It's Beginning To Look Alot Like Tax Time

Christmas is almost here and a week after the end of 2010. Ebay Partner Network wants to remind you to double check the accuracy of Your W9 Information for 1099-Tax Forms by December 31st to ensure you get your 1099-MISC form. Of course you will only get a 1099 if you are a United States citizen or legal resident and you had $600 reportable tax activity for the year 2010. Hopefully you are over qualified for both of these criteria. While you are at it, I would suggest you go through ALL of your affiliate accounts to make sure that you have the correct W9 info filed with them as well. It is just better to be safe than sorry. Hopefully one day I can live to see a fair flat tax, but that is a post for another day. I hope your holiday season is going as good as mine is. Keep your head up and keep working. The rewards are tremendous.

EPN Announces Custom Banner Improvements

You may or may not be aware of it, but EPN (eBay Partner Network) has announced in a new blog post that they have changed the way Custom Banner handles keyword inputs. According to the post, you are now able to use a large variety of operators to define your keyword input in greater detail. This helps to bring the custom banner more into line with keyword searching functionality on the eBay site. You can able to enter these operators and queries directly into the search box in the Custom Banner interface starting now. They are suggesting that encode any keyword query you place directly into the Custom Banner code instead of the interface and recommend you to do this by using the tool located here. Make sure to click the images to see what they are talking about. I plan on putting one of these to use tonight.

What’s Hot In Affiliate Marketing With JJ McCarthy Of EPN

The latest video episode of Chatting with eBay Partner Network is up now and I must admit they are getting better at these then when they first started. In the latest episide, JJ McCarthy discusses what’s hot in affiliate marketing and shares examples of leading content curators. Depending where you are at in this business, you may or may not learn something here.

Chatting with EPN: Episode 9 from eBay Partner Network TV on Vimeo.

EBay Partner Network Head JJ McCarthy Discusses Quality Click Pricing

Happy Friday everyone, JJ McCarthy of eBay Partner Network recently spoke with Scott Parent of MediaTrust about the success of Quality Click Pricing. JJ also shares eBay Partner Network’s internal realignment and focuses for the upcoming year. Check out the video below and draw your own conclusions.

New EPN eBay Partner Network Features Available Soon

According to the most recent blog post on the EPN blog. eBay Partner Network will be rolling out new features this coming Monday. These new features will include some better custom banner capabilities including the ability to filter for Free Shipping and Top-Rated Seller listings. In addition, a multiple keyword and category search will be rolled so you can search across several keywords and eBay categories, or select the “Use Popular Search” option instead. A new EPC Download Report is scheduled as well. Make sure to put these through the rigors before implementing across the board as you never know what bugs may be involved. Move slowly with these new additions. One thing they have yet to implement is a domain white list much like Google Adsense uses. I fill this will protect both EPN as well as the affiliate, but I do not see or hear anything like that coming. EPN does seem to be making a little better strides as of late, but will have to improve even further to help their transparency. I still love and use them as they are a huge earner for me, but I also temper where, when and how I use them a little more. They continue to be left behind by Amazon and others as far as both implementation and transparency.

Ebay Partner Network EPN Videos Chatting With Chad Wehrmaker

I doubt many of you have caught this, in fact I picked it up on Twitter a bit ago. It seems Ebay Partner Network (EPN) is starting a new series of vidcasts videos that they will be releasing over the next few weeks, to give you a chance to get to know the eBay Partner Network. This first of the series features a chat with Chad Wehrmaker, the new head of the global eBay Partner Network. Part 1 was released 8 days ago it seems and part 2 about 20 hours ago or so. The main Vimeo Ebay Partner Network page is here. I am embedding both videos as well in this post for you to watch as well.

Chatting with EPN: Episode 1 from eBay Partner Network TV on Vimeo.

Chatting with EPN: Episode 2 from eBay Partner Network TV on Vimeo.

301 Redirects Or Termination By EPN

Not sure if everyone caught the blog post by EPN this morning, but by June 8th, 2010 you better have a fix in that passes both a referrer and a 301 redirect or you risk being banned by EPN. I posted about this briefly the other day from a referrer standpoint and if you are using BANS as a platform, Sonjay has a fix for this you can download here and read about in this thread here.

If you are using PHPBay, Wade has already updated his Wordpress plugin and I highly suggest you download his latest version as well. If you are using any other plugin or platform, I highly suggest getting with the developer to make sure you get a fix in place soon.

Below is the post:

Hi all,

We have noticed recently that the use of temporary redirects (302 redirects) instead of 301 redirects can result in activity that is not compliant with our terms & conditions. We know that often this is unintentional, so we have worked together with a few of our affiliates to identify and prevent the problem. Here is an example to illustrate what can happen:

Many of our affiliates use a redirection page to help collect statistics on their click through to eBay. In these cases, when a user clicks on a link on the affiliate site, they are taken to a URL (redirection page) that logs the click through and then redirects them to an eBay page by using a 302 HTTP return code. The search engine crawler indexes the content it finds at the end of the temporary redirect (the eBay page) to the redirection URL. Therefore, when a user searches for content from the eBay page, the search engine results will contain matches to the redirection URL that link directly to eBay. This type of redirection is not compliant with our terms and conditions. A solution to this problem is to use permanent redirects, i.e. 301 return codes instead of 302. This will ensure that all the content on the destination page after the redirect is indexed to that page only.

If you are currently using a 302 redirect in a method similar to the one described above, please inform us by emailing CS and make the appropriate changes immediately. From June 8th 2010, we will treat this issue as an intentional breach of our terms and conditions and any affiliate exhibiting this behavior will be expired.

The eBay Partner Network team

EPN, BANS, Referrers & You

My fellow BANS moderator Sonjay, has put together an excellent post on explaining what referrers are and their relationship to EPN and how BANS handles or does not handle them. Sonjay has been gracious enough to include a fix as well. She does a great job in explaining the whole situation and I highly suggest you read it even if you have moved on from BANS. EPN doesn't want affiliates to send traffic to their site without a referrer. They want to ensure the surfer is coming from a site you own. Great job by Sonjay on this and I encourage you to ask questions in the thread should you need any clarification.

EPN Rolling Out New Features To Interface

In case you missed the latest news from EPN (eBay Partner Network), they are adding some things to their interface and sent out the announcement below along with a link to the latest blog post. The one thing they have yet to do or add is a great white list or approved website function. I think this would help protect existing EPN partners along with help EPN fight more fraud. The white list would work similar to the way Google Adsense has their approved site list. It doesn't sound too difficult to implement, but perhaps another day. Maybe before 2012 when the world is scheduled to end. Relax folks, that is a joke. Happy Friday everyone, the EPN email copy is below:

As part of our continuing investments in the eBay Partner Network platform, we will be rolling out new features to the eBay Partner Network (ePN) interface on March 30th. This release incorporates several improvements requested by a number of you, including updates to the dashboard, the addition of a new landing page report, a new way to handle archived campaigns, and an overhaul to the Creatives Generator to make it easier to use.

Please see this blog post for detailed information about the new functionality and we recommend that you pay particular attention to the section on "Dashboard Updates" and "Deactivating Campaigns", as when you log in you will see a few changes to the dashboard and the way we handle your archived campaigns.

We continue to listen to your suggestions and strive to offer advanced tools to better assist your marketing needs. Thank you for your continued partnership.

The eBay Partner Network Team

March Ebay Category Changes Forthcoming

That's right, more category changes for eBay. The announcement of the category changes for the month of March can be found here. Hopefully you are not building by category anymore, but by search terms only. You will drive yourself crazy trying to update the category database in BANS, that is for sure. Build by the category 2 method instead and hopefully no category at all if using PHPBay. They claim these changes will be live in late March. We all know that those words mean nothing, you need to act as if they happened yesterday.

Confusion With Twitter & EPN

I had a very confused BANS user contact me in regards to using Twitter as a means of promoting their niche and BANS site. They were under the impression that using Twitter will get you canned from EPN (ebay Partner Network). Let me clarify a few things as told to me by my EPN account manager a while ago. You can use Twitter to promote links to YOUR sites, you can not use Twitter to post links to products on eBay that include your affiliate code. Yes, yes, I know. You see tons of people on Twitter promoting links that include their affiliate code and go straight to ebay. I see them as well. All I can say is the end is near for them. Many likely are already terminated as most are automated feeds set to post into the users Twitter account. Twitter is full of those. The same goes with any site you do not own like Blogger or a free Wordpress.com hosted blog. If the domain name is not registered to you, you can't post Ebay products on it. The exception right now is Squidoo and Hubpages at last check, but you must already have an approved EPN account to use these. You should read up on both of these sites rules and regulations first before using though.

Critical Update For PhpBay Pro

Unless you missed it, Wade has an update ready for PHPBay to accommodate the new link structure for Ebay EPN affiliate links. Wade does a fantastic job support wise on ALL of his Wordpress plugins and if you have not yet purchased PHPBay or PHPZon, you really ought to consider it. They really are fantastic plugins that will make your money back in no time.

Below is the email Wade sent out.

Yesterday morning, EPN made a sudden announcement regarding a new link structure for Ebay affiliate links. As you can see, the information was vague at best and lacking in any details.

A group of phpBay Pro forum members and myself spent the day researching, and early this morning, came up with a fix to the new linking structure for phpBay Pro users.

The good news is, only the auction.php file is affected, so you will only need to replace this file on your sites (if using any 3.x version).

There are two ways you can obtain the new auction.php file:

1) Login to your store account and download the latest .zip file(s) for phpBay Pro for Wordpress and/or phpBay Pro API. This email is being sent from the phpBay Pro store to all phpBay Pro customers.

2) Login to the support forums using your forum account and visit the Critical Update thread.

This update, the auction.php, affects both the Wordpress and API versions of phpBay Pro. You will need to update your sites with this new auction.php in order for your affilite links/clicks to track properly with EPN.

This update nor the EPN changes affects phpBay Lite or versions of phpBay Pro prior to 3.x. If you are using those versions, there are no changes needed.

I do apologize for the inconvenience. This was a sudden and unexpected announcement from EPN with virtually no information, that threw us all into overtime mode to come up with a quick fix.

Kind regards,

Wade

New Ebay Category Changes Are Now Live

If you are running ANY platform that uses eBay Partner Network, you need to check all of your sites this morning. eBay has made live several new category changes and yopu were likely affected by these numerous changes. Here is a page that list the category changes. Also, Sonjay from the BANS forum has a tool up to let you know what is in what category as well. These category changes have affected BANS as well as PHPBay, so do regardless of whatever platform or plugin you are using to show listings, you should probably sift through ever page on every site to be on the safe side.

BANS Cloaking Redirect Fix

Tao has come up with a re-direct fix for US stores for BANS since a few feed parameters changed. You will want to edit both the index.php file and the FrontControl.php file in BANS for this fix to work correctly.

Make sure you back up both these files before making any changes. You can open these up in notepad, but I highly suggest using a code editor like PSPad, I think it is still free and very easy to use. The FrontControl.php file is in the cont folder of your install while the index.php is likely in the root directory unless you installed BANS in a sub directory.

Open both files and scan for this block of code below:

if(($siteType == "US") && ($cloak == "1")){
$front->sid = str_replace("%2B", "+", $front->sid);
$link[$counter] = str_replace("http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?", "".URL_PATH."/item/", $link[$counter]);
$link[$counter] = str_replace("&mpre=http%3A%2F%2Fcgi.ebay.com%2F", "", $link[$counter]);
$link[$counter] = str_replace("QQcmdZViewItemQQssPageNameZRSS%3AB%3ASRCH%3AUS%3A101", "", $link[$counter]);
$link[$counter] = str_replace("campid=".CJID."", "", $link[$counter]);
$link[$counter] = str_replace("&customid=".$front->sid."", "", $link[$counter]);
$link[$counter] = str_replace("&toolid=10005", "", $link[$counter]);
}

Replace that code with this block of code:

if(($siteType == "US") && ($cloak == "1")){
$itempos = strpos($link[$counter],"item=");
$cloakeditem = substr($link[$counter],$itempos+5,12);
$cloakedtitle = preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z0-9\s]/", "", $title[$counter]);
$link[$counter] = URL_PATH.'/item/'.str_replace(" ","-",$cloakedtitle)."_W0QQitemZ".$cloakeditem;
}

Save both files back to your hard drive and FTP them back to their appropriate places. You may be prompted to over write the existing files, just say Yes.

Log into your BANS admin and go to settings. Check the cloak option in box 4 and hit save. Reload your BANS site home page and check that an eBay listing URL is indeed cloaked and click it to make sure it redirects properly to the matching listing on eBay.

EPN RSS Feed Link Structure Change

I promised to update my findings from yesterdays post. Casey has responded on the EPN forum about the changes to the feed structure. Once again EPN has dropped the ball on this as all developers I have talked to did not see this coming. If you plan on cloaking BANS links, you better hold off still. I also doubt you will see a fix provided by A&K on this as well. The fix will likely come from a forum member like Sonjay or Tao. The good news if you own PHPBay, is that Wade is on the case and has a call set up in the coming days with EPN to make sure PHPBay is handling things right. As of right now it appears PHPBay is handling the changes fine and the links are tracking properly. As much as I love BANS and supported it in the past, you need to take my advice from previous post on learning Wordpress and work towards switching BANS sites over to Wordpress and PHPBay. Unless you are well versed in PHP and coding, you are holding a gun to your mouth in a Russian Roulette type scenario. A&K have made it clear they are no longer tied to the development of BANS, so you will be at the mercy of others soon. Remember my earlier statement. BANS works until it no longer works. It is getting closer and closer to not working.

Below is the post from Casey:

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

Check Your BANS Sites That Cloak URLs

This is a public service announcement if you are using BANS and have set the Cloak Affiliate Links in box #4. Your links may not be redirecting correctly and you surfers may be going to a "Page Not Responding" on eBay. I suggest you set these links to not cloaking and double check that your links are going through to eBay correctly. You can see an example of the fail on the Game Improvement Irons site. I am not sure what is causing this problem, but EPN may have changed its feeds in one way or another. If I hear anything, I will update you.

Social Media Strategy

Most of the blog post on EPN really do not catch my eye, but they did address social media today in their latest post. Albeit not much new, I did pick up the Twitter Party link which is an interesting concept. I will delve deeper into it after the holidays, but have bookmarked it for now. I will be posting more about social media myself in the new year as it is a must in my opinion. I have tons of success with it myself and only have scratched the surface in regards to other things I have planned in 2010. I suggest you really get your own social media strategy together and get it implemented sooner than later.

Pepperjam Ending Ebay Program

Just got the email from Mandy Foley at Pepperjam that is announcing that Pepperjam will be pausing their eBay program due to the new QCP structure. I highly suggest converting your sites back over to EPN as soon as possible. Below is the email.

I wanted to let you know the eBay program on Pepperjam Network will be paused as of October 1, 2009. eBay has decided to move forward with Quality Click Pricing, a new payout structure designed to further reward the affiliates who drive incremental transactions on eBay and who send valued buyers to their sites. At this time, Pepperjam Network can not support the CPC model. Since you are a valued eBay affiliate through Pepperjam Network, eBay would like the opportunity to work with you directly through their in house affiliate program, EPN. If you are not an affiliate of the EPN program, click here. Please include in your description that you are an active affiliate promoting eBay through PJN. Also, to help expedite this process, please email me the email address you used to sign up. I will pass this on to eBay.

Surfer Intent Plays A Much Bigger Role In EPN

Sure kind of an obvious statement the deeper we all get into the new EPN QPC model. Before, we would just target the keyword phrases, try to rank and get our fair share of organic traffic and hope they ate the cookie. Now for straight BANS or primarily monetized EPN models, we need to pay more about the intent of the surfer.

Intent of the surfer is so vast and wide from niche to niche. To put one solid formula or stereo type on a surfer is impossible. For instance, a keyword phrase for "Joe Blow XYZ Review" might produce a surfer that is primarily intent on buying Joe Blow XYZ's. However in another niche "John Rubbles ABC Review" keyword phrase will produce surfers that are mostly tire kickers. If you have been around niche store building a while and have multiple sites, you have surely seen this or something close to the example.

Figuring out surfer intent is hard with any affiliate program, let alone EPN. The only data we can rely on is our server stats and any analytics programs like the Googles. You also have the EPN transaction reports that tell you click times and the items that sold. You really have to marry all of them together to know what keyword phrases or producing the surfers with buying intents. It ain't easy, I will tell you that. Most of my weeks now, I am playing with data. Not that I wasn't before, it is just more important to me now with the new EPN QPC structure. Not only that, it will make me a better marketer.

Lets face it, we all would like 9 out of 10 organic surfers to be intent on buying, that just is not going to happen, but the closer we can get to 9 out of 10, the more success we will have. Even if the magic number is one out of 10. It certainly will vary based on the organic traffic and the intent of the surfer.

If you are looking for a straight answer in this post, I hate to disappoint you. I do not have it, but the answer does lie in your stats or un-attacked keyword phrases and understanding/researching more about the niche. Sure it is like looking for a needle in a haystack, but if you never start digging through the hay, you have absolutely no chance at finding the needle. Surfer intent is something we constantly now need to pay attention to. As I mentioned before, it not only will help you with EPN, but will make you a better performer in other affiliate programs as well.

I would be remiss if I did not take time out on September 11th to say thank you to everyone that serves this country in the military and beyond. I will never forget that September day and the sacrifices you fine people make or have made for my country. Thank you!

Notes From The Tuesday September 1st EPN Webinar On QCP

Steve Hartman and Will Martin-Gill hosted the second webinar related to the EPN (eBay Partner Network) new QCP (Quality Click Pricing) Pay out structure for the affiliate program. While we really did not learn anything really new a few things were clarified so below are a few of the notes I took in case you missed it.

Questions to ask your sites:

1. Does my website provide a good, clean experience which could lead people to be interseted in making a purchase?

2. Is the website that I am putting ebay advertising on a good fit for eBay?

Below are some other items I notated:

It was mentioned that with the small range of dates thus far, you might not be seeing the long range value reflected into your ECP (earnings per click). Give it a while and a larger range of dates to make a complete analysis. Short and long range value are important to the EPC.

No rash decisions will be made in terminating affiliates with a low EPC. Early on it will be more on a case by case basis.

Impression pixels are not manditory, but should be considered in the future to provide better tracking.

The same metrics will still be made available in the transaction downloads.

BINS (buy it now items) and auctions are weighted differently in the QCP EPC.

EPN is still ramping up bot filtering and looking for new bots all the time.

The range of EPC for better affilites is between .07 & .21 cents.

Some new blog post mentioned:

Customer Testimonial - Harmjan Heeling

Beginner’s Guide to Germany

In closing, I think a better date range will give a better look statiscally of what your true EPC really is as the number could go higher if the value of the surfer fits what EPN is looking for. I highly suggest patying attention to the EPN forum and blogs on a daily basis to see more specific questions and answers.

All in all it remains you should be targeting your traffic with unique quality content and engaging them to look at eBay to buy the items you are focusing on. Stay upfront of where you are sending the surfer. The more targeted and engaged, the better chance you have at increasing your EPC.