Taxes on Cigars - Urgent Request from Thompson Cigar

I received this email from my old buddy Ben at Thompson Cigar this morning:



!!! Urgent Request from Thompson Cigar !!!

********************************************************

The U.S. Senate will shortly vote on a proposal to expand
the state children’s health insurance program by $35 billion.
Funding is to be provided solely through higher tobacco taxes.
The tax increases on cigars are particularly punitive,
as all large cigars would be subject to a tax of 53.13% of the
manufacturer’s selling price. This is an increase of 156.4%
over the current rate! And, while the current tax on cigars is
capped so no cigar pays more than $.05 in federal taxes,
the proposed legislation would increase the cap by 20,413%
(not a typo) to $10 per cigar! The combination of these two
factors will result in a dramatic increase in cigar prices in
the U.S. and many cigar companies are likely to go out of business.

We urge you to phone the offices of your own U.S. Senators
(see list below), give them your name and address and ask
that they vote to oppose the punitively high cigar tax increases
in the state children’s health insurance legislation.
Please call only your own U.S. Senators because Senators
respond to the concerns their constituents, not to those who live in other States.


Click "Take Action Now" and email your senators!

Check out the Kowabunga Blogs

One of my new tasks here at Think Partnership is to overhaul the blogs set up for Kowabunga. It isn't an overnight job, it will take a few months to develop the right look and feel for each blog and work with the content experts to come up with a strategy for posting. You'll see that some of them haven't been updated in a while.

The affiliate team members have done a great job getting the blogs up and running and I'm so happy I don't have to start from scratch like the last two business blogs I started - The Security Awareness for Ma, Pa and the Corporate Clueless blog for Winn Schwartau and Cigar Blog 101 for Thompson Cigar.

So bookmark these blogs from Kowabunga and keep an eye on them in the coming months.

Kowabunga Blog

Team Affiliate Blog

Kolimbo Blog

Kolimbo New Merchant Spotlight

Kolimbo New Merchant Alert

Father's Day - Buy Some Cigars from Thompson Cigar

Here is a tribute to my old company - Thompson Cigar. Father's Day is one of the best times of the year to buy Cigars. Order Now...

Protecting the Brand - Cleaning up Search Results

For the last year and a half, I've taken it upon myself to clean up the paid and organic search results for Thompson Cigar, Linensource, Casual Living and Cafe Belmondo. You should have seen what they looked like then!!!

The problem with paid results in both Google and Yahoo were the mass amounts of competitors bidding on our trademarked keywords and/or using the keywords in the title and content. We filled out the proper paperworkd and after several months of waiting, we finally received word from Google and Yahoo that they would protect our trademarks, but it would be incumbent upon us to report violators. This is still going on today. Take the SmartBargains War of 2006 for example. They were bidding on our trademark and using "Linen Source Discount" as the title of their ad. The attorneys did their squabling but it was Google that stepped in to slap Smart Bargains for us. Later that day, they changed their title to read "Your Source for Linens", which was genious by the way.

Look at our paid search results now. Linen source
You should see Linensource and our two affiliate sites - bed-linen-deals and highthreadsheets in the premium listings, followed by Smart Bargains and Discountbedlinens. If you see anyone else, I have some work to do. No one else has permission to use "Linen Source" in their title or content and I typically report someone about once a month.

Same trademark rules apply to Thompson Cigar. Right now there is a competitor bidding on the trademark and is listed in the premium spot, but they aren't using "Thompson Cigar", so there isn't anything I can do except try to boost my affiliate listing into that position. Both Thompsonhumidors and cigarsbynet are my affiliates, since Google won't allow Thompsoncigar.com to have any ads.

As for organic listings, I had to clean up old affiliates with broken links and error pages for all the companies and competitors with our keywords stuffed in their metatags. If someone looks at my organic listings, I want the top ten to be filled with links to my pages or my partners pages (preferably affiliates since I pay them less than shopping engines).

I don't want pages like this to show up - Eco Shopping. That Linen Source link is broken and I don't know why it was there in the first place. I'll have to see if they can sign up as an affiliate or send them a cease and desist letter to remove the text link.

Check out the Thompson Cigar organic links - perfect. Five of the organic links are directly to our pages and sites, the other five are trusted partners. That one has taken some time to fix.

It's not an easy process, but if you track sales from paid or natural listings, it's worth the time.