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July 1, 2009
There has been alot of debate on the ePN Forum about the eBay ACRU system and how its just too hard for affiliates to control the level of engagement from their visitors. This post is my take and understanding of the ACRU system, as well as a few ways you can achieve higher quality scores!
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
June 30, 2009
Last week I was asked… “Where do you find inspiration or sources for new Posts?” The truth is… if you have to search too hard to find an idea for your post content, you may be targeting the wrong niche market! Now, with that out of the way… lets take a look at one of the hidden gems buried in Google Search, that you rarely hear about…
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!
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…
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!
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!
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.
June 29, 2009
You have probably heard of the new learning product soon to be released from Adam and Kelvin, the developers of the very popular Build a Niche Store software. Today, we learned that within the next week, we will all be able to read exactly how Adam and Kelvin have built their own Niche Empire with BANS and other content systems!
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…
More to come on this…
June 29, 2009
If you have ever had the pleasure of landing on a hard sales page, you know that the people who wrote it will always make an offer you simply can’t refuse… As Long As You Buy It Now!
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!
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.
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:
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!
June 20, 2009
A friend of my oldest son Mark sent me an email ealier this week, asking what kind of tips I could provide for getting accepted into the eBay Partner Network Affiliate Program, commonly referred to the ePN.
As we all know, eBay has taken a different approach to its relationship with affiliates over the past year, and instead of simply approving every new member that comes along, they truly want to focus on quality versus quantity, when they look at the website of those applying.
I thought it was a good post topic, since I have heard the same question repeated at the ePN forums many times. Incidentally, if you browse the forums, you can find me as epn_builder.
Registering a new domain and building a simple website does not constitute a good partner! eBay wants to see that you are established and already engaging your visitors with quality content! The products being sold on eBay should simply compliment your content!
Allowing your site to grow readers and gain authority for a few months will go very far when you apply!
With the integration of Build a Niche Store and plugins like phpBay, it’s very easy to build a clone of eBay. This is NOT what ePN (or search engines) want to see when they visit a prospective partner site! Your site should be a good resource for visitors in your niche topic and again, the eBay items should simply compliment your site, not make it!
eBay listings should be just like Salt and pepper on your meal! Sprinkle just enough here and there to compliment the flavor of your food!
eBay did not spend money and time creating the terms of being a partner for nothing! More importantly, they do not ask first - shoot later! If you agree to the terms and then violate them, they WILL shut off your account! The best way to avoid this is by understanding your part of the agreement.
Once you are confident you know the rules of the game, make sure your website is in compliance.
As you complete your eBay Affiliate network application, there is an area for comments about your website. Tell them a GREAT story about your site and WHY they may WANT to advertise on your website! If you don’t have a good story to tell, don’t apply yet!
Your website is a billboard and eBay is just another prospective advertiser! You should share your website traffic stats, subscriber metrics, target visitors and any other information you may share with anyone else looking to advertise on your billboard!
A good story to Steve or Casey may be something like:
“Thank you for the opportunity to be a part of the eBay Partner network. My “site topic” website has been established in its niche for more than 3 months and receives a steady flow of XXXX targeted visitors every month, through onsite optimization, search engines, and referrals from other authority websites! While onsite, the visitors tend to stay around and browse through 4-6 pages each, as they learn more about “site topic“. I feel the eBay listings would be a perfect compliment for my visitors and look forward tobeing a part of the ePN.”
Never try to hide the fact that your website shows eBay listings or offers from third party advertisers! The last thing ePN wants is for a user to click one of your links and NOT KNOW they were being sent to eBay for the item!
Spam filters are pretty smart, and they were built by humans! They recognize certain words and look carefully at the content to see if it too, is nothing but spam! Words like “sale, cheap, bargain, buy, used” and hundreds of others are very quick to make ANY reader cautious about the content of an email or website!
If you have the word cheap in your domain name, make sure your content is BETTER than every other site that sells cheap whatever! When a human looks at it, they are going to be extra critical of your content.
Edit - 06/24/09 - Added Additional Recommendation from Amanda at ePN
Amanda over the ePN Blog made an additional suggestion to the approval tips.
In addition to the tips mentioned above, we want to stress the importance of giving valid contact information in your application. Although we understand the desire for privacy, giving false phone numbers and/or contact information is an easy way to get rejected quickly from eBay Partner Network.
Lets face it - affiliate marketing is not short of failures! For every one of us that finds success, I would bet there are 95 others who quit within 6 months, maybe less time than that! Those 95 are the same people eBay does NOT want in their program!
If you are declined on the first attempt, ask yourself if you have built an authoritative website, built a strong readership, and have a steady flow of traffic that is genuinely interested in the information your site is delivering!
Take your time, build your authority, gain reader value… and reapply to ePN with a positive story!
June 15, 2009
Over the past weekend, I was asked by a reader… “How do you know when Google search dislikes your Niche Store?” It’s actually a very interesting question that DOES carry a few indicators you can watch for, to prevent the inevitable. Don’t get the wrong idea of “inevitable” meaning your site will be dropped from the G index! Your site may very well stay indexed forever, but the most popular search engine will just stop sending traffic!
Depending on the log program you use to measure site analytics, it’s a pretty quick glance to see if Google likes you or not! In cPanel, you can right to the Web/FTP Stats icon, then head into your AWStats application. Once inside, skip past everything else and head right down to the “Referrers > Origin” section, which will show you where your external visitors came from.
The screenshot below comes from a site thats almost 3 years old and actually has RISING traffic every month for the past 3-4 months, but as I will explain below the image, Google thinks the site sucks - actually, it does! I didn’t need search trends to tell me that. :-)
Its a pretty quick discovery in this sites case! Google owns about 80% market share in search, and while you don’t want to rely on search traffic completely for your sites success, this image tells the story!
Looking at that image, I can see that 432 visits have come from search engines.
Its pretty basic math… IF Google owns 80% of all search traffic, then they should also own 80% (approx) of my search referred traffic, right? In this sites case, Google refers about 55% of all search driven traffic, therefore Google MUST think the site sucks! (Again, it DOES!)
In addition to AWStats, I also installed Google Analytics about 4 months ago, and I can see that the site enjoys a nice bounce rate of 72%. Meaning 72% of the visitors came to the site and either backed out, closed the window, or left the site without visiting any additional pages. On some of my very successful sites, the homepage bounce rate is in the 30-40% range, which is still high, but not out of my own bounds. Some of the internal pages however, are in the low teens for bounce, which is very good!
When you look at your bounce rates, don’t take the single site percentage as the whole picture… you really need to look at the different entry pages and measure them individually! Even though your site may have a 60% bounce, you might find that some of the pages are bouncing much fewer, and only the homepage needs work!
This is where it starts getting interesting! First and foremost, it a 100% BANS site! Yes, I still have a few! But what strikes out as most interesting, is that I have done alot of work to make the site unique! Unique content, few product listings, growing number of inbound links, and pagerank 3! In addition to the dev side, the site DOES earn money every month in ePN! Not alot mind you, but enough for me to justify doing some work to make it better!
As much as I hate to say… I am going to drop BANS from the site and rebuild it into WordPress. I can take whats already there and reuse it on the new site. I will also look at the different areas I can improve on, like product reviews or ratings, top lists, etc.
I will actually plan to relaunch the site at the end of the month, so I have a end-of-month baseline to use as an indicator of my efforts.
June 4, 2009
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I like to celebrate small wins, and use what I learned from the experience to replicate the same steps on other sites, turning one small win, into two! This post is just a round-up of a few things going on in our world…
Late last month, I mentioned that I lost my wife to her true hobby, saving money and getting the most out of every dollar we have!If you look at the basic AWStat chart to the left, you can see that she is doing things right!
Kims Coupon Site turned more than 140,000 pageviews in its first full month of operation and is on pace to serve more than 300,000 to 15k unique visitors this month! I don’t know about the measure of success for anyone else, but this is an indicator that the site will turn into something big for her!
The site IS monetized with some coupon feeds and just yesterday, we entered the ePN 20k Contest and already had a sale, qualifying her for the prizes! We have plans for a few more pageson the site before the week is out… focused on putting the Free ShoeMoneyX Internet Marketing Guide into place! If you haven’t done so, you can read the full ShoeMoneyX Review over at Script Critics.
If I had to select one definitive way she has driven traffic… it’s Networking! She became very active on several “Stay at Home Mom” and “Ways to Save” type blogs, and already has a weekly guest post section at a very popular coupon site! In addition to this, she has networked locally with a weekly saver magazine here in Charlotte, and they are working to put together a special section for Couponers in the Charlotte area!
She does spend roughly 2-3 hours on the site every day between posting, guest posting and communicating with her readers. The one area we both noticed needs more traction is in the comments. Even though she is appealing to alot of people, they are not yet commenting as much as she would like, so we are working on that now!
If you recall, I posted on Sunday about selling my first site as a “Ready to Go” niche site. I’m not quite sure I can celebrate it as a small win yet! Even though the CobraStang website auction does have a bid and will sell within the next 24 hours, it just didn’t get the traction I thought it would, and I have to look into the WHY factor. I know the time I put into it… and the breakeven point for my time value.
The auction has had hundreds of views… so there must be some reason why its just not selling or getting bids.
The slower than expected response actually put a hold on a few other sites that were in the process of being completed, since I don’t want to put days of work into a for-sale website and not be able to sell it. :-)
June 2, 2009
Just in case any of you missed this… ePN is holding a $20,000 contest for affiliates in the month of June! Its a pretty cool contest geared around the eBay Daily Deals widget, that shows a small group of super hot sale items every day.
From the forum post:
Starting today, from June 1st through July 31st we will be giving away nine $1,000 Weekly Cash Prizes, one $1,000 Best Daily Deal Integration Prize, and a $10,000 Grand Prize!
Creatives for the Contest
There are a few new creatives to test out… and I could really see this program working best on sites with a wide range of visitors, age groups, men, women etc, basically ANY kind of traffic that may be bargain hunting, since the 4 items on the daily deals could be anything from iPods to Ironing Boards!
One way or another - its worth entering and getting your name in for the prizes!
May 31, 2009
Back in April, I mentioned that I had too many domains and needed to find a way to eliminate many of them. What I decided to do, was try my hand at content flipping, with a slightly different perspective! Not only did I want to provide a great starting point for someone, I wanted to give them the option of receiving all the important stuff they needed, to make the success in the shortest amount of time possible.
In total, I will be offering up more than 75 of this type of site over the next few months… if you don’t see the one you like this week, next week may bring something in your market!
Are you a fan of cars, specifically Mustangs? If so, this site is aged, optimized and ready to go!
CobraStang was originally registered as a place for me to blog about my own love of Ford Mustangs, but due to having too much to keep up with, it just fell off my radar and was neglected. The niche itself is very popular among a predominately male crowd, and there is high volume for many related searches in engines!
I launched a BANS site on the domain in July 2007, and continued building to more than 140 pages of content. When BANS became unpopular in mid 2008, the site was rebuilt using a WordPress / BANS themed blogging site and continued to generate revenue throughout 2008, until it was ultimately removed from the host in Feb of this year, due to lack of updating.
The site was relaunched not long ago, and already has traffic from previous marketing efforts over the past 2 years. It has NEVER been delisted or in any kind of trouble with search engines.
The CobraStang site was completely tore down and rebuilt to look best in the free Arthemia wordpress theme. After reviewing demand, keywords and other indicators I look at before building a site, CobraStang comes ready to go, with the following:
This site is truly a diamond in the rough… with a very brand-able domain name, indexed content for more than 7 years, and a high demand niche market, where buyers like to spend their disposable income!
Starting Price of this website: $290.00 (That’s really dirt cheap!) To bid on this site, head over to the eBay auction and bid today. The auction will last for 5 days, unless someone uses the buy now option and ends it early.
Since I am targeting fairly new to moderate Internet Marketers, I wanted to offer a bonus option for someone who is serious about making this business. I have set a buy it now option on this auction of $1350.00 (Which is what I would have charged to build it!)
If the auction is won using the buy it now, the winner will also receive several items which will help them get up to speed and achieve success with the site much quicker!
Win the CobraStang Site by Bidding Today!
Please don’t hesitate to ask any questions prior to bidding or winning this auction!
May 22, 2009
Unless you live under a rock in the affiliate website world, you have heard of Jeremy Schoemaker, aka Shoemoney! Last night I got an email from him that kinda shocked me! Jeremy has decided to provide a FREE Shoemoney 12 Week Affiliate Training Course!
This is priceless for everyone, including seasoned affiliates! Getting a 12 week step by step look into one of the Guru’s of Marketing process is priceless! Jeremy has said he will cover the following:
I Signed Up - You Should Sign Up Now as Well - ITS FREE!
