Money-Code

eBay and Twitter.. some confusion

admin — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:27:17 +0000

It’s been well documented that you cannot promote eBay listings on social networks.. or any site you do not currently own. Meaning, you can post rover links on Twitter, Facebook, Squidoo, etc. It has been the general understanding that you can use those social networks to promote your OWN site where you’d have rover links on them.

Today, I noticed a very disturbing post on the EPN forum by mrguyhp where a affiliate had their account suspended, then reinstated, but withe following warning from EPN:

We have completed the investigation of your account and decided to unsuspend it. It is now active again. However, please be advised that as of August 20, 2009 publishers are no longer allowed to post on twitter.com or any other social network (facebook.com), even if they are merely sending traffic to their own sites. Please remove all your links on these sites and stop those campaigns. If you continue to receive traffic from these sites, your account will be expired and all your pending commissions will be reversed

Now, this makes no sense! According to their EPN blog “10 Tips to Improve Your Social Media Strategy” they have the following listed:

Although eBay Partner Network does not allow our partners to directly promote eBay through social media arenas, we want to make sure you know that you can drive traffic to your own website(s) through appropriate social media strategies.

These two statements seem to be opposite. So far no word from the ‘pinks’ on the subject. You can follow the entire thread here.

UPDATE

Looks like we have a pink reply on the post!

Hi everyone,

To clarify our policy allows social network traffic to be sent to your own site, just not directly to eBay. The blog post is correct. We are looking into the context of that response from Network Quality.

Thanks,
Casey

So hopefully, this is all cleared up now.

EPN change to RSS

admin — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:58:08 +0000

So I mentioned earlier that BANS users were experiencing problems at the same time of my issues with dynamic RSS search results. It also appears that some phpBayPro users as well as a few other EPN scripts are experiencing issues. On the EPN board ‘casey’ replied with the following statement in a thread where individuals were trying to debug the issue:

Hi everyone,

We’d like to thank you for your patience through the recent change made to the RSS Feed links that has impacted some of you, and apologize for the delayed response on the boards as well as the lack of a proactive message to announce this change. There was some miscommunication here on when this change was planned to roll out. Essentially we updated the links in the RSS Feeds to reflect the new link generator structure which we implemented a while back. This new link structure includes added parameters that we plan to use for some optimization initiatives to further enhance our tools and most importantly help generate higher earnings for our partners.

We believe the third party tools being used to publish content from the ePN RSS Feeds will update as necessary, if not already, to account for this new link structure and direct users to the correct pages on eBay. Also, as recommended by others in this thread it’s a good idea to consult the resources available through these third parties for further assistance. Please note that there are no issues with the RSS Feed URLs and links when taken directly from the publisher interface.

Thanks again for your patience,

Casey

You can read the full thread here. So it definitely looks like there are some serious backend changes in the works. I’ll be slowly (or quickly depending on when they enforce the change) converting my rover links to follow these new variables. The BANS issue may have been related to urlencoding, not sure.

Pay Attention to your Roll-Your-Own EPN sites

admin — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 02:44:38 +0000

Yesterday I noticed that my EPN sites were having trouble with their searching capability. It appears that eBay changed some things related to their RSS feed on my searches, luckily my category RSS were okay, for the time being. This recent change affected my parser that extracts the Auction ID for my SEO links (internalized links to eBay). I also noticed that they named a few new variables (this could be old news for many, but it was new to me)

icep_item=xxxxxx
ipn=psmain
icp_vectorid=xxxxxxx
kwid=xxxxxx
mtid=xxxx
kw=rss
icep_ff3=2

I was able to restore search functionality, but I only updated my rover redirects on one site to verify that this change did NOT impact my click counts for that site, and I’ll be migrating my rover code to this new style. I know I could pull this rover URL directly from the RSS result, but I’m not passing extraneous info via the querystring on my redirect. I may reconsider this though.

Today, Dave at BuildANicheStoreBlog.com had a post stating that if you have BANS sites that have Cloak Affiliate Links in box #4 you may be experiencing problems. This seems awfully coincidental to my issues noticed yesterday. Apparently, those users are directed to a ‘Page Not Responding’ at eBay. You can read Dave’s full post here.

Issues with CJNiche WordPress Plugin

admin — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 02:36:27 +0000

So I’ve been working with the cjniche plugin. Overall, it’s a pretty good plugin, but I definitely have some issues with it. I noticed that a few of my requests were getting the dreaded PHP warning:

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in
/var/www/wouldnt/you/like/to/know/wp-content/
plugins/cjniche/cjniche.php on line 79

Want to see if it’s a wide spread problem on the interwebby? Check out this Google search on the topic.

The line number may vary with yours, I added some extra special customizations to the plugin. Googling around on this, I see constant references to this error relating to this plugin. I also see crazy recommendations like deactivating and reactivating the plugin. Reminds me of the ‘did you reboot your computer’ and if the answer it ‘yes’, you follow up with ‘how many times’. Odd how some things just go away. Well, I wasn’t buying it.

It is true if you add a space to the advertiserIds or dork up your CJ Key you’ll get the same error, but I was experiencing intermittent errors. It would work a few of the times, then not work the other times. That would have NOTHING to do with variable values stored in the database. I did some digging (which is hard with this particular plugin since they encode everything.. really?). I was able to get to the root of the problem.

If you’re getting this error every time, the plugin is not receiving a proper XML response CJ and that is why the foreach is blowing up. Unfortunately, the plugin is not checking for a good product set return from CJ and just explodes. Now, if you’re getting this error some of the times, the problem is very similar. I was able to echo the XML returning during a failure and this is what I saw:

[error-message] =>; The server is currently at
capacity or down for maintenance. Please try again later.

Wow, now that helps shed some light on the problem for sure. Looks like CJ is having problems. This is my biggest irritation dealing with CJ’s datafeed. I’ve mentioned that in the past that it’s just not reliable. This plugin is nice for something quick and if you’re working with small data sets or small merchants, this probably works really well. If you’re dealing with larger product catalogs, the keyword filtering is obviously going to take longer and probably cause issues with many requests. Now this is an assumption. I’m not sure if yesterday and today are the only two days having problems.. who knows. What I wanted to do with this post was shed some light with the PHP error and this plugin. I definitely see mention of it in many places.

I’ve written some error handling in the plugin to catch vs. explode when this occurs, but I might need to work on a caching solution to fall back on a stored data set if it has trouble.

Apparel ItemSearch does not display ListPrice

admin — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 17:36:13 +0000

Today, I was noticing one of my Amazon sites was not displaying prices for *some* apparel items. Looking closely at the XML response coming back from AWS, I noticed that ItemAttributes->ListPrice->FormattedPrice was not included as well as OfferSummary->LowestNewPrice->FormattedPrice was missing as well. Price of any sort was completely missing in about 80% of my apparel listings when I do a ItemSearch.

After doing some Googlin’ I found others with similar problems. It’s definitely not a new problem, so I was glad there were solutions, so I wanted to post this in case others run across this issue. It might be in other SearchIndexes besides apparel.

The solution is to modify your ResponseGroup value in your request to AWS. Normally, I only ask for “Offers, Images,ItemAttributes”. What you need to do is include “Variations” as well. So my ResponseGroup looks like: “Offers,Images,ItemAttributes,Variations”

You should now see VariationSummary in your XML response. To access the price there you would look at VariationSummary->LowestPrice->FormattedPrice

Hope this helps!

Simple modification to FD Feedburner Plugin

admin — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 18:38:45 +0000

Today for one of my sites, I needed to populate a Facebook page with a feed, but I didn’t want the entire post as the ‘note’. I found a great plugin called Feed Facebook, Leave Facebook that leaves a partial feed with a link to ‘leave Facebook’ to your site. This is EXACTLY what I needed, but I was having problem with my FD Feedburner Plugin which auto-magically converts my RSS feeds to feedburner feeds. In this particular case, I needed to exclude a single feed from this. Unfortunately, this is not a configuration option.

So I’m posting this mainly for myself in case there is a plugin update and I need to know how I did this the first time, but I can see that few might find this useful.

Basically in the feedburner_redirect() function, we need to add a conditional:

if ($feed_url != null) {
// Redirect the feed
header("Location: ".$feed_url);
die;
}

Needs to be changed to this:

if ($feed_url != null) {
// Redirect the feed
if(!eregi(‘facebook’,$_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’])){
header("Location: ".$feed_url);
die;
}
}

The feed url that Facebook will be using looks similar to this : http://www.yourdomain.com/feed?feedfacebook, if we detect this in the REQUEST_URI, we do nothing with the redirect. Now Facebook will be happy with our new feed, while any other requests to our site’s feed will be directed to Feedburner.

So you messed up, now what?

admin — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:12:18 +0000

I pretty much try to avoid the official EPN forum these days. The amount of negative, paranoid and panicky posts there can sometimes freak you out. But, those posts are real and should be looked at on occasion to understand how series EPN is about violations.

I’m still trying to diversify my affiliate marketing pie and get EPN more in the balance by promoting heavily with Amazon and CJ products over the last few months. In fact, I just recently did some new EPN development for the first time last week. During this development phase I clicked on a rover link to test that the proper CampID was being sent and I was landing at the appropriate listing. The next day, I purchased something on eBay and realized that I just purchased an item after dropping my rover cookie on my machine. Normally, I do eBay purchases on another box that has none of my affiliate cookies (or clear my cookies). Not doing any EPN development for a while, I forgot about the rover. Total rookie mistake on my part.

I’m sure a lot of people do this, intentionally or not intentionally, but I didn’t want to be one of those users at the EPN forum complaining that I can’t log in, or that I’ve been booted from the program without any reasons, etc. I decided to take a proactive approach and contact EPN and let them know what I’ve done, and request that transaction be removed from my earnings.

After submitting my email (via their Contact/Help form in the ‘Can I test my own links?’ section) I received the classic ‘canned’ message stating that they’ve forwarded my email to the Network Quality team at EPN. I didn’t get a response for about a week, but then finally received a great email from the Quality Team, thanking me for being proactive and notifying them of the accidental click. The letter stated that this would not be a problem (this time) and request that I be sure to clear cookies before making any future purchases at eBay. No problem!

Nothing probably would have happened if I didn’t send them a email. This was the first and only time I’ve purchased someting on my rover cookie, but you never know. I’d hate to lose my EPN account over simple purchase at eBay.

Update WordPress!

admin — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:37:14 +0000

Okay, looks like WordPress released a ‘hardened’ release for 2.8 which will jack your release version to 2.8.5. It’s very important to stay upgraded to ensure that your sites will run properly, but more importantly to maintain security. You don’t want your money-making sites to go down, or to have your account suspended due to your site being compromised. As they say, “A ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”.

Details of the release can be found here: http://wordpress.org/development/2009/10/wordpress-2-8-5-hardening-release/

The headline changes in this release are:

A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen.
Removal of areas within the code where php code in variables was evaluated.
Switched the file upload functionality to be whitelisted for all users including Admins.
Retiring of the two importers of Tag data from old plugins.

Are you distracted by earning stats?

admin — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:24:19 +0000

I’m not sure where I’m going with this post. Maybe it’s a personal observation and something I need to work on. I guess I should start out…

“Hi, my name is Hank… and I’m addicted to stats”

I would be embarrassed if I counted how many times I log into CJ or EPN’s control panel to see my numbers. I’m particularly most annoyed with my habit to login to EPN, since that updates (earnings) once a day. I think I find myself checking to see if earnings had posted, but even after they post, I still login often.. I guess to see what my click counts are doing. It’s quite silly. With Amazon, I only check once a day (in the morning) since earnings/clicks only post once. CJ, I check continually (same time as EPN), but at least earnings trickle throughout the day.

What I’m not liking is the time I waste doing this. Add this to my email and IM/Twitter conversations, and various mailing lists alerts, I know I spend a lot of time where I could probably save a lot by doing it once at set time. This is where the addiction is identified. The thought of doing it once a day, seems ‘weird’ to me. It’s like I need to do it all day long?

Am I alone here? Or are there other internet marketers wasting time on earning stats? What’s the cure? Is there a patch of some sort?

GoDaddy’s Discount Domain Club

admin — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:20:26 +0000

Today I wanted to bring up GoDaddy’s Discount Domain Club. If you own a lot of domains at GoDaddy, you need to join this club!

Over the months, I’ve heard people mention this, and I have one friend that has told me in the past that I needed to be a part of this. Basically, you pay a yearly fee to be a part of the club, but the club offers some sweet discounts that add up! In my case alone, I’ll be saving several hundreds per year.

Prior to my joining, I’ve been purchasing domains at regular price (sometimes on sale, etc) and then setting them to auto-renew. Pretty simple. You can get a discount by manually renewing your domains, but I feel that is trouble waiting to happen (for me anyways).

By joining the Discount Domain Club, your renewals (automatic) are discounted. You purchases on new domains are always the lowest price at GoDaddy, that alone is great deal, but the renewals is what is going to save me some serious yearly dough.

Joining the club is not free though, it cost’s $89.99/year, so you need to do the math and figure out if it’s worth it for you based on the numbers of domains you have in your account. If you have lots of domains, this is a no brainer. I think 20 domains is the break even point.

So what types of savings are we talking about?

.com is $7.29/year (31% off)
.net is $5.99/year (53% off)
.org is $7.29/year (51% off)

You also get free Premium CashParking and get to keep 80% of the revenue generated. You get fre membership to GoDaddy Auctions. You get discounted Domain Buy Service (this is for negotiating domains that are already taken).

It takes the headache out of the mix. No longer waiting for ‘weekend specials’ or looking for coupon codes to get a deal on domains, just auto-magic, which saves me time… and I like saving time and money.