www.affiliateconfession.com

Okay, it’s not as bad as the headline indicates, but all eBay affiliates received the news this morning that the company will be moving away from Commission Junction managing their affiliate program and they will bring it in-house, running it themselves. The change is due to start on April 1st and all present and new eBay affiliates will have to sign-up through the eBay Partner Network. CJ links to eBay will still work through the end of April and must be migrated by May 1st.

As you can imagine this has cause quite a buzz on blogs and the major internet marketing forums around the net as eBay affiliates panic at the amount of work they they are facing replacing links next month for the transition. I will personally have several hundred pages of links to migrate over to the new program and I’m a small player compared to some of the big guys. There’s a guy in the eBay affiliate forums saying he has some 75,000 links to change and there are even bigger players to the tune of $1 million per month facing this transition as well.

I’m not at all worried about any of my BANS stores because everything there is automated and will probably just require a minor file update and possibly changing an affiliate number in all of the store interfaces. What I am concerned about is all the text links I have in blog posts, on web sites and who knows where else. I honestly don’t know if I can find every single link I have out there and can change it over, much less if I had tens of thousands or more such as the big players do.

There are a few positive things to look at though with eBay handling all their affiliate matters. You will be able to register with all eBay countries affiliate programs throughout the world simultaneously, no more individual country sign-ups, there will be more detailed reporting available to affiliates (I’m sure this will help you target your efforts better), the commission structure won’t change, there will be new landing page optimization options and a few other changes for the better.

I don’t know how all this will pan out and it seems like a daunting task for some affiliates however, eBay owns the redirect url for all their affiliate links (rover.ebay.com) so it may not be as bad as we think. I’m sure eBay has thought this through and how much it might affect their business and we know they want to do something positive as the final outcome. If eBay affiliates don’t make money, eBay doesn’t make as much money. More details will be coming out shortly.

Meanwhile, if you have a BANS store, just keep building.

I just got an email the other day from Super Affiliate Jeremy Palmer to let me know the ebook he used to charge $45 for (I actually bought it) is now going to be free. If you don’t know about Jeremy, he is one of the top publishers at CJ and made around $1.7 million in commissions in 2006. Jeremy has over 100 web sites and works pretty much by himself.

I bought Jeremy’s ebook High Performance Affiliate Marketing a couple of years ago and at the time I thought it was pretty good, but now it has gone through either 2 or 3 revisions and is completely free. I was pretty impressed with Jeremy because he wasn’t in the business of just selling nonsense and pushing you to buy his next silly ebook for even more information. He also personally answered questions in his forum and even personally answered some of mine. I thought that was pretty decent of him considering he had more than 100 web sites to manage.

Jeremy has since renamed his ebook Quit Your Day Job - A Blueprint For Affiliate Marketing Success and not only is he giving the 2007 version away for free, he is working on a version for 2008 and giving that away free as well. The book is filled with his insights, techniques and lot of resources that are a huge benefit to the affiliate marketer. And you can’t beat the free price. He decided to give the book away because he no longer wants to sell info products and as he quotes in the email:

The fact is, making money on the Internet isn’t easy. It takes a lot of knowledge, hard work, and above all - persistence. But it’s hard to get people to understand that on an e-book sales page.  Many think that if they just buy this one product or service all of their financial problems will be solved. This thinking is completely unrealistic and a recipe for failure.

I think that statement is quite revealing and says a lot about the get-rich-quick ebook industry, especially coming from one of the top publishers at Commission Junction who’s ebook wasn’t about getting rich quickly at all. 

Jeremy is also redesigning his QuitYourDayJob.com web site to add new content, an updated member forum, scripts and more. His goal is to have the site be a more community driven one than it has been in the past.

If you want to learn from the very best affiliate marketer in the business, then check out Jeremy Palmer’s free ebook. You can also get a sneak peak at the new design of his web site here.

Alan

Tags: jeremy palmer, ebook, quit your day job, affiliate marketing

The above screenshot was what I saw Sunday afternoon (1-13) around 5 pm after logging in to check my stats at Commission Junction. The balance may seem like nothing or it may seem like a lot to you depending on where you are in your internet marketing ventures. It seemed like a lot to me because it was about $550 more than I had expected to find there.

Had there been $5,000 there I would have thought immediately it was a mistake, but because this past week had given me 3 straight days of earning less than $4 each day, I thought maybe it was an adjustment to stats from the beginning of last week.

Of course, I was thrilled to think earnings had gone up more than $500 in one day, but as I checked deeper into the stats to see where exactly the money came from, I couldn’t find anything. That’s not all that unusual though. Many times the total in my CJ account will go up $50 to $100 several hours before more specific data becomes available.

I certainly though I had easily blown past the goal to earn more than $1,000 last week, but then I checked stats again around 8 pm that same evening and this is what I found:

I was actually a little less than that (around $800) because I didn’t get a screen capture until the next evening. The reason I even took a screen capture was because this has happened before and I wanted to have a record of it this time.

All things considered, it’s not something to suffer and die over, but dang CJ, this sure puts an affiliate on a roller-coaster ride we don’t need to be on. It’s hard enough to earn commissions without thinking you’ve made a big score for 3 hours (just enough time to have mentally spent the money), only to have your hopes dashed because of a mistake.

I have no idea what causes this, but it would be nice if this didn’t happen again.

Has anyone else seen this kind of oddity from CJ?

Alan

Tags: cj, affiliate earnings, commissions, internet marketing

Usually the day after Christmas is almost as huge a day for shopping as is the day after Thanksgiving. May people take their Christmas gifts, in the form of gift certificates, and use them around town on the various sales that range anywhere from 30% to 70% off retail. If you didn’t get what you wanted this year, you can go out and find your own Christmas present at a great discount.

Well, I got a one day late Christmas present this year courtesy of Google and Commission Junction. This has never happened before, but both checks arrived on the same day, yesterday. The Google check was for $1,150.84 and the CJ check was for $969.30. No it’s not really a true Christmas present, but it sure is nice to get them on the same day, so I thought I’d share them with the readers of Affiliate Confession.

The CJ check, which is kind of hard to read, is off a bit from what I reported on my November earnings because of the way eBay pays its bonuses and I think there was also some late reporting involved as well. CJ checks are always off a bit from the reported monthly earnings because they pay commissions for the previous month and then eBay bonuses aren’t posted until the 9th of the month, but they’re paid in the current month.

I haven’t quite figured out why, but earnings are always higher than reported, never lower than reported. When you look at your CJ reports for a month, after the 9th, they would include your eBay bonus for the previous month. There should be times where your bonus from eBay drops, giving you a commission less than reported at the end of the month. It never works out that way and I’m not complaining.

If you’re confused after that last paragraph, so am I, but the nice thing is, I get to put more than $2,000 in the bank within the next couple of days thanks to getting 2 large affiliate checks on the same day.

The goal of course, is to keep making these checks bigger.

Alan

 Tags: cj, affiliate checks, christmas gifts, presents, earnings

When you write a blog entitled Affiliate Confession it’s probably a good idea to be completely honest. That’s why I’m letting you know the hype about Cyber Monday didn’t translate into affiliate riches for one affiliate marketer, namely myself.

As reported in a previous post Adsense income on Monday was $54, but unfortunately my CJ commissions were only $19. We did sell another Vegan Meal Planner at $17.97 so at least I can add that to the total. So the total comes to $91. That’s better than my daily average for the year so far, but not what I expected. That’s the way the affiliate game goes.

However, there were 106 clicks to eBay on Monday and that’s good news because eBay auctions don’t necessarily end on the day of the click-through. Once someone goes to eBay they can bid on anything and you have 7 days for them to win an auction. You also don’t get paid your commissions from eBay until the auction winner pays for the item, so it could be several days after you receive clicks before you see any benefit.

A better overall look at affiliate selas would be to take stats from the whole Cyber Week Sunday through Saturday which I will report on sometime next week.

So, that’s the Cyber Monday report. I just keep doing what needs to be done…

Alan

Tags: cyber monday, affiliate riches, cj, clicks