allow you to use that name officially. For example, you should be able to create a checking bank account under your business name. The fees for such a registration should be pretty low (i.e., $50).

Which brings us to the second question. Do you need to pay taxes on the revenues generated from your website? The answer is “yes,” unless your website makes less than $400 yearly, in which case it could be considered a hobby (in the US at least). If you are earning more than $400 yearly you’ll need to pay self-employment taxes (because your sole proprietorship business is not a separate legal entity).

The good news is that on most countries you only pay taxes on your profits (i.e., revenues minus expenses), so if you have a lot of related expenses your tax burden will be small.

How much tax do you need to pay? It varies from country to country. In the US it is 15,3%.

Depending on how much your websites are making you should also consider creating a limited liability company to hold them, but that is topic for another post.

This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. Just use the contact form if you want to submit a question.

Don asks:

Do you have a opinion on link cloaking for affiliate marketers? Do the pros use cloaking and should it be a standard practice as an affiliate?

What Is Link Cloaking

First things first, what is link cloaking? It is the practice of using redirects or Javascript to hide affiliate links, thus increasing the conversion rates.

Let’s explain this. Affiliate links are usually very easy to identify. They always contain some numbers and the referral id of the affiliate. One example could be:

http://www.godaddy.com/98493/ref=johndoe

If you use such a link, upon hovering the mouse over it the end user would be able to see it on the bottom of his browser (called “status bar”), and this could reduce the chances of him clicking on the link and making a purchase. Why? Because he might suspect that your recommendation/review was biased, and that you are just trying to earn an affiliate commission.

Link cloaking tries to solve this problem. You could use a Javascript link, for example, so that when users hover over your links the status bar would display nothing.

A better solution, however, is to use a redirect. That is, you would create another link that redirects to the affiliate one. The easiest way to do that with a URL shortening service like bit.ly. Alternatively you can also use some PHP or a WordPress plugin to create the redirects within your own domain. An example of a redirect could be:

http://www.dailyblogtips.com/go/godaddy

Apart from cloaking your affiliate link the internal redirect might also get a higher click-through rate because some user might believe that they will not leave your website by clicking on the link.

Do the Pros Use It?

Yes the professional affiliate marketers use link cloaking, and it is a very widespread tactic around the web.

Some users frown upon cloaked links, because they won’t know where the link is pointing. Pro affiliate marketers are only worried with the bottom line, however, so if the conversion rates increase they will certainly use cloaked links.

My Opinion and a New Trend

I have nothing against using cloaked links. In fact on some affiliate marketing campaigns I promote I do use redirects. My main motivation for that is to be able to track clicks, but it ends up working as a link cloak as well.

However, I believe that the use of link cloaking is becoming less important in certain contexts. For example, if you promote affiliate products with reviews on your blog you might not need to use link cloaking, and if you do cloak your links you might not see an improvement on your conversion rates.

Why? Because your readers will know that you are promoting an affiliate offer (at least they should), and they will expect an affiliate link there. If you are upfront and transparent, therefore, you won’t need to cloak your links at all.

On other contexts link cloaking will remain important, though. One example would be on landing pages where you drive PPC traffic. You have no relationship with the people that will visit your page, so cloaking the affiliate links will probably increase your conversion rates.

What about you, do you use link cloaking? Why? Why not?

This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. Just use the contact form if you want to submit a question.

Mathew asks:

Do you spend a lot of time and effort on SEO and getting some quality/relevant backlinks to them right away, or are they mostly organic links from people linking to them?

Also, what’s the best ways to get backlinks to my inner pages with older posts on them?

I was wondering because I’ve noticed almost all of your older posts have very good page rank.

I used to spend a lot of time and effort on SEO and on getting quality/relevant backlinks a couple of years ago. That is because the blog was new and had a small audience, so publishing outstanding content alone wouldn’t do the trick. How did I go about attracting backlinks? Doing three things mainly:

1. Submitting my posts to social bookmarking sites. There are plenty of do-follow social bookmarking sites out there that will send you link juice even if you are the only one voting for your story. On top of that I also tried to promote my killer articles on Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious, and whenever I managed to score a front page a big influx of organic links would come.

2. Networking with fellow bloggers. Building a relationship with bloggers inside your niche is essential. This means that I would link to them often, and many times they would return the favor. I am not talking about link exchanges but rather about natural links to quality content that your fellow bloggers post.

3. Guest blogging. As you probably know I am a big fan of guest blogging. Back in the day I used to do it a lot, which sent both new readers and backlinks my way. Sometimes instead of using the byline link to my homepage I would point it to a related post I had published on my blog, and that can help a lot with search rankings.

Over time, however, I started to spend less and less time trying to get backlinks, because as my audience increased so did the organic backlinks. That is, every time I publish a normal post these days I get 5-10 backlinks on it. When I post a killer article I get 50-100 backlinks. So I just focus on producing content these days, because the promotion side pretty much walks alone.

There are two other things you can do to maximize the link juice of your single posts, however. They are:

1. Having an HTML sitemap. This is basically a page within your blog that you’ll link to all posts you have ever published. You could make this by having an “Archives” section, as I do. This is a very efficient way to distribute your link equity because all pages of your blog will link there, and it will link back to all pages of your blog.

2. Cross linking between your posts. Linking to older and relevant posts is another practice that can increase your PageRank and search rankings, apart from adding more value to your readers. Whenever you are writing a new post, therefore, think about what you have published in the past and trying to find something relevant to link to.

Finally, notice that having lots of backlinks pointing to each of your single posts is not necessary to make sure they will have a good PageRank. If you have a good amount of backlinks pointing to your homepage, and use the two methods I mentioned above, your link equity will naturally spread all over your website, and even single posts will no backlinks at all will gain some PageRank.

This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. Just use the contact form if you want to submit a question.

Vijay asks:

How to build a product landing page to sell our own products through our blog? Should we develop a page on the same domain, or should we put it on another domain?

Last week I answered to the second part of the question above. You can read that here: Should I Put My Product Landing Page Inside My Blog Or On A New Domain?.

Now let’s talk about the first part: how to create landing pages for your products and services.

If you decided to host your landing page inside your existing website you have two options: you can either use a normal page template to create a landing page (i.e., just create a new page on WordPress or on your publishing software), or create a new template.

Many people opt to use a normal page template because it is easier and fast. If you want to see an example check the landing page that Darren Rowse create for his 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Workbook. As you can see it is a normal page, with all the default elements (e.g., header, sidebar, footer and so on).

If you have time and know a bit of web design you could create a new template for your landing page, including only important elements of your design (e.g., the logo) and removing than unnecessary ones that might distract potential buyers (e.g., ads, external links and so on). You can see an example of that with the Freelance X Factor that Brian Clark launched a while ago. He basically create a landing page inside his blog to sell the course. The product is not available right now, but you can get an idea of how the landing page looked like compared to the default design of the blog homepage.

WordPress users can create new page templates easily. You’ll just need to download the page.php file from your theme, create a copy of it, rename the copy (e.g., to landingpage.php), and then customize at will. You might need to create a new header.php and sidebar.php files (e.g., by calling them header2.php and sidebar2.php), but that is easy as well. Once you are done, simply upload the new template to your server and create a new page using that template.

If you are going to host your landing page on a new domain, you’ll need to find a template to use there as the landing page. The easiest option is to use a simple HTML/CSS template, which you just need to customize and upload to the server. There are dozens of free landing templates on the web, just search on Google for “free landing page” and “free sales templates.”

Obviously the free templates won’t look that great. If you have a product that is selling well, or that you believe will sell well, it might be worth it to invest in a custom design. Landing pages usually have simple layouts, so you probably won’t need to spend more than $300 to get one done.

Finally, you can also load a CMS on your new domain and create your landing page on top of that. One example of this technique would be to install WordPress on your domain and use a landing page theme like the Squeeze theme. You’ll need to spend some extra time installing and tweaking WordPress, but this solution offers many more features than a simple HTML/CSS template.

You might also be wondering what you should include inside your sales page, what are the best practices and so on. Well, that deserves a post of its own, so stay tuned!