Money-Code

Coding For Online Success

March 29, 2008
by admin
4 Comments

Unusual March Trends

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?

Continue reading

March 29, 2008
by admin
6 Comments

Prepare for eBay Partner Network cutover.

eBay Partner Network

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.

Continue reading

March 17, 2008
by admin
3 Comments

eBay leaving Commission Junction

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.

Continue reading

March 14, 2008
by admin
3 Comments

Build a Niche Store (Parent Site) Hacked?!?!

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):

Continue reading

March 6, 2008
by admin
0 comments

Spring is here

I’ve gotten a few IMs and emails asking about what has been going on. Sorry about not posting. I have been extremely busy, with both work and affiliate marketing. I hate that feeling when “work” gets in the way of my affiliate marketing plans. I have been on track for launching four sites per month. My quota has been met, and earnings are reflecting this effort. March is looking to be a record breaking month for me!

Continue reading