Hello All. First of all, I'd like to apologize for the lack of posts here at Money-Code.com. Frankly, I've been quite busy with web development clients, and that really puts things on the back burner as far as affiliate marketing. Not to mention, that I'm quite frustrated with the current state of eBay's ePN and the drastic change of commissions since migrating. I wanted to give you a summary of where I am, and point out some interesting results.

I was at DigitalPoint today, and came across a great thread "Adwords and ebay?How necessary?". I personally don't like to use AdWords (I prefer Yahoo's YSM), but I wanted to get some basic tips for PPC in general... since I'm always wanting to learn how others are doing it.

Anyway, manx posted the following post, which I thought was extremely useful. I wanted to put in here, so I could easily reference it in the future... but some of you might find it useful as well. It's basic, but the basics get easily lost when you dive into PPC.

Anybody into Twitter? If so, look me up! You can view my profile here (https://twitter.com/hanjicode).

hanji.. over and out

I've been seeing a lot of complaining, specifically on the EPN forum about impressions and clicks not tracking. Lots of whining and basically ill feelings directed towards eBay's programmers. Being a programmer, I feel for them. I do however agree with some of the issues, specifically the lack of validation of input fields. This lack of validation is allowing users to input incorrect data for their widgets. Though, I feel for the people that are missing clicks and impressions because of this... I have to say, "Why don't you inspect your links after you've built them?????" It's really easy to double check your work and verify that it looks correct.

I initially migrated two sites over to EPN on the 1st, and I've been waiting to see earnings before making any other moves. I also wanted to make sure that clicks and impressions were working as expected. Early on, I thought my clicks were down considerably, but after a few days, I think they're fairly accurate. This afternoon, I was pleasantly surprised to see commissions in my earnings column!

One thing to understand when migrating, is that the new EPN cookie is different than the CJ cookie. So you're basically starting over with tracking. So expect to see commissions 3-7 days after migrating the site. Also, you still might see commissions and ACRUs in CJ after the migration, since these are different cookies. People are freaking out, and if you just settle down and think about this.. it makes sense.

Items to note:
EditorKit variables are different and need to be changes. I mentioned this here :: EPN EditorKit Transition

I've successfully migrated two sites yesterday (both of which were the most challenging sites in regards to eBay configurations). I did run into some weirdness with the EditorKit, so I wanted to show the variables that need to be changed for it work properly (I still haven't seen any earnings at EPN... so properly might not be the best word here).

You'll need to change/add 4 values

toolid=10004
track=yourcampid
sid=something (I wanted to use sid, since trackid and RSS were having issues)
prvd=9 (this is important, this is what converts things to campid, etc)

2008 has been a very prosperous year for me. I'm averaging $1500-$2000/month with various forms of affiliate income. I was predicting around $1800 just from CJ for March alone. All things were looking good until the last five days. Suddenly my sales have dipped to less than 10 / day, which is very unusual. I usually average around 30-50 sales per day.

Paying attention to the eBay Forum as well as Digital Point, I'm not seeing the usual chatter about low sales all or tracking issues. Could this be related to the eBay EPN switch? Could I be a part of a small subset of tracking errors? I'm not sure. But it could be a reflection of overall market trends. One of the decisions I try to focus on when creating a niche site, is to NOT focus on seasonal sites, but sites that generate throughout the year. With that said, what could determine the change of events?

Most of you should know that eBay is leaving Commission Junction and have started their own affiliate network called the eBay Partner Network. You can learn more about it at their blog as well.

What does this mean? And how does that affect us? Well, leaving Commission Junction will put a serious hit on my four bar earners status, but like I keep saying, it's important to diversify... so I'm going to continue to push other merchants to help keep funds coming in from CJ. There will most likely be some issues with the cutover and tracking related to EPN, but eBay has been historically good with working with their affiliates to correct and compensate them. To me, the biggest issue will be the initial work to cut sites over.

So big news this morning, and it's rippling through the affiliate community at light speed. eBay is leaving Commission Junction and starting it's own affiliate program. Here is the letter received this morning:

We are excited to announce eBay's new global affiliate platform: the eBay Partner Network.

The new platform will go live on April 1st, 2008 PST, at which point eBay will no longer be running its affiliate program through Commission Junction. Beginning April 1st, affiliates should register with eBay Partner Network and migrate their links from CJ to the new platform.

While CJ and ValueClick have been valuable partners to eBay throughout the years, we've decided to give our affiliate community a customized experience. eBay will continue its partnership with ValueClick's technology division, Mediaplex, for ad serving, tracking and other custom projects.

I remember my first interaction with BANS, and it was horrible, but oddly enough, it started with me visiting their site and was surprised to see that my browser was prompted for downloading the PHP source code? I noticed that DB connection string was exposed, so I quickly notified BANS via digital point forums. They were aware of the problem (as to why they didn't disable the site completely during the outage is surprising). You'd think DB connection strings would be quite useful to hackers.

Fast forward 8 months or so to today, and I was surprised to see that someone stated that the site was hacked on the forums. I had to check it out, since I haven't been to the BANS site in a long time, and sure enough, I was viewing the following screen(s):