Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone! I hope that 2008 has been a good for your affiliate marketing business.

I’ve had a great month of December. So far, my earnings are 3x more than what I normally make in a month. Obviously it’s due to the Christmas season, but still impressive considering the current economic climate. Even more impressive is the fact that I really haven’t worked on my affiliate sites for the past couple months!

My Main Earnings Source

The majority of my December earnings have come from a Nintendo Wii BANS site that I setup last Spring. I can’t even remember the last time I worked on that site, but MSN decided to index it and rank it fairly well for some good terms.

The rest of my earnings are coming from a combination of BANS site and WordPress blogs running phpBay.

I’m not lazy and I put in a lot of hard work setting up my sites, but it amazes me that they can essentially run on auto-pilot for a few months or more, and my earnings still go up 3x during the Christmas season.

Sweat Equity

I credit my success to all of the “smart” hard work I invested in getting my sites setup.

I also credit my good training from Wealthy Affiliate, and the great keyword research I was able to perform using Micro Niche Finder and NicheBOT. Remember that there isn’t a software tool or training resource available that’s the silver bullet for making a profit with no work. (Trust me when I say I spent countless hours researching my niches, setting up my sites, and marketing them.) However great tools can make your hard work be more efficient, for the best results possible. I’m very pleased with the results I’ve obtained from the tools I rely on.

Happy Holidays

I’m looking forward to 2009, and wish you and your family the best this holiday season. Here’s to all of our ongoing success!

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eBay Partner Network Sends Affiliates Pink Slips

The eBay Partner Network (ePN) affiliate program has recently “fired” many of it’s affiliates. They were given their seven day notice and told to remove all of their affiliate links. (You can read the reactions of frustrated users and eBay’s response over on the ePN discussion board.)

Note: for the sake of full disclosure, I want to make sure and state that I’m still an eBay affiliate myself. I have not been “fired,” but I know many people who have.

The letter that “fired” affiliates received from eBay reads in part:

During a recent review of eBay Partner Network publisher accounts and site metrics data for clicks your account drives to eBay.com, we determined that the traffic generated from your account is significantly less engaged with the eBay site as compared to the standards set by our other affiliates. While we appreciate your efforts to drive traffic to our Advertiser sites, we do not think that it is mutually beneficial to further our business relationship at this time. As a result, we will be expiring your eBay Partner Network account in 7 days and we request that you remove all of your eBay Partner Network affiliate links by that time. Payment will take place as per the Network Agreement for any traffic driven to eBay Advertiser sites prior to the expiration date of August 27, 2008.

One of our account managers will contact you if a more appropriate business opportunity arises to work together again in the future.

Regards,
The eBay Partner Network

Basically, the affiliates were kicked out of the program because eBay deemed the quality of customers they were driving to eBay weren’t good enough. Apparently the problem was that these customers didn’t become repeat buyers.

Now there is a lot of anger being thrown eBay’s way by affiliates in the various forums, and that is completely understandable. People are either mad at being removed from the program when they felt they did nothing wrong, or they’re scared because while they didn’t get their pink slip today, they worry it’s only a matter of time before it’s their turn.

My Thoughts on the Situation

I don’t want to jump on the anger bandwagon and state the obvious. You can read the comments on the ePN forum for that. What I want to do is offer some of my own insights into the situation. Bear in mind that some of these insights might seem random, but trust me… they’re not. I am choosing to focus on the broader issues involved here, which are all related together, instead of elaborating on just one or two sticking points.

What type of affiliate sites have you created…

• I noticed that many BANS users have been banned, but no one on the phpBay forum has come forward saying they were affected by this. Neither tool is better than the other, but clearly it’s far too easy for the lazy affiliate to create an eBay affiliate store with BANS, whereas phpBay depends on a blog to function.
• Based on that observation, I think the days of the affiliate “e-commerce” site are over. You know… the sites that emmulate an e-commerce store, but instead of selling and shipping their own products, the items for sale are affiliate links to another site.
• Quality niche content is crucial. Not only will you drive the most targeted niche traffic to your merchant, but it will also rank well in the search engines over the long haul.

How many eggs were in that basket…

• I’m afraid that far too many eBay affiliates put all of their eggs into the eBay basket. That is, they depend on the eBay Partner Network for most–if not all–of their affiliate earnings.
• THAT IS A HUGE MISTAKE!
• The ePN Agreement states that eBay can terminate their relationship with you at any time, for any reason, within 7 days. You have no recourse, so you can’t depend solely on them for your livelihood.
• Therefore it’s crucial that you diversify your affiliate efforts… especially if you depend on your affiliate earnings to buy food and pay the mortgage. Remember there’s still merchants at Commission Junction, Linkshare, Clickbank, Amazon, and many other quality affiliate programs. If you haven’t already, it’s time you start putting your skills to work promoting affiliate products from other programs besides eBay (and you should start diversifying immediately).

It’s still okay to promote eBay products…

• If you weren’t “fired” by eBay, then you are still okay. That doesn’t mean you’ll be okay tomorrow, so be careful. However if you already have successful eBay promotions running on your sites, there’s no reason to pull them down out of fear. Simply start diversifying and be prepared should the worst happen.
• Remove your poor performing “e-commerce” style sites now before they cause you trouble. Replace them with quality niche content. If you’re not an expert in your niche, then hire others to write the content for you. Become a resource in your niche, and the traffic you send to eBay is likely to continue to weather these storms in the future.
• Sign up for the PepperJam network. Nobody at PepperJam is getting expired like they are at the ePN. So there’s always that option.

I’m sure we’ll be hearing more and more about this in the coming days, and if anything significant occurs or I have additional insights, I’ll be sure to blog about them.

In the meantime, I would love to read your comments regarding this situation…

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Required phpBay Update

Wade from phpBay sent out the following e-mail to customers:

If you are using phpBay Pro 3.x for Wordpress on ANY site, it is imperative that you update it immediately to version 3.0.8 that I released tonight.

The update stems from an omission in the licensing code where instead of validating the license once, it’s revalidating it every time phpBay Pro is called, from every site, from every user, that has it installed.  This is putting an extraordinary strain on my server.

This is now fixed in 3.0.8.  The server side verification file has been renamed and after 10 days, I will remove the old one, so it’s very important to update your site(s) as soon as possible.

If you didn’t get the e-mail for some reason and use phpBay, make sure to upgrade as soon as you can!

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