Tag: EBay

Categories
Affiliate Marketing HubPages Making Money Online

eBay Rule Change Leaves Blogger, HubPages, Squidoo Out in the Cold

eBay Bans Blogger etc

Its official – as of 1 August 2009 you cannot not use eBay (EPN) to monetize Blogger (blogspot) blogs, HubPages hubs or Squidoo lenses or InfoBarrel articles. This one is a bit a of a shocker – the time frame of less than two weeks is pretty bad too. Actually eBay will tell you that they “told you so” back in May when they mentioned that both:

Ad Networks:  Using any graphical ad network to place eBay ads (ads that go directly to an eBay domain) on websites not directly under the publishers’ control…Sub-affiliates:  Any arrangement where publishers distribute their earnings from eBay Partner Network to other publishers.

were no longer acceptable to EPN. Source EPN Official Blog.

The Ad Networks paragraph reflects the HubPages and Blogger business models, the Sub-affiliate model reflects the Squidoo model.

This is a huge change and will take some affiliates out of business and for many more will mean that they will take a huge income hit while they rebuild their business.

Is eBay evil?

Is  eBay is bad, ugly nasty company who treats their sellers like dirt and their affiliates worse? Nope, the point is that nothing has changed: he who has the gold makes the rules.  eBay would rather the buyer bought from direct from them – they don’t really want to pay affiliates – it costs them money.

No eBay isn’t evil – they are in business and they have, and will continue to make business decisions with their own best interests in heart, the interests of the shareholders, not the interests of their affiliates.

Is Building Your Business on Free Sites Bad?

Using sites such as blogger (blogspot) and HubPages meant that you could make money from eBay affiliate commissions without investing any of your own. Now don’t get me wrong – I think making money for nothing down is fantastic! But it leaves you doubly vulnerable – either the affiliate or the website you are using (or as they say these days “the Web2.0 property”) could change the rules, ban your account – and you are back to where you were with nothing.  Don’t put all your eggs in one basket : ironically when I used to invest in property for passive income I used to say the same thing:

Build a diversified business
Build a diversified business

Diversification is Everything

If you have built a successful income stream from eBay affiliate sales on blogger and hubpages is this the end? Yes for eBay – time to move on – with blogger blogs you have the option to self-host them (yes blogger does have a self-hosting option same as WordPress) which is probably the quickest option, but if that involves a change of url there is going to be some work involved. Alternatively it will the time to move to self-hosted WordPress.

The other option is to leave the blogger blog where it is and change the monetisation method. Its unlikely that Adsense will work well for an eBay niche but it does sometimes – double check- Amazon is the obvious option but there are literally dozens of others. I have just signed up with Chikita and I quite like what I am seeing with it too.

I expect that Hubpages will come up with something to ease the pain of the transition but obviously the only real option there is either Amazon or a relevant affiliate product.

Once I have my income level up to full-time – my aim is simple – I don’t want any one affiliate to be contributing more than 20% of that income -its just too risky and this is a case example of why!

Where do you stand – how does the eBay change of heart over blogger blogs and HubPages affect your business?

Photo Credit

Categories
Blogging Freelance Writing HubPages Online Business

Tips from the First Year On Line


Happy Anniversary!
Originally uploaded by bruno1378

Since my last post on Freelance Writing we have had a quick trip back to New Zealand for the New Zealand Dancesport Championships. This is my anniversary post. Sept 2007 was when we arrived in Perth, Western Australia and decided to stay awhile. We decided that I would try to make an online income to replace my IT salary (US$1000/week round figures) – I gave myself until December to do it – LOL

I know I wrote how my online business was going up until May – yes ignore the date time travel is alive and well on blogs.

March I found a new approach to making money on-line. Wish I could remember how I found it but I found Vic’s Make Money online site around then. He’s responsible for the name of this site because the initial idea was to buy 100 info domains.

Well I set up some sites and waited for Google to index them, and waited, and in fact I’m still waiting. Almost simultaneously info BANS sites fell out of favour with Google. I was a little pissed to say the least – in fact I cried in frustration quite literally. Everything seems to have worked for people last month or last week – but as soon as I touched it poof – gone. I was in no doubt that Vic was explaining how he made money to me – but the search engine’s rules appeared to change every time I tried what was being recommended!

I was pretty very close to giving up then – I was also participating in Vic’s trends blogging contest: where you blog about current news – which did at least make me realize that the trick to getting traffic was to write about something that people were actively searching on – duh! Vic said in one of video posts something that stuck with – “proof of life” – (according to the movie of the same name this is the first thing that hostage negotiators ask for) . So I did my own little experiment. I had already bought a info domain which was the same keyword phrase of my best performing hub page. I knew how many people searched for the phrase – because my hubpage was normally ranked #1 or #2 in Google, I knew it wouldn’t make me a fortune but I just wanted to know I could get my own site on the first page. I put a niche blog on the domain using Court’s Keyword Sniping.

Well it worked. For the last couple of months my site is regularly on page 1 or 2 of the Google results for a number of its keywords. For weeks it alternated from being not indexed to being in the top 10 pages. It seems to have settled down now. It the CPC is rubbish – it will never make me more that $1/day – and its made me nothing to date because I haven’t yet dared put Adsense on it –I want it to be more consistently on page #1 before I do that. I’ve done it I have proven to myself I can get a site indexed and ranked even on an info domain.

I was concentrated on my freelance writing when the other day I got an email saying that eBay had paid me – $10. I went an checked my eBay earnings for the first time in a couple of months and oddly some of those un-indexed BANS sites were getting clicks and a couple had made me a little bit of money. I did further investigation: Google still hated me but Yahoo loves me! And it wasn’t even that sites which I had developed properly – think of the potential if I actually put some more pages on the sites 🙂

So now after a year I can happily report that my actual website online income is about the same as it has been for month. BUT – and its a big but, I definitely feel I am at the end of the beginning at the start of the real beginning … To Be Continued the fun has just started!

Categories
Affiliate Marketing Search Engines

Adding a BANS store To an Existing Site

Yes success! Having been frustrated with getting INFO domains indexed I decided to try adding a store onto one of my existing blogs. The blog has great content and basically gets about10 hits a day even though I havent updated it for months and done no promotion of it. I checked what people where using to find it and then built a BANS EBay store around those keywords.

Never Delete an Old Blog

Google basically considers that the older a site is the more likely it is to


Ruins of a Muslim haveli in an Oudh qasbah near Lucknow
Originally uploaded by Indscribe

be legitimate. If you think about it age is one think you really can’t fake! Or hurry up! My blog wasn’t being updated and it still has a has a PR of 3 which in itself can be useful for backlinks too.

Well 2 days later my store is indexed in Google: no traffic or sales yet but at least its got potential now! Think it might be time to re-vitalise this particular site too!

So if you think your old sites are a mistake you may be right but don’t delete them – they aren’t costing you anything and you might be able to reuse them for something more useful in the future.

Categories
Affiliate Marketing Making Money Online Marketing Online Business

Update on the first month of my BANS Empire

OK I started buying domains on 10 April and now I have over domains. Buying of course is the easy bit! To date I have only got 7 sites setup.


SALE, GRR!
Originally uploaded by Peter Kaminski

The GoDaddy sale is still on so you can buy a info domain for $1.99c (plus 20c registration fee). That’s cheap compared to a com at $9.99. Though you might want to hesitate before you jump in. Six of my BANS stores are on info domains and not one of them are currently indexed. What does that mean? If you put the exact url of the domain liswidget.info for example in Google it will return no results – but put the url exists – well not that one but you get the idea. No one searching on Google will find my stores 🙁

My first info was indexed for a couple of weeks: it even bought me in a small commission. Then Google did an update early May at it disappeared, the other info stores have either been briefly indexed and dropped or never indexed.

The low price of info domains obviously attracts bargain hunters but also spammers. It appears that Google has decided to “sandbox” info domains for a while to discourage the spammers – hopefully they will back soon :-). One of the things I have learned with internet marketing that there is not point worrying about things you can’t influence and I definitely cannot influence Google! On the other hand Google can’t ignore all info domains for ever – its a perfectly legal TLD with lots of perfectly legitimate sites established and being established.

As 6 of my info domains are effectively invisible to Google I am getting little traffic and no sales. The last site is a com but has only been up two dates so far!