Money-Code » EPN

What I’ve Been Up To

admin — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 18:25:07 +0000

I’ve had a few people ask me what I’ve been up to. Over the last year, I’ve been laying low in regards to Money-Code.com, but I’ve been pretty active in affiliate marketing in general. Granted this past year has been a busy one with my primary business, but every free moment has been devoted to tweaking.

For 2011 I decided to make some major changes in my strategy, and focus on tweaking vs. building. I really believe that a better user experience is the only way around Panda updates and the general ups and downs of traffic. To develop community and loyalty with your users is worth WAY more than the new tools, etc. Panda hit me hard, and I still feel the sting, but thickening sites, and creating loyalty, I’m starting to see some improvement, and I feel that these changes will really shine in 2012.

I have to say that in 2011, I did do some new site development, primarily in Amazon. I’ve had issues with Amazon for years as an affiliate. It’s definitely a hard egg to crack and to see consistent revenue can be challenging. I’ve been working on a few theories and so far they have been paying off nicely.. and more importantly, consistently. I believe in 2012, I’ll put a little more emphasis. Also, on the flip side, my Commission Junction earnings have been dipping. I ended up dropping PopShops, and I haven’t looked back.

It was interesting that Panda changes hurt, and developed a significantly lower amount of sites, yet 2011 will still be a record year for me. Again, keeping a foundation is very important to float you while you develop.

Plans for 2012 include much more Amazon sites, focus on direct advertising, and developing a web application for potential re-sale. I might be developing some mobile solutions for EPN sites as well, that is still in the brainstorming stages. Oh.. and to blog a little more on Money-Code.com!

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Chatting with eBay Partner Network – Episode 14 – Network Quality Team

admin — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 18:20:41 +0000

Here is a interesting video with Chad Wehrmaker discussing the Network Quality Team at EPN. Personally, I’ve been weary of my EPN account, and work extremely hard to send ‘quality’ traffic to EPN. Work on improving sites and my EPC. He provided some great insight on the ‘quality’, and mentions it’s not about EPC only. I thought this information was quite interesting. He mentions some additional factors – Transparency and Brand Association are also factors for quality. The way I transparency could be related to registered domains at EPN, tracking pixel and clear understanding of the flow of traffic to and from the site. If you have other suggestions of what transparency means, please comment below.

Now Brand Association is interesting. Clearly using registered trademarks or brand names in the title is a violation of the TOS so this should be a no-brainer, unless brand association is related to something else. Is this related to certain products on the site? Not sure what this fully means.

Chad mentions that there is also an appeal process if your account is terminated or suspended and to write to ebaypartnernetworkquality@ebay.com. Threatening or harsh emails will not be responded to. Reading a blogs that have successfully appealed their account termination all mentioned that they would calmly AND continually write to the quality team. Persistence and patience seems to be the way.

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Chatting with eBay Partner Network – Episode 11

admin — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 16:21:39 +0000

I don’t hit the EPN blog that often.. and I should try harder. I saw that on January 13th, the posted Episode 11. I thought this was a good interview, since they addressed some of my ongoing issues with EPN. I appreciate that they acknowledged that they still need to improve in the customer service sector, and also that they’re aware of their issues with rolling out new code. Nothing like ‘new changes’ followed up by reporting issues, etc. A little unnerving, so I’m glad they they’re aware and plan to do better in 2011.

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eBay API Change

admin — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 15:00:43 +0000

Most of you already know this, but I have been getting a few emails about this, so I’ll post it. eBay changed their API to the new Finding API. This will officially be unavailable aft October 2011. The new Finding API is MUCH better and you’ll definitely benefit by using it. There is a migration guide available. Unfortunately, it does mean some major code changes. When I say code changes, I’m referring to the request and the variables returned from the response have different syntax, so it’s not too terrible on what needs to be done.

Here is the link to the migration guide:
http://developer.ebay.com/devzone/finding/Concepts/map_FindItemsAdvanced_2_FindingService.html

Hope this helps.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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?

EPN Tracking Image

admin — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 16:19:07 +0000

A good friend of mine, just starting out in EPN, asked me if I add a tracking pixel as suggested by the link tool. Hmm? I haven’t ccreated any links using the tool in over a year, so I didn’t see mention of that. I do remember that one of the EPN webinars that someone mentioned that they wanted to see some more impression tracking for more publish transparency, but I didn’t hear more on the subject.

I quickly went to the tool and generated some links and saw the mention…

Tip: We recommend serving at least one impression pixel per Campaign on every page that has eBay links. For more info, click the help link to the left and contact us.

As some of you know I roll my own EPN sites (No BANS) so I needed to quickly add this tracking image on my sites. All of my sites have a ‘store’ section, so within that template I added the following PHP code at the bottom:

echo ‘.EPNID.‘&customid=&mpt=[CACHEBUSTER]" alt="" />’;

The EPNID variable is a PHP constant that contains my campid for every site. I’m not seeing increased impressions in my campaigns. I had ‘some’ impressions before, but those were from various pages that had Editor Kits, but now I’m seeing proper page impressions for my RSS and API pages.

I wanted to post this in case others like me, didn’t see the ‘suggestion’.

Side note, EPN’s QCP is still better than my daily commissions under the old system. I’ll be officially ramping up my EPN development again. I’ve been working on Amazon store fronts during the last month and half, and seeing some ‘okay’ earnings from there. Still nowhere near my EPN earnings, but I’ve been learning alot about what works.. and what doesn’t. I’m hoping that these Amazon sites will really pay off during the holiday shopping spree.

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