www.affiliateconfession.com

Is the once grandaddy of pay per click advertising losing it’s appeal for bloggers? As if you hadn’t noticed, none of the major internet marketing bloggers use Adsense on their blogs any longer. Don’t believe me? Go ahead and look:

Darren Rowse at Problogger doesn’t use it.
Jeremy Shoemaker doesn’t use Adsense on Shoemoney.
John Chow doesn’t use Adsense.
John Cow doesn’t use it.
Yaro Starak at Entrepreneur’s Journey doesn’t do Adsense.
CopyBlogger doesn’t use it.
DailyBlogTips doesn’t use Adsense.

Are you getting the picture? A bigger question is, is Google getting the picture? Major bloggers are instead opting to use 125 x 125 ad buttons at the top of their blogs and generate their revenue by making direct deals with their advertisers. No one really knows, but the thinking is that Google gave around 50% of their take to publishers. With direct deals, the blogger gets to keep all the revenue and can in turn offer discounts to advertisers while still earning more than Adsense could produce.

This has been going on for several months now and you think Google would sit up and notice. Darren Rowse explained why he doesn’t use Adsense any longer since his redesign. He says it is an experiment, but his main reason is because he was getting mediocre results. Many have followed, stating that the usual Adsense text links just don’t look good any more and don’t really fit a blog’s style. Darren does say that he uses Adsense on some of his other blogs and it works very well.

When starting Affiliate Confession only a couple of months ago I noticed what the big blogs were doing in the way of advertising. No Adsense, hmm, this most definitely made me think about what to do when the time came to monetize the blog. I generate a decent income from Adsense so I though I’d start using their CPA ads and find some nice 125 x 125 banners to display. The trouble is, there aren’t any. That’s correct, in Google’s large base of advertisers using CPA, not one has opted to create a single 125 x 125 ad.

Now you think Google with all it’s world class marketers and engineers would have thought this through. The 125 x 125 button has been a popular banner for most CPA networks for some time. Why doesn’t Google encourage some of it’s large advertisers, or anyone using CPA for that matter, to use a preferred method made popular by bloggers the world over? This is just a no brainer and I’m completely surprised Google hasn’t figured this out yet.

The fact that major bloggers don’t use Adsense is probably a minor thing to the bottom line at Google. Right now I’m sure they don’t feel it. But all trends start small.

Google, have you noticed?

Alan

Tags: bloggers, cpa ads, cpa networks

Build A Niche Store is a tool I use to help maximize the potential of the eBay affiliate program. So yes this is a review that contains my affiliate link, but at least it’s one where the writer (me) actually uses the product. I don’t want to go off on a rabbit trail here, but the way many of the Clickbank guru’s make money online is by doing reviews for Clickbank products they don’t own. I own Build A Niche Store (BANS), have built 7 or 8 sites with it and it’s my biggest single money maker outside of Google Adsense.

I’ve said it several times before what a great opportunity the eBay affiliate program is and I had been reaping the benefits of it since before I even knew about BANS. When I came across BANS I had already been using a script named CaRP which is an RSS to HTML converter. CaRP allows you to take advantage of eBays RSS feeds which are found at the bottom of every search you do on the site. However, when using a script such as CaRP you must hand build every page. BANS however, allows you to build a complete website in about 15 to 20 minutes.

You must already have a hosting account (I use 1and1.com, you must have UNIX hosting), a domain name and be a member of the eBay affiliate program and once you have your copy of BANS, installation is very simple. All you have to do is upload the BANS files to your domain via ftp and follow the instructions, choose your eBay category, plug-in your PID from Commission Junction for your new domain, click Set Up and you have a new website with a few or more than 1,000 pages depending on the categories and niches you pick.

BANS is fully customizable and comes with 9 templates that you can tweak via CSS or if you are savvy enough you can design your own template and just put the necessary tags in the correct places. You can adjust everything in your BANS store to suit your liking and style. You can change the number of auctions that show on the pages of your BANS store, you can add customized search pages for very specific items, you can change the layout of how the auctions are displayed, you get to upload your own logo and tweak many more parameters so you have your custom store. It really is so simple a low IQ caveman could do it.

Every page on your site gets necessary header info such as titles and meta tags via eBay so you will want to add your own titles and change the meta info, but this info will at least have you started and some of your pages will get indexed in Google very quickly. I have additionally added H1 tags and a paragraph or two of text to each individual page of my sites to give them their own unique spin. You should also add a few to several articles related to the niche you’ve chosen to give your readers info about your topics and so the search engines see that there’s something to your site.

Can You Make Money With BANS?

Well, that all depends on how much you are willing to work to promote your site and the niche you are in. Here is a screen shot from CJ on my best performing BANS website last month:

The example above is for a store that is only two months old as of the date of this posting. I’m not revealing the url of this store but here is my BANS travel auctions site and a toys and hobbies site I added to an already existing gifts site.

As you can see, at least for me, the answer is yes you can make money with Build A Niche Store. BANS is one of the first products that has really live up to it’s billing. I’ve found BANS to be very search engine friendly and have seen several pages on new sites get indexed in Google in only about 6 to 7 days.

After spending 2 months building a eBay computer affiliate store with the CaRP script, Build A Niche Store is like an answer to prayer. In the time it took me to build my computer store, I had 5 BANS stores built and had paid for the initial $97 cost of the software many times over. If you can’t make money with BANS and the eBay affiliate program, you might not want to quit your day job.

If you want more info on Build A Niche Store you can check it out here.

However, if you can wait, you just might win a free copy of BANS that I’m giving away in a contest starting tomorrow.

Alan

Google Adsense has been a good source of income for me for about 3 years, but I sometimes feel manipulated almost to the point that they don’t want me to earn too much money. No conspiracy here, but I find it quite odd the level at which my earnings fluctuate even from day to day.

Since I run a travel site I know there are seasonal issues affecting how much people look for vacation rentals and consequently how many people actually see your ads. So income for certain niches will deviate over the course of the year, but over the course of a week? This is just weird. Check out Adsense revenue for the past 6 days:

As you can see, last Sunday’s earnings were $24.20 and then the very next day earnings were $53.92, more than a 100% increase. And again on Thursday earnings dropped by more than 50% to $23.54. I wonder if the big guys see such a huge difference in only a few days.

I remember reading somewhere that Jason Calacanis of Weblogsinc.com was the first blogger (and maybe the only) to reach a milestone of earning $1 million per year from Adsense. That would put your single days average earnings at an incredible $2,739.73. What I have to wonder with the results I’ve been seeing this week is if Jason earned that $2,739.73 one day and then earned $1,196.09 just 4 days later.

Here’s where I see some oddities whose fault can only be placed on Google themselves. The click through rate on my best Adsense earning site went from a high of 21% to a low of 7.74% which can only mean one thing. Google must be serving completely irrelevant ads on the lower click rate days. In fact, I have witnessed this myself seeing ads for Lake Tahoe show up on pages about Gatlinburg Tennessee and Gatlinburg ads show up on pages about hiking in the Grand Canyon.

I’m sure that ad timing has something to do with this since advertisers can now turn off and on their ads with Ad Scheduling to show at specific times of the day and only on specific days. There would tend to be less advertisers on certain days, but there should still be enough ad inventory in the travel niche to serve relevant ads. I can see lower paying clicks, but find it hard to understand huge swings in click-thru rates.

As perfect as Google tries to be and seems to want to control everything on the net, they still aren’t able to control their ad serving mechanisms enough to put relevant ads on my sites all the time. I know my sites are an infinitessimally small percentage of the sites and ads they deal with on a daily basis, but it would be nice to see if other affiliates see this kind of swing in their earnings.

I’m kidding of course when I say that Google doesn’t want me to earn too much money. For many publishers $50 a day is nothing, so that means $23 is less than nothing.

Please leave a comment below if you’ve seen your Adsense earnings fluctuate such as this.

Alan

Tags: adsense earnings, travel, jason calacanis, relevant ads, click through rate

When I told my friend Lonny (he likes to be called Lawrence) that I had finally started this blog after reading John Chow’s October income report he first congratulated me and then made this statement via email, “I keep having trouble wrapping my head around the idea of guys like him who make tons of money off a blog whose only purpose is to tell others how to do it.”

I’m going to attempt to explain why this happens.

First of all, if you’ve ever been over to ClickBank you know the number one selling type of ebook has to do with making money online or how to get into Google’s supposed super secret back door or whatever so you can, what else, make more money online. Then there are the groups or more like cliques of Internet gurus who’s individual members come out with an ebook every week it seems like, telling you how to, you guessed it, make money online. The way they make money is by promoting each other’s books.

And I’m sure in your online trekking you’ve come across those 10,000 foot long web pages that attempt to tell you how everybody else is doing it all wrong and you absolutely must listen to them about how to…make money online.

Are you seeing a pattern here?

The trouble with these supposed secrets is that they cost a bunch of money and while some are good, some are really bad and very costly. They are filled with stuff that you could probably get from reading forums and the top bloggers on the net. So here’s your answer:

When someone Like John Chow or Jeremy Shoemaker shows up on the scene and tells you how they make a killing on the net and they give that information away for free, people are naturally going to gobble it up. Even when they tell you their failures as in Shoemoney’s 10 Worst Ideas To Make Money it’s worth listening to because it just shows they are not really superstars, they’re just trying to make a buck like the rest of us.

Secondly, there are tons of blogs that tell you how to make money, but they are nothing but affiliate spammers that haven’t made a dime themselves. All they do is refer you out of their blogs or sites to those expensive ebooks found on ClickBank. Jeremy, John, Darren Rowse, Yaro Starak, all of these guys have made money outside of their primary blogs and they write a lot about how they have done that.

I recently read an ebook found on ClickBank that was going to tell you how to make thousands from blogging. It turned out to be nothing more than a formula to set up a huge spam blog network and make money from scraped content by putting Adsense on all your spammy sites. No thanks, not interested. I’d rather learn how to make a living from someone who’s actually done it in a legit way that’s going to last longer than the next Google update.

I don’t know about you, but I want an honest representation of what people really do to make money on the web instead of getting a bunch of hype about how the next ebook someone comes out with will contain even bigger secrets.

The next time you ponder how someone like Shoemoney or John Chow are making a killing from their blogs just think of them as constantly updated free ebooks. Those spammy affiliate blogs telling you how to make money, guess what? They don’t make money!

If you must read an ebook to learn how to make money on the net, go read John Chow’s ebook on how he did it. Scroll down to the bottom of the post and you’ll find a direct link to his ebook. Oh, by the way, it’s free.

Shoemoney is also coming out with an ebook that is scheduled to be released in the Spring of 2008. I’m sure he will be charging for it, but there are definitely some things worth paying for so I will be reading it when it comes out.

Alan

Tags: blogging, make money online, shoemoney, john chow, clickbank

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