eBay Partner Network Tips and Ideas

I'm starting to gain some good traction with the eBay affiliate program lately, or more correctly named eBay Partner Network. On my beef jerky blog, it's become my second best revenue stream, second only to direct advertising sales.

If you're not using eBay's affiliate program, it's worth your while to explore.

http://www.ebaypartnernetwork.com

They pay a per click fee that varies based on the quality of traffic you refer. Quality is defined as the long term value of each person you refer, including the purchases they make, the stuff they sell, how often they use PayPal, and other factors.

That's important to understand. You'll get a higher per click fee, if you send them really good traffic.

The factor that we publishers can influence the most is a visitor's likelihood to purchase something.

To do this, you need a website that's focused on something specific. After two-and-a-half years of running my beef jerky blog, I've built up a steady traffic of visitors interested in trying out new beef jerky. But it's more specific than just beef jerky, it's beef jerky reviews. My readers are not looking to make their own jerky, nor looking for the best bargains, they want to know where the best tasting jerky is. These visitors are willing to buy.

As it turns out, eBay has a rather large marketplace of beef jerky sellers. These people either sell their own homemade jerky, or they sell bulk brands of jerky. All I did was connect my visitors to eBay's jerky page using ad banners that say stuff like, "Visit eBay's Beef Jerky Marketplace". That alone is probably enough to pique someone's curiosity.

The other way I refer traffic into eBay is through product reviews. I buy up jerky from these homemade jerky sellers, and write reviews. I still write honest reviews. If it's bad jerky I say it's bad, if it's good jerky I say it's good. But as it turns out, homemade jerky is almost always better than factory jerky, so no matter whose jerky I review, it usually turns out to be a good review.

The review includes an affiliate link to that jerky maker's eBay storefront. And it's that link that actually generates the bulk of my eBay referrals. Here's an example of such a review...

http://www.bestbeefjerky.org/2010/09/landos-jerky-garlic-pepper.html

So here's some thoughts to ponder....

• I'm thinking it's better to have a website/blog dedicated to reviews only, as opposed to one that covers reviews, news, funnies, and opinions. A dedicated review site should theoretically focus your traffic down to just those people who are serious about making purchases.


• Develop trust with your readers so that they feel compelled to purchase what you reviewed. Write intelligently, be consistent with your prior reviews.


• Review products that replenish. That is, products that the seller will restock and always have in stock. That way, visitors clicking through on an old article of yours will still see that product for sale.


• Review products from sellers that seem to have built up their own trust factor. It could be sellers with a high satisfaction rating, sellers who've built long history of selling on eBay.


• Review products that you can't buy anywhere else. Homemade jerky is a good example. But I've also seen people selling their own homemade pickles, homemade bird houses, handmade quilts.


• Consumable products work well for this, that is, products that don't last and need to be repurchased. People who make repeated purchases, theoretically should increase your per click fee. Food and drink is an obvious example. Guitar strings eventually need to be replaced. Scented candles need to be replaced.


• Review products that your readers will actually buy. Stay away from retarded stuff like "mystery gift box", or "wierd alien rock found in desert".


• Hobbyist products should also do really well. Rubber stamps and scrapbooking supplies. Knitting and sewing supplies. Hobbyists are passionate about their hobby and willing to make purchases, and repeated purchases.


• Link to the seller's storefront page because that should remain constant. Don't link to the individual product because that will eventually expire. Also linking to the storefront allows your referrals to see all of the sellers products.

Finally, I give you a link to an article written by eBay in March 2009 about affiliate marketing. It should give you an insight to what they're looking for in an affiliate publisher...

http://www.semj.org/documents/SEMJ_ebay_vol2.pdf

Let me know how you use eBay's affiliate program.  ✓

The Real Reason for Google's Success

I was reading a post by Jim Kukral entitled, "Are You Thinking Like Google", in which he tries to explain why Google has become so successful. He offers up the same easy answer that so many other Internet analysts have offered up, which is that Google offers the most quality search results...

So why does Google win? Because Google is the world's biggest, and best, problem solver....

...The truth is, Google (and your business) has to solve problems for their (your) customers, the Internet searcher. If they (you) can't do that, they (you) lose customers. It's that black and white.

I disagree.

People use Google for viral reasons. People associate the word "Google" with quality. Whatever Google develops, people get excited. It's doesn't matter if Google pumps out shit, people will still want to dig their hands into it. Think Google Wave, which was a total disaster, yet it created so much buzz that people were clamoring to buy up every domain name with the word "wave" in it.

Google's products don't actually solve all your problems, they just make you believe it does.

You have to go back to 1998, back when search was dominated by Yahoo, Alta Vista, Excite, and All the Web. All of those sites billed themselves as search engines and web directories designed to help people find what they're looking for. Yet, in 1998 all the buzz was about "portals".

That is, those sites all wanted to be the end all, be all, destination for everything you needed to know, all on one webpage. Weather, news, sports, traffic, movies, shopping, everything, was all jam-packed on one single webpage.

It got to where you couldn't figure out where the search engine was. The search forms on these sites were tucked away into a corner, while all the other portal content took center stage. Instead of marketing their search engine, they tried to market their portal content.

So in 1999, Google debuts. And they offer up a ridiculously simple looking home page. No news, no weather, no horoscope, no shopping, no nothing, except a plain jane looking search form....



And this is still the same home page they offer up today.

When Google debuted, people saw it a total diversion from the other search engines. It looked so clean, so simple. It was totally unlike the clusterfucked checkerboard of content squeezed into every little square.

The media announced it as a "popularity search engine". That phrase is no longer used today, but back in the day that's what Google billed themselves as. And in that time, no one had ever heard of such an animal, and people were very intrigued.

I mean, I was very intrigued with it. I wanted to see how my websites showed up on Google. I typed in such search terms that should have yielded one of my websites as the top listing, but it did not, and delivered results that were totally irrelevant.

But the media, along with all the technology writers, all pounded out the message that Google was far more relevant, and consumers believed it. That hype is what launched the viral marketing that made Google what it is today.

The truth is that Google delivered up no more relevant results than Inktomi, which was the dominant search engine robot of the day. But what made Google successful was usability.

That is, it provided a very simple search form that people could understand, no portal content, no clutter, and it delivered results very quickly, and very easily understood. Google gave people simplicity, speed, and usability.

You have to keep in mind, that in 1999, the major search portals lost sight of what people really wanted. They assumed people wanted everything all presented to them on a single home page. But Google knew that people wanted to search, and they made it very easy and accessible to search. It helped that the media heralded them as a superior search engine.

But the fact is that the media didn't know shit at that time. All they had were the press releases, and they spewed out whatever quotations were handed to them. As it turned out, users didn't really care if Google was more relevant than Inktomi, all they knew is they now had a search engine they could easily get to, and use.

That's what made Google successful.

You can apply that same principle everywhere. For example a restaurant that serves up really great food will do poor business if its located in a bad area. But meanwhile, McDonald's will succeed because they focus so hard on marketing, accessibility, and convenience.

That should prove to you that a quality product is not what makes a business successful, it's all the other things.

Think about how that applies to your website. Just because you have a quality product or quality content, doesn't mean people are going to visit your website. YOu gotta do all the other things.  ✓

An Example of Poor Marketing

Would you buy SEO & Marketing services from a company that can't even spell "Marketing"?

Marketing is misspelled in the ad banner at the top

I clicked on the ad banner and it takes me here...

http://everythingz.info/seo
(rel="nofollow")

And then I notice the landing page has several broken image links, for example...


I mean if you're going to pay for traffic, at least have your shit together.  ✓

Money With AdSense is Back

Just as it was about to succumb to the fiery depths of Hell, I decided to keep my old AdSense blog and make another go at trying to earn a buck-a-month off of it...

http://www.moneywithadsense.com/

I just posted an article on there (here's the direct link) about why I'm putting it back online, and why I stopped writing it in the first place.  ✓

The Secret to Successful Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is as simple as matching up someone's need with a solution.

Yet it seems very few people understand this very basic way of looking at it.

What many of us publishers do is build a website that focuses on a subject, but still at a general level. For example, motorcycles. They write about motorcycles in general, and then pepper their pages with a variety of affiliate program links ranging from motorcycle helmets, to motorcycle magazines, to motorcycle insurance, and the list goes on.

But to their dismay, the click through rate is very low, and the conversions are about non-existent. So they give up on affiliate marketing and opt for Google AdSense.

And not to knock Google AdSense, I use it quite a bit myself.

People who are interested in buying something will seek out those websites that offer that something specifically. That's the opposite of traditional sales and marketing, where salesmen identify a demographic and then seek out customers. Whereas on the Internet, the customers seek out the salesmen.

Think about a motorcycle rider who wants to buy a new helmet. That person will not go to a general motorcycle website and traverse the many levels of pages trying to find reviews of helmets. Rather, they will do a Google search for "motorcycle helmets" and click on the site that appears to offer what they want.

That's where you need to be. If you want to be successful with that motorcycle helmet affiliate program, you have to design a site that becomes an authority on motorcycle helmets, that clearly defines this on the Google search results, and manages to rank high on Google.

The subject of motorcycles in general is still too broad for affiliate marketing. I know this because I've been there. I published Biker News Online for several years and learned that.

The people who visit general motorcycle sites are only interested in general motorcycle info, and don't have any specific need to fulfill. The same is true with any general subject, such as pets, golf, food, gardening, etc. Google AdSense and display-based advertising (CPM) is best for monetizing general interest traffic.

Figure out what people want to buy online, and build a site that caters just to that need.

That's the secret to successful affiliate marketing. It's that simple. The rest is all technical, such as designing a professional looking site, creating content, keeping the site updated, doing some SEO, advertising, etc.

What if you've already invested time and money into building a general subject website? Then keep building it, but build other specific sites that push specific affiliate programs, and use your general site to pump page rank into it.

Last year I wrote about this same subject, but through a different angle, "Proactive Marketing versus Passive Marketing".

I hope that helps, let me know what you think.  ✓

Recapture Lost Page Rank Value

Over the years of running a website, it's not uncommon to have restructured the folders, moved files around, or even renamed files and folders. When you do you will break inbound links from other websites who had linked to those URLs.

That in turn causes you to lose page rank.

That's what has happened to me while running Interment.net. Over the 13+ years of publishing that site, it has grown huge. And in order to manage it in a sane and sensible way, I've had to redesign the directory structure and filenaming conventions, and of course, broke many inbound links and lost incoming PR value.

Knowing that there are still hundreds of other websites still linking to these old URLs that now no longer exist, I decided to see if I could recapture that PR value by simply recreating those old URLs.

So I used Google Webmaster Tools to take a look at the "Crawl Error" report, showing me all the other websites that are linking to a non-existent URL on my site.

• I found that some webmasters made typing errors when creating a link to my website. This isn't anything I can fix other than contacting them to make the correction. (Which of course is a worthy effort to capture some extra PR value).


• But I found that the majority of crawl errors were due to what I've described above, where I broke inbound links by changing my old directory structure and filenames.

Below is a screenshot of Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Error report for just one of my old URLs (http://www.interment.net/aus/nsw/orano/mudgee.htm)...


There are eight inbound links above, and these links are still live on the Internet, and still have PR value to give me, except they are pointing to a URL that no longer exists (/aus/nsw/orano/mudgee.htm)

So all I did was recreate that URL on my site by creating the "orano" folder and the "mudgee.htm" file. It's not important that "mudgee.htm" contain the same old content that it used to have, all that's needed is for this page to exist and have some links that carry the incoming PR value to the rest of the site.

Now there are perhaps a hundred more of these URLs that I used to have that I no longer have. So, I would need to recreate all of these again.

The problem with doing that is that I will clutter up the nice-and-neat directory structure and filenaming convention that I use today. But I can solve that problem by hiding every new folder and file that I recreate for this effort.

But then again, I can only do that because this particular website of mine is hosted on a dedicated server that I can access via remote session and set the properties of each folder and filename to "hidden". If your website is on a shared server, you may or may not be able to do that depending on your web host provider.


I created the folder "orano" and set its attribute to "Hidden" so that it no longer appears in my FTP sessions.

This may be a little more work, and a little more technical, but here's a way to capture a good deal more PR value that you may have lost over the years.  ✓

Facebook Page versus RSS Feed

Considering that Facebook boasts more than 500 million active users (I'm not sure how they define active), is it more effective to have a Facebook page than an RSS feed?

The scenario is this...

1. You have a blog, and you're trying to build your subscriber base.


2. Your blog has an RSS feed, and on your blog is a "Subscribe to Our Feed" form where users can have new posts delivered to them via e-mail.


3. You're having trouble getting enough people to subscribe.

So how about this solution instead: set up a Facebook page for your blog, and get people to "Like" your page.

From what I'm seeing thus far, Facebook users are more willing to "like" a page than they are willing to submit their e-mail address for an RSS feed. You use this Facebook page to post links to your newest blog articles, hence it works like an RSS feed.

Facebook pages are also interactive as opposed to RSS feeds. Every link or status update you post to your Facebook page can host a discussion via Comments, whereas RSS feeds cannot. That allows your readers to build a relationship with you.

But while Facebook boasts 500 million active users, obviously not everyone is on Facebook. It's still worth your while to keep that RSS feed going, considering it won't cost you any money or labor to publish one.

And RSS feeds can host ads that generate revenue for you, while Facebook pages cannot.

But I'm of the opinion that using a Facebook page to announce your newest blog posts is actually more effective than an RSS feed.  ✓

Is Google Image Search Traffic Any Good?

There are already several articles out there with tips on how to optimize your images and pages for Google Image Search, but just how good is that traffic?

As it stands now, several of my websites get a lot of traffic from Google Image Search, and in some cases even more traffic than Google Web Search. It seems that people love to search for images.

So if someone searched for images of beagles, and it eventually landed them on a website about beagles, would that website benefit in any way from that visitor?

Not necessarily. Searching for images is not the same as searching for information.

People search for images because they want to see photos. If they wanted to learn something specific about beagles, they'd use Google Web Search instead.

Furthermore, the amount of time people spend on your site is pretty much limited to just looking at that image. If that image is not quite what they had in mind, they will go back to Google Image Search and look for more. They won't stay on your website.

So how do you get them to stay on your website?

Provide them with navigation links for more related photos. Using the beagle search example, provide thumbnail images of more beagle photos, and place them somewhere they can't be missed. And use the heading, "More Beagle Photos".

But just because you're getting them to stay longer doesn't mean they'll click on your ads, or subscribe to your RSS feed, or even "like" your Facebook page.

Remember that the reason why people search for images is because they have an immediate need to see photos. That need trumps all else. Even if you have an awesome website, your website won't mean squat to them, at least not at that specific moment.

Google image search traffic, at least in my experience, is rather cheap traffic.

How to Monetize Google Image Search Traffic

Simply put, by CPM. Place a banner ad that pays a display rate (CPM) on all pages that display images. Considering most CPM networks are paying about $0.25 CPM for run of network campaigns, you won't make much money. But you'll still earn something.  ✓

Can You Generate Content Efficiently?

One thing I learned when working for HNC Software several years ago is that you'll never get ahead with more management.

That is, the more time you spend doing something, the less you're going to come out ahead.

Some of the blogs I created proved to be failures simply because they required a lot of work to maintain. If I was to put a dollar figure on the amount of time I spent finding material to write, and then actually writing the content, I was spending an awful lot of money, and earning little of it back.

Blogs like Strange New Products, Junk Food Blog, Cool Website Ideas, Biker News Online, seemed like great ideas, and they did fetch a lot of traffic. But they also required a lot of my time just to find something new to write. And even though they brought in a respectable amount of revenue, it still didn't compensate for the time I put into it.

So one of the primary requirements for launching a new website or blog, is that it has to cost little to generate content. The least amount of time and effort to write, but with the most amount of advertising revenue to earn, that's the best scenario.

With Strange New Products, I would sometimes spend a few days before I actually found something to write about. That is, I would sit at my laptop, reviewing all the press release sites, the news wires, and various online stores, looking for a strange new product to blog about. If I valued my time at just $25.00 per hour, then I could spend $200 to $600 just to find inspiration for one blog post.

Obviously, that's wasteful.

Contrast that with a current blog of mine, Best Beef Jerky. Beef jerky manufacturers are sending me packages of jerky to review. In other words, the content ideas are coming to me, instead of me finding them. It takes me a lot less time to generate content this way, and on top of that, I'm getting free food.

If you're going to make a business out of writing blogs, how efficiently can you generate content on a daily basis?  ✓

Facebook is Better Than Twitter

So I'm just going to say what other marketers don't want to say out loud. Facebook is better than Twitter.

That is, if you want to conduct a social media campaign, and use it to refer traffic to your website, Facebook is far more superior.

Google Analytics for my largest website (Interment.net) says that in the last 30 day period (Jul 2 to Aug 1), referrals from Facebook versus Twitter were as follows...

Facebook: 10,326
Twitter: 5

Yeah. Only 5 measly referrals from Twitter versus 10,326 from Facebook.

The biggest reason for this is because Facebook's in-house search engine will display results from Bing if it can't find any pages or people matching your search query exactly. This is where I get the bulk of my referrals.

Which begs the question, what are you doing to rank high on Bing?

Whereas with Twitter, what you're primarily getting are techie people, or computer savvy people. That's largely who uses Twitter. If your target audience is people like this, then it makes sense to focus your marketing campaign there.

But if you're like me, and you're targeting non-techie folks, you're better off spending more time developing your Facebook presence.  ✓