Antigua Web Solutions Blog

eBay Affiliate Sales Blogger Blogs and Hubpages

janetra — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 10:36:11 +0000

From Aug 1 you will no longer be able to put eBay auctions on free blogs such as Blogger, on Hubpages, Squiddo, Infobarrel etc!

A related question was: “Can we use affiliate links on third party sites like Blogger, Twitter, Wordpress, Tumblr, Squidoo or article sites where we “own” the IP of the content but not the actual site?”

For blogging platforms like Wordpress, we’re requiring that publishers use the download-and-install versions of the products so that they have full ownership of their sites. For other promotional methods such as Twitter, etc, it is ok for your links to lead to your own websites that have links to eBay, but not to lead to eBay directly.

So eBay changes things yet again and pisses off even more affiliates! You will know that I no longer can use eBay as I was dumped last year for spurious reasons. eBay seems to be using whatever means they can to cut down the number of affiliates, perhaps in an effort to keep more money themselves? Maybe they think they are so well known that they don’t need anyone else to drive traffic to them but blocking free traffic seems a bit of a strange business plan to me.

if you have a load of blogger blogs or other free blogs that are getting decent traffic and you have been doing well with eBay try using adsense instead. I have found it to be successful, although not quite as profitable as eBay. My top earners for adsense are sites that still have eBay auctions on them as they won’t easily convert to affiliate sales. Sites selling used products for instance. eBay ads are good for bringing in long tail traffic and you can leave the ads there if you take out your affiliate ID.

If you are still using eBay on self hosted sites I suggest it may be time to diversify a bit. eBay is not a reliable source of income and who know what they will do next!

The Hub Pages Adsense Challenge

janetra — Sat, 30 May 2009 17:59:48 +0000

Court over at the Keyword Academy issued a challenge to make 100 hubs in a month as a means to make money online with adsense. If you haven’t found hub pages yet check them out. You can make a hub easily and quickly and get some do follow links. In order for the links to be do follow you need to have a hub score over 75 which is pretty easy to do. I made a new account and reached that with just 4 hubs.

I’ve been making hubs really for the back links and haven’t paid much attention to using them for adsense but some interesting things have come out of Court’s challenge. He’s doing well (but then he’s a master at this!) but a Ben over at How to Make Money Online with SEO has taken up the challenge and set a target of 200 hubs in a month! At first he wasn’t making any money but he’s been refining his technique and now seems to have cracked how to go about this. I won’t go into the details here as he’s posted just how he’s doing it on his site so head over there and read about it.

Just thinking about all that work makes me tired and now he’s talking about making

100 phBay self-hosted ebay niche sites, 200 ezine articles, 100 blogger blog niches, or 1 self hosted blog in a niche with 200 niche based articles, or 3000 backlinks in one month

Good luck Ben!

More on Banned from eBay Partner Network

janetra — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 17:15:59 +0000

It’s now been 4 months since I received the ‘banned for being associated with a banned account’ email and I have never received any reply to my emails. Steve from eBay says “ However, if you feel your account has been incorrectly terminated, you may contact us and we will work with you to resolve the issue. If you would like to discuss your specific account status, please contact us via our help section”. Despite this no one seems to have received any reply to their emails, not even a form letter.

I had a look at the eBay forum (I’m not going to give them a link here just google eBay partner network forum!) and there’s been another round of bannings from around the 17th of April. I find it extremely suspicious that they ban people, close their accounts and keep their money JUST before payday! Many, many people are saying they are completely innocent of any wrong doing and I believe them as I know I am too.

There has been some speculation on the forum that eBay is getting rid of affiliates who use BANS. I have no idea if this is true but the way eBay is treating affiliates is shameful and the frustrating part is that we can’t do anything about it. Months and months of work by people is just tossed aside and they keep our hard earned money as well.

I have moved on and I advise anyone who received this email not to wait for eBay to reinstate them. It isn’t going to happen! There are other ways to make money with your websites. I have added adsense to my sites. I tried just using affiliate ads via popshops but found the convertion rate was low so I also have adsense on them I know the popular thinking is not to have 2 types of ads on a site but I found that having affiliate ads doesn’t affect the adsense click through rate for adsense and vice versa.

So if you are banned it isn’t the end of your IM carrer. It’s going to take more work but you can move on and use all the other methods of making money online that are available to you. If you haven’t already found Griz’s Make Money With Adsense have a look at it and his other sites. You’ll learn all you need to know there!

Update Your Privacy Policy

janetra — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 11:38:58 +0000

Just a quick reminder that if you have Google adsense on your site then you need to update your privacy policy by April 8th in line with Google’s use of interest based advertising and their DoubleClick DART cookie. You can find more information about Google Advertising Cookie and Privacy Policies

If you need to generate a privacy policy you can use the Privacy Policy Plugin For WordPress

Is Site Build It a Scam?

janetra — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 15:46:52 +0000

There are plenty of scams out there and if you are about to pay out a heap of money for anything on the net most of us will do some research. A good way is usually to do a search for ‘xxxxx scam’. You can usually come up with enough information to alert you straight away if the product you are about to purchase is a scam or not.

So, what happens if you do this for ‘Site Build It! a Scam’? You’ll get 46,800,000 results. Seems like a lot right? Until the last few days the results were not dominated by people giving a genuine review of the Site Build It! software but by affiliates pushing the program for their $75 cut of the profit. Purporting to be genuine reviews but all of them being sales pitches for the program. So what happened a few days ago to change this? A blogger called Lis published a post Site Build It Scam and all hell broke loose! To date there are 133 comments on that post most of them praising Site Build It and calling down all kinds of dire punishments on Lis including suing her and contacting her hosting provider.

Now I have never used Site Build It and woudn’t. In my opinion $300 per website is ridiculous when all the information and programs you need for setting up websites and making money on line are available for free. The program appears to do what it says although looking at some of the sites built with it they look very old fashioned, but that’s just my opinion. It is aimed at people with little knowledge of web site building who want an easy way to get started so it could well do just that. What is a problem is that Lis in no way deserved the nasty and threatening response to her post and is entitled to express her opinion in any way she wants without that kind of response.

There seems to be something quite out of proportion for so many people to react in such a way. Could it be that they are making more money pushing the product as affiliates than actually making money on line with their Site Build It! websites?

Now if you search for ‘Site Build it Scam’ on Google the post by Lis is on the first page, thanks to lots of friends publishing posts like this one with a backlink to Lis’s post embedded in the text. In just a few days all those links have pushed her post to page one, showing the power of backlinks and at least when people search now there is one genuine review on the first page rather than ALL fake reviews pushing the product.

As well as Lis’s post have a look at this post and video at Site Build It Review Or SBI Review What Ever! and the post by Griz at Site Build it - Don’t Buy It

And a few more related posts

SEO for Small Businesses – Buyer Beware

When ‘Site Build It’ Zombies Attack

Is Site Build It A Scam? | SBI Review

Google Adsense and Smart Pricing

janetra — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 15:48:24 +0000

If you have niche sites that are not getting much traffic it can be tempting to try to boost the traffic by stumbling, digging or adding your post or site to social network sites. However if you are monetising with Google adsense be careful. Google pays you for traffic that not only clicks on the adds but that converts. Not all the people who click on ads are going to buy of course but Google knows what proportion to expect to convert if the traffic is targeted.

That means that traffic coming to your site needs to be already looking to purchase something. You get this kind of traffic from the search engines. If someone is looking for an answer to their problems they will use a search engine to find it - they won’t use stumbleupon or blogcatalog! Stumblers and diggers are surfing, hopping from one site to the next. If they do happen to click on an ad they are very unlikely to buy anything. At least this kind of traffic is not too likely to actually click an ad. A lot of social traffic can lead to Adsense smart pricing

Quote from Googles Adsense Blog (my bolding)

The best way to ensure you benefit from AdSense is to create compelling content for interested users. This also means driving targeted traffic to your site — advertisers don’t gain as much ROI when paying for generic clicks as they do for quality clicks that come from interest in your content. Good content usually equals a good experience for user plus advertiser, which can be much more valuable than CTR. (ROI return on investment - CTR click through rate)

So Google wants targeted traffic. That means traffic from search engines that comes to your site with a purpose in mind. It is also important to have relevant content on your site to trigger relevant ads. This is easier with a niche site and you can tweak the ads appearing by making sure the relevant keywords are in your post titles and content. Use one post per page unless all your posts target the same keywords especially on the home page. Mixed posts targeting different keywords will only confuse the Google bot and lead to irrelevant ads which won’t do you any good.

How do you know if you’ve been smart priced?

All the sites in your account are affected not just the offending site and the cost per click (CPC) will go down to cents. If you see a sharp drop in CPC you could be smart priced. The good news is that if you remove ads from the problem site your CPC should return to normal in about a week or so as soon as Googlebot has reindexed your site. It may be difficult to find the offending site especially if you have more than one that is causing the problem. The CTR is an indication that the traffic is not targeted for the ads but itself is not a problem - you could have a low CTR but high conversion so use it as an indication not a proof that you may be smart priced.

Griz has lots more information at How to Get Traffic to your Website or Blog

How to Get Backlinks

janetra — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 00:17:40 +0000

It is vitally important if you want to rank well on Google that you know how to get backlinks to your site, posts and pages. Not just any backlinks but relevant backlinks. A backlink from a completely unrelated page won’t do you much good but a backlink from a highly relevant page, even if that page has a low page rank (PR), will help you rise in the SERPS. There are, of course, lots of ways to get backlinks but I’d like to describe two ways I use.

Article Marketing

To get relevant backlinks write an article and include a link to your site with your keywords as the anchor text in the resource box. I’ve been using article marketing with great success. I was using isnare but they have become so slow that I recently signed up with Article Marketer and am pleased with the service. All my articles have been distributed in, at the most, 2 working days and they also check the article for any errors in formatting for things that editors may not like.

ConnectContent

ConnectContent is run by RT Cunningham who has a blog at Untwisted Vortex. This is a great service! It costs just $12 a month. The idea is to form a network of people who can exchange relevant links in posts and pages. You can only get as many links as you give (weighted for PR). It works best if you have a wide range of different types of sites as you can’t be guranteed that there will be someone with a site relevant to yours and you may not get links for all your sites. If you just have one or two sites it won’t work very well and you should probably wait until you have more sites but if you want to know how to get back links check it out!.

Griz’s New Site - Make Money with Adsense

janetra — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 20:17:34 +0000

As I can no longer use eBay to make money I have been concentrating on using adsense. I’ve put adsense on the eBay sites and I’m making between $900 and $1000 a month from these. However I did not optimize these ads so the CPC (cost per click) I am getting on some of the sites is very low. The reason for this post is to introduce a new site by Griz Make Money with Adsense which has so much useful information that you really don’t need to go anywhere else to learn how to make money online. Griz is an advocate of using free platforms such as Blogger and in making the blogs ugly so that people take one look, think this can’t be very good, and back out, often enough by clicking on the ads to make some money.

Have a look at his site, you will learn a lot as Griz, not only knows what he is talking about but has the knack of writing in a very clear way. Make sure you read the comments, especially Griz’s answers as there is so much information in these.

I have learned so much from this site and his other site How to Make Money Online for Beginners that I want to share this with you all.

How I Use Keyword Sniping

janetra — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 12:58:02 +0000

I’ve been meaning to post some info on keyword sniping for some time so my apologies for taking a while to do this.

There are a lot of things you need to know about other aspects of internet marketing in addition to the keyword sniping (KS) technique and I can’t address everything in one post so I’ll concentrate on the techniques I use and skip over some of the other stuff.

Choose Your Niche

Choose your niche - this is vital to the success of KS. Then choose at least 2 good keywords. For keyword research I use Google Adwords Keyword Tool. If you intend to make money from Google Adsense then click on the show/hide columns and choose Show Estimated Avg. CPC You will need to pick keywords with a reasonable high CPC. If you are new to IM choose keywords that have more than 5,000 searches a month and less than 30,000 competing sites.

Set Up Your Site

The whole point of keyword sniping is that your whole site is optimised for 1 or 2 keywords. The keywords should to be in the domain name, and must be in the title, the description and in the content on the home page. You will need to add at least 10 pages of good content to the site all about your keywords. If you’re using WordPress you can remove the dates from the posts to make them all look like pages rather than posts. On each of the pages make a link with your keyword as the anchor back to the homepage. Pages should be at least 300 words long.

Some Points about the Site Structure

You need the title tag on every page. If you are using WordPress you can use the All-In-One SEO Pack plugin it do this.
A link in the footer to point to your homepage using the keywords as anchor text.
On the home page keywords should be included about seven times. This will be okay if you have a least 1000 words of text so you could set your home page to have four posts appearing all with your keywords in them.

Back Links to Your Site

Most importantly you need to get links to your site using your keywords. Vary the anchor text, don’t have all of the anchor text exactly the same. Use your keywords that mix them up a bit with different words.
You need to get links that are on relevant pages. The best way to do this is to submit articles you have written yourself. I’ve been using Article Marketer to submit articles recently. Although it is a paid service I’m finding that it is much faster than ISnare which I was using and they also look at your article and check that they are formatted correctly for the article directories. Most articles have been approved and submitted within 1 working day. ISnare lately has been taking more than 2 weeks. For some of the sites I have made I only needed 2 articles distributed to a range of article directories to rank high in SERPS. Of course it depends on the competition so you will need to add more if you don’t get the ranking.

How Long Does it Take?

It won’t hapopen overnight so don’t despair! It took a minimum of two months to begin to rank well and some sites took much longer. Submit another article if you don’t see results within about 2 months.

Banned from eBay Partner Network

janetra — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 17:58:37 +0000

On Dec 14th I received an email part of which is below:

“During a recent review, we found that your account is related to a previously banned account. Your account has been terminated and 100% of your pending commissions will be reversed.”

I have never has another account with EBPN and certainly have not been banned for any reason. I had over $2000 in that account that I earned honestly and with a lot of hard work. My earnings had really started to increase and I had high quality traffic for every period.

For those who don’t know eBay gives you a quality score based on ‘who knows what parameters’ and has dumped affiliates in the past for sending too low quality traffic.

I am not the only one who has received this email and all say that they do not have any other accounts. Today looking at eBay’s forum I see another round of bannings for the same spurious reason. I find it very suspicious that people are being dumped just before pay day. See the thread “your account is related to a previously banned account”

In the email it said “If you believe you have been linked to a banned account in error, please reply to eBayPartnerNetwork-Quality@ebay.com with your account information and a detailed description of how you are driving traffic to the eBay site. ”
Despite 4 emails to this address giving them the details they asked for I have had NO reply. Not even a form letter to say they have received them. This is how they treat honest, hard working affiliates that have been sending them, traffic for over a year?
I can no longer recommend either using BANS or being an affiliate of eBay as there is just too much likelihood of perfectly honest, hardworking affiliates being dumped and losing hard earned money through no fault of theirs.