Identifying Your RSS Ninjas

In most cases, finding your Ninja shadows can pretty easy! You can just head over to Google and do a search for some of the content you have recently written about. Once you search G, just hit the more options link near the top and narrow it to blog searches in the past week.

In most cases, you will find related posts listed right around the same time as your own…

Common Characteristics of Your Shadow Ninja’s

I know personally of a few Ninjas that lurk in the shadow of the NSB site. The following traits have held true for both and may be true of your own RSS Ninjas.

1. They NEVER post comments on your Site or join into discussions!
2. They NEVER link to your work, often claiming it as their own!
3. They Spring into action when they Spot a Great Idea on your site!
4. They Contradict themselves on their own sites, sometimes within just days of each post!
5. They Tend to Feed People Bad Information when they Shoot from their Own Hip!
6. They are VERY Predictable and Easily Manipulated, without Ever Knowing it! :-)

Dealing With Your Own RSS Ninjas

This is probably the hardest part of having an RSS Ninja or two in your shadows. I mean, you really don’t want to stir the pot and discredit them in public… but at the same time, you feel obligated to your own readers to let them know about things, just so they don’t fall into the Ninjas trap!

If you DO decide to call out one of your own RSS Ninjas - make sure you have your game in full court press mode! Once you make that call, its up to you to have the proof that they are full of shit, not the other way around!

You will be surprised (Maybe even shocked!) at what you can learn about people, just by having a list of the domains they own, and looking at the content or niche within each!

How Do You Deal with Your RSS Ninjas?

Hmmm - I wonder if one of my own RSS Ninjas will reveal themselves by commenting? Nahh…

Post from: The Niche Store Builder

Are You Afraid of Shadows? Boo!

What is a CRU or an ACRU?

If you are like myself, you see quite a few references to both CRU and ACRU in your ePN dashboard every month. The key difference between the two are that one of them bought something, and the other just bid on something, but did not win.

CRU - Confirmed Registered User, is a person you referred through your affiliate link who bid on an item, but did not win the item. The good news, is that if the person bids on another item within the first 30 days, you should still receive compensation as an ACRU (Waiting on confirmation, as there is some gray area)

ACRU - Active Confirmed Registered User. This is a person you referred through one of your ePN links that not only confirmed their registration, they completed a money exchanging transaction within the first 30 days.

Of course all of this assumes that they do not click through another affiliate link during the 30 day process, or the credit goes to the most current affiliate cookie.

Understanding ACRU Quality

One of the biggest hurdles we must face as an affiliate in ePN is accepting that we DO actually control the quality of our visitors! eBay has said they want to reward higher quality traffic from affiliates with higher payouts per ACRU. The amount you can earn ranges between $1 - $50 per ACRU.

ACRU Quality is not based on individual campaigns, but instead, it is a rating of your entire ePN account and all of the campaigns and visitors you send through the system. In other words - if you have 10 campaigns and 5 are very good but the other 5 are very poor, your entire account will suffer the consequences of the poor performers, with a reduced quality score.

The focus of increasing your quality score actually has nothing at all to do with eBay itself, its all about your OWN website and the level of repeat interation you build with the visitors you cater to.

Sending 100 clicks to eBay through your affiliate ID is ALOT more valuable, if you continually send repeat visitors. Which do you think is more valuable?

1. 100 unique click visitors - coming from your site..
2. 100 unique clicks from 10 visitors, repeatedly coming from your site over time.

Its safe to assume you are related to the visitors you send to eBay. In other words, “This Visitor” = “Your Customer” and is related to your campid. If you can find a way to get that same visitor to buy products on eBay from your same campid, over and over, your quality will naturally increase!

5 Ways to Make Your Site Sticky & Increase ACRU Quality

It is too easy for us to sit back and say that we have little to no control over the amount of engagement or quality of our referred site traffic, when in fact, we have 100% control of it!

Sending repeat traffic to eBay is probably the easiest way to increase your ACRU quality! It shows that YOU are engaging your site traffic, versus relying on eBay to do it for you. The list below represents 5 relatively simple things you can do to encourage repeat traffic on YOUR site.

1 - Setup a User Discussion Forum!

By adding a forum to your site, people will naturally revisit and become involved in discussions, based around your website topic. It also gives you the added luxury of having more to write about on your blog or site pages, that will attract new users to the site.

2 - Provide a Steady Stream of Fresh, Relative Content!

Keeping your sites’ content fresh not only increases your search relevance, it gives users a reason to bookmark your site and come back often! Visitors will quickly recognize a stale website and see no value in bookmarking the page to come back.

3 - Start a Weekly eMail Newsletter or Publish an RSS Feed

With the advent of WordPress and services like Feedburner, every website should have a newsletter! By encouraging your visitors to subscribe and receive fresh content updates, you have immediate access to repeat visitors!

Often times, you can promote signups by offering a free service to your visitors in exchange for signing up to receive updates. This can be anything from a free eBook to free access to a members only area of your site. Only you know your visitors and what may appeal to them.

4 - Make it Super-Simple to Bookmark or Subscribe!

While a simple bookmark may not be as rewarding as an email or RSS subscriber, you want to provide every possible option you can employ to encourage your visitors to revisit, and make it as easy as possible for them to do so!

As a matter of fact, while you are here, I encourage you to subscribe to my own site updates by Email or RSS feed, where I publish content that helps you succeed in affiliate marketing and Niche focused website building.

5 - Become a Solution Guide Versus a Link Clerk

Back in my day of retail store management, I held weekly training sessions with the sales team and we focused on being a Solutions Provider, versus simply clerking the items we sold in our stores. There is a HUGE difference! We found that when we touched every person who came in, our sales conversions increased dramatically, and we measured that through a shopper-trak device that counted every walk-in.

As a Solutions Provider, you are there to guide your visitors through the selling process from start to finish. Your content asks and answers the questions, then  presents them with a final solution to their needs. In other words, you interact in a content environment with your visitors!

As a Link Clerk - the visitor comes in looking for XYZ product, you point them to it, and you are done. This method almost assures you that your conversion rate will decrease, as the shoppers are left to themselves to do research and decide what to buy.

Bottom Line

eBay has developed a way to make it very rewarding for publishers who build communities and then expose their communities to products for sale in the eBay marketplace. They have repeatedly said they want quality just as much as quantity, and by engaging your own visitors with your own content, you will be rewarded at the highest levels.

eBay does not really want affiliates referring shoppers to their system - they want well informed repeat buyers who have already done their research, made their decision, and preferably… are being guided into the eBay marketplace by their Trusted Shopping Guide, You!

What Other Ways Do Encourage Repeat Traffic to Your Site?

Post from: The Niche Store Builder

5 Ways to Make Your Site Sticky and Increase Your ePN ACRU Quality

The Google Search Wonder Wheel!

If you have been around search for awhile, you may or may not have visited a site that was very useful for finding related terms, The Keyword Map, or KWMap. It was only a matter of time before Google, with all its infinite amounts of data, delivered a similar product!

The way the Wonder Wheel works is simple… when you search for something, anything, on Google, just click on the “Show Options” link right beneath the search box, then scroll down to the Wonder Wheel and click on it. You will be presented with what I assume is a volume / semantic index of related terms! The more you click… the bigger your wheels continue to grow!

Use it for IDEAS - not building keyword lists or research… ideas!

Lets Give this a Try!

I am going to pull a random product off my head… lets use “Refrigerators” (opens in new window). As you can see… the minute I enter refrigerators into the search box and give that sucker a spin, I am presented with several topical options! (Highlighted in red)

Within the first spin, I have 4 topics to write about, and several ways to spring them into additional posts…

1. Common Problems with Refrigerators (Each problem is a new post of its own)
2. Average Counter Depth for Different Refrigerators (What color appliances go best with XXXX Color countertops)
3. What is the Perfect Refrigerator Temperature (Leading to freezer temps, gauges, dangers of the wrong temps, etc)
4. Refrigerator Review Process (Explain HOW you will review the items)

Taking it further, each of these has a bevy of different topics, within each one! So - if I pick one of those topics, lets say, refrigerator reviews…. and spin that sucker again, I get another list of more tightly focused topics to pull ideas from!

Don’t Make This Hard On Yourself - KISS!

Before someone chimes in and says… what about keyword efficiency, volume, competition, etc… just keep it simple! You may hear this from alot more over the next few months, but forget about all that and simply write! By dealing with one thing at a time, you will only increase the opportunity for success with your website!

The MORE Info you have on your site - the MORE people you will appeal to!

At this point, we are NOT selling to people, we are simply preselling them with volumes of USEFUL information, that others will like to link to! As we become more of an authority on the topic, then you can start selling them! I don’t care who the hell you are… you could have the best damn pitch in the world when it comes to sales, but if you have nobody to pitch to, you will strike out every time!

Of course, you want to form your posts correctly and use good titles, proper formatting with your heading tags, and provide a blaring answer to the hypothetical questions your readers may want to know!

Don’t Kill Yourself With Analysis!

If you were dying from dehydration and had only 30 minutes to get yourself some water… Once you found it, would you spend 10 minutes checking the temp of the water to make sure it was cold enough? Would you spend 10 minutes testing it for chlorine content? No… you would drink it!

The same holds true for your website… if you decide to write a post about XYZ - then just write it! Don’t spend 2 hours reviewing keyword demand… or looking for the best possible way to title your post, just write it! In the time you spend overanalyzing the data, you could have written 5 posts!

I have talked to many people building their own sites and the most common mistake among everyone (including myself at times) is over-analysis! Be human… write like a human… make mistakes like a human. As you learn new things over the course of the years it will take to perfect your skills, you can always click the edit button and make changes to your existing content.

Post from: The Niche Store Builder

Ideas for Post Content are Just a Spin Away!

I have to be honest - When I got the first email from them the other day, I ran out and regged a new domain to promote the product… and even tonight, as I got the second email, I jumped over and grabbed a domain they used as an example in the email. (Good domain name BTW)

As I sit here and write this post.. I’m asking myself what several of you may be asking…

What took you so Long?

More to come on this…

Post from: The Niche Store Builder

Build a Niche Guide from the BANS Crew

From the countdown timers, to date displays, to limited to the next 5 buyers, while these statements may turn off a few buyers, they work… and they work well!

So - Why not apply them to an affiliate site that features a small selection of eBay listings? I mean… if the buy it now attitude works for other marketing practices, it should do the same with auction listings right? Take a look at my test results and you will see!

Conversions Increased 500% Overnight!

Many of you will recall that Kim found her niche with her new Coupon Site. So much so, that she posts several times a day and has a gone from zero to +200 subscribed readers in less than 45 days! That’s another post…This post is about her Coupon Auctions page, and how a simple formatting change, resulted in a 500% conversion increase, overnight!

When we added the Coupon Auction page to her site at the end of last month it was a simple phpbay call, that displayed ANY item in the eBay system, that was triggered with the word coupon in the title. As you can imagine… there were alot of listings being returned.

We let it run like that through mid month, not really paying it much attention. As I watched the referral stats in my ePN account, I noticed that people were definitely coming through and bidding, but it was nowhere near the level I thought it should be… I mean, we had 36 coupon auction  listings on the page, and there should have been a bit more traction since everyone on the site came to it, looking for coupon deals.

One Simple Change Made ALL The Difference!

I know what you’re thinking… nothing is that easy! But… it was!

Instead of showing ALL coupon auctions, I pulled out the shortcode for phpbay and switched over to the longer code, the one on the last page of the phpbay manual, that allows you to define almost every variable of the rss call, and display very specific results on your page.

Original Call to Listings: “Show 36 items, with the word coupon in the title”

Changed Call: “Show 36 items, ALL must have at least 1 bid, sort them by the ones ending soonest!”

In effect - I have used the phpbay code itself, to put in a “Call to Action” with the site visitors! When they visit the page now, they are presented with a group of items that:

1. Are Popular (Have bids and WILL sell)
2. Time is an Issue (Ending within minutes, to only a few hours)
3. If they Don’t Act Now - they may not have another chance!

This simple change resulted in more than 500% increase in click/BID ratio, overnight! While this may not work in every niche… it was a simple change on hers that had a huge impact!

How do you increase conversions?

Post from: The Niche Store Builder

Increase Conversions by Applying a Sense of Urgency!