Tag Archives: affiliate

eBay Partner Network Affiliate Replaces CJ

April 1, 2008 – 5:45 am

Ebay Partner NetworkToday eBay announced the official opening of the eBay Partner Network (or EPN) which, in 30 days no less, will replace Commission Junction as the sole affiliate program for eBay.

For those casual users of the eBay affiliate program, the email this morning might come as a bit of a surprise but they have been working on this for some time, and promise to have a better reporting and functionality, although I have been very happy with Commission Junction for many years now.

The news didn’t go unnoticed by those in the blogging world where you could find several posts this morning like eBay Partner Network now live by Sue from Tamebay, eBay Dumps Commission Junction from Net Profits, a good discussion from Shoemoney in eBay Affiliate Program FINALLY Drops the CJ Dead Weight, and several others. For those working with the eBay affiliate program in one way or another, this is big news.

What is an Affiliate?

If you are unfamiliar with how affiliates work, it is a simple concept that has been around for quite some time. A company offers an affiliate partner (the user) an incentive of some kind, usually money, to promote their company. At this point almost all companies do this in one form or another, and even small ecommerce sites can setup affiliates for their customer. I am both an affiliate partner and an affiliate provider through one of our small ecommerce sites.

You can even see this on non-eccommerce site and large B&M companies. DirectTV has offered $50 to anyone who gets a friend to sign up for a new satellite TV account for a long time, this is just a simple affiliate offering that can be done by anyone who has a friend who needs their service.

How Much Does an Affiliate Pay?

This is always the question. How much can I actually make using something like this. The answer is just about as much as you are willing to put into building your affiliate network. For most of us, we don’t have a 40 hour work week we can devote to an affiliate program, so we use it where we can, when we can.

I have posted my most recent report below, so you can see it isn’t much. We current run about $100 a month on the eBay affiliate program but it doesn’t take much effort to produce results like that below. We have made as much as $500-$600 a month and as little as nothing. It all depends on how much work you want to put into the program.

Commission Junction Report

If you have time, and minor programming skills, there are many people that make a nice living with all the various affiliate networks. Like anything else it can take quite a bit of time to initially set up, but once set up, it can run and produce some nice revenue without much effort or maintenance.

Using an Affiliate Program With eCommerce

It works very similar to an ad network like Google Adwords except without the ads. It can also be perceived by your customers and visitors as an unwelcome way to use them to receive a payment for something. So if you use it on an ecommerce site you should keep a few things in mind.

  • Don’t let it take away from direct sales
  • Don’t let it effect your customers perception of your good business practices
  • Use it sparingly in areas of your website that need some filler
  • Make sure you are familiar with the TOS of the network
  • Have real expectations about revenue, and plan accordingly
  • Know the effect on customer service and be willing to change

As with anything else you do on your website, make sure that the benefit you receive for using something is worth doing. I know many sites that use Google Adwords in various places and receive little or nothing in return. If you are making $1.00 a month on a banner ad on your header, perhaps a $25 ad sold to a supplier might be a better use of that space.

This section could be expanded to pages and pages as there are several issues involved with using an affiliate program and an ecommerce site you earn a living from, so proceed with an ounce of caution when adjusting a shopping cart platform. The customers that buy from your site daily are far more important than an affiliate program, so make sure they are happy first.

eBay’s Affiliate Program

Ebay Partner NetworkI have been a part of this program for probably 5-8 years now, and they have always used Commission Junction. Thank goodness for us, the migration over to eBay’s platform will not be a huge expenditure of time, but it will take some re-coding and apparently, it needs to be done by May 1st.

There is already someone in the forums who seems to have been denied an account but it does seem to be operating on an automatic basis as far as the sign up process goes. I simply filled out the forms on the sign up sheet, received an activation email, then you will have to go back to the site and enter your payment information to be paid. I did try to move a few of my applications over and they were not completed on eBay’s end yet, they said… coming soon… so hopefully they will be fixed quickly. Then comes the fun part, moving all your affiliate links over to eBay program instead of Commission Junction.

The Google Effect

I thought I would mention this in passing as well. I few weeks ago, Google also announced a change in the way their advertisers can use their URL structure for ads. This was, I think, an attempt to keep affiliates that mislead customers but it had to have a huge effect on the affiliate programs in total.

Important Change to URL Policy Enforcement
Starting in April, display URLs for new ads will be required to match their destination / landing page URLs, without exception. Please adjust your URLs accordingly when creating new ads. -google

You can now no longer display a url and have the link url go to a different place. This technique was used for good purposes by many people but also used to trick people into thinking they were an official advertiser for that particular display url company.

Conclusion

It does look like the new EPN will be good once all the work is completed on eBay’s end, and on the providers end. The report functionality looks great, and the process seems to be a little more straight forward than before. It was always a semi-confusing process to a newbie, but many things are until you learn the in’s and out’s.

Have you moved your links over yet or joined the new EPN?

By islandzephyr | Posted in Business | Also tagged ebay, news | Comments (0)

Snap Shot Announces Snap Share Ad Program

November 7, 2007 – 8:21 pm

Snap Share Shot AdSnap Shot announced that they are entering the monetize your site advertising program with Snap Shares. Much like other affiliate programs Snap Shot now has the option to include four different types of ads, and of course Google Adsense is one of those methods.

Snap Shares adds a new money-making dimension to Snap Shots by allowing Web site owners and bloggers to increase their inventory with context-based ads at the bottom of each Snap Shot.

New Way To Monetize Your Blog

For those monetize your blog folks out there, this might be something to look into if you haven’t used their service before. It works similar to those textual links where an ad pops up from some keyword from within your post. What made Snap Shot a little different is they take existing links and the pop up window is a “snap shot” of the link. I use / used it on a few different blogs (I even used it on this blog) for a while, but the pop up on each window became tiresome to me, especially when it had no advertising value to the program.

I don’t know if I will try it again on this site, probably not, but I do have one blog that still uses their service and I will be sure to change over to my ad numbers. If you are already using the service, by default, the ads will be displayed when you mouse over the link. You will need to create an account on Snap Shot and make sure you update your account with your Google Adsense or other ad information. Without the update you are just giving away ads clicks.

Will the High Traffic Blogs Try It?

It will be interesting to see if some of the larger blogs pick up the service. Most of the a-lister blogs I come across do not use their service. I would guess one of the main reasons is that it distracts from their site a little bit and I am not sure how profitable the ad program will become.

What is interesting to note is that some of their subscribers seem less than happy about the change, and many have gone to remove the plugin altogether because they moved to an ad based system. When I initially signed up for their service I was rather surprised at the time that they were not using an ad based system, but perhaps that was the big appeal for a good part of their clientèle. If a majority of the Snap Shot users were not interested in the monitize your site application they may loose quite a few users, but I would guess they had researched this before hand and know what to expect.

What about your site? Have you used their service in the past or do you plan on trying it out now that they are offering a way to make money with the service?

By islandzephyr | Posted in Business | Also tagged adsense, google, snap shot | Comments (1)

Register a Domain Name for Increased eBay Affiliate Traffic

October 8, 2007 – 9:18 am

Register Your Own Domain NameDo you want to look more professional and drive more traffic to your online store on one of the big auction sites like eBay, Overstock, or Amazon, and earn some eBay affiliate commission at the same time? Registering for your own domain name is a good place to start. This may sound very basic at this point in the online shopping game, but if you haven’t done it yet, what are you waiting for. This is one of those things for small businesses that is easy, probably costs less than your lunch, and can have a real impact on customer perception and even make you some money like paying less for your listing fees.

I am not really talking about registering your own company name, I assume you have already done that if you are serious about your Internet store and marketing your company name. I am talking about not having to use that really long url address that these sites use, and in the process, making it easier for your customers to find you.

Normally when you setup shop, you are using the servers of the company you sign up with. Using eBay as an example, if you have an eBay store site, your url address is going to be something like http://stores.ebay.com/chipseo-marketing. Something hard to just tell someone, also a little less professional looking, and just hard to type in, bookmark, or even remember (especially for your customers).

Essential Oils Store With Long Domain Name

Having your own domain name changes that. I just randomly picked one from eBay Stores above, so hopefully this store won’t mind a little publicity (they have some great feedback and have obviously been selling on eBay for a long time), but from the screen shot I can count 51 characters in the url not including the http:// part. I tried to do a search on eBay’s store search page for this store (see below) and it didn’t show up under the keywords for essential oils or 02 essential oils so it might be a little difficult to find by just using a keyword search for their products. The issue of getting your proper keywords available so people can search for them is a topic for another post, but getting a good domain name is a start.

eBay Store Search

You can do a quick search to see if a few domain names of your choice would be available. Most all hosting companies allow a search, some of the easier ones to use are GoDaddy, Hostway, or Networksolutions to check on the availability of a domain name. In the example above I found some good choices with just a few minutes of looking, and might be something like http://www.o2oils.com or even http://www.o2oil.com.

Often times today it is very hard to find a short domain name, especially in the 5 four to five character area but if you look, eventually you will find something that will work for you. If you get one and don’t like it, you can always add a new one later and then you have two addresses that will both point to your store.

eBay Domain RegistrationeBay actually makes it a little easier to setup than some of the other sites if you already have an ebay store. You just log into your store and scroll to the bottom and click on the link for domain registration and follow the steps outlined on those pages. Even if you don’t have an eBay Store yet, they are easy to open (just click here to open an eBay store), or even if you are not on eBay at all it is easy to setup. Remember, you are not actually setting up an online store or a web page, this is going to be a forward (also called a 301 Moved Permanently in technical terms) where you type in the domain name and then it redirects users to your eBay store.

For example, this site has a permanent redirect domain url of http://www.auburnseo.com, mainly because the keyword for Auburn is used in my business and it might bring in more typed in traffic, but it still works the same way. Now, when I go to http://www.auburnseo.com my users will be directed hopefully to where they wanted to go in the first place. Some companies will also give you a code to append to the end of the forward address that will give you an affiliate payment of some kind, like a discount on the fees normally charged or a payment for referring other people. In the eBay case, they will give you 75% off your final value fees (FVF), called a Final Value Fee Credit. That is not bad at all. Imagine taking 75% off that FVF bill each month. We used this FVF credit for about a year and saved almost $10,000 in fees over the whole year. That is not an actual payment in cash handed to me, but what’s the difference if you are paying the fees that many are on eBay.

To receive the FVF credit, you just need to append the forward to address with ?refid=store which is what eBay uses to track the domain forward. That is not the domain name you just registered, it is the ebay store name. So in the example used above, it would be http://stores.ebay.com/chipseo-marketing?refid=store for the address you will use as a forward to your new domain name.

When you set up your custom domain name on the registrar’s site, eBay will prepopulate your Store’s URL as the destination that your domain should forward to. We will also include a code at the end of that URL (?refid=store) to track when a user enters your Store from outside of eBay. If the user purchases an item, you can earn a Store Referral Credit. For more information, see the eBay Stores section in the eBay Help Center.

The refid id tag is specific to eBay so it may or may not be something you will need to add on other store pages. It will be slightly different for each company so check and see if there is something special they do with their credits or affiliate programs. With eBay there is both, and nothing says you can only do just one domain name either.

You do want to do a few things to make this happen of course. Some of the steps involved are going to be:

  1. Choosing a domain name - there are some basic do’s and don’ts to this and I have an article I will post soon on the specifics to picking out a good domain name. In the mean time, here are a few pointers.
    • Choose something easy to remember
    • Spelled correctly
    • As short a name as possible
    • Avoid the dash “-” in the name if you can
    • Use something that may combine your company name and shopping store
    • Be careful not to use a copyrighted name
  2. Decide what registrar company you want to use - ebay recommends two different companies, Hostway and Network Solutions, but there are many many different companies you can use. They all do the same thing. If you are comfortable with using one of the two companies above then by all means go ahead, they are both fine companies. We used Hostway for our eBay forwards just because they were a little less expensive.
  3. Apply the forward to your new domain - this is usually just a matter of copy and paste into a text field in the user options for your domain
  4. Promote your new address - this is an important step. The way the FVF credit is given is if someone types in the address you just bought, so you need to USE it. Basically anywhere you want to promote your products and services.
    • Put it in your email signature
    • on your email invoices
    • your paper invoices
    • on a flyer or promo in your customers orders
    • If you advertise in a magazine
  5. If you don’t want to mess with it, find someone who will set it up for you - services like this exist everywhere. I can and have setup domain names for people for a small fee or do the continued maintenance on them each month for a small monthly fee. Either way, it is not an expensive business decision to make.

You can do the same thing for affiliate programs you participate in as well. eBay has its own affiliate program where you can use an amended url just like above (but a little longer) and you get paid for each bid, and for each new ebay registration that comes from your link (eBay uses a company called Commission Junction to take care of the complexities of this task). This doesn’t have to be the same domain, you can one for each purpose and then you will be on your way to start looking for ways to track and rank your domains and affiliate commissions.

Using additional domain names in your business is simple to set up, affordable, and a great way to expand your reach beyond the basic store url you are given when you sign up.

Implementation Rank
[1-10]: Technical [2] | Cost [1] | Revenue [3] | Customer Service [8] | Time [2]

By islandzephyr | Posted in Business | Also tagged domain, revenue, traffic | Comments (0)