www.affiliateconfession.com

I thought about that title for awhile and then thought, ah heck, just go with it. I’m referring to my earnings with Pepperjam Network, not their total earnings. For the first time since eBay switched over their affiliate program to be managed in-house and by Pepperjam, my earnings this month through PJ will exceed earnings at Commission Junction by around 4 times, and none of those earnings are coming from eBay managed through Pepperjam.

At one time I had been earning around $800 to $1,000 a month with CJ, but since my leads for Apartments.com dropped off and eBay left, there are only a handful of programs I’m still running through CJ. This signals a changing of the guard for the affiliate networks I’ll be working with from now on. While earnings this month through Pepperjam will not be large by any means, I do expect to see continued growth as new programs get introduced and I start working with more of them.

Pepperjam has around 250 merchants they are working with right now and it seems like they introduce new ones several times a week. And PJ just recently added a new feature to their interface where you can now see the best performing offers on their network according to EPC (earnings per click). This makes it easy to find the best paying offers in your particular niche. Just select your preferred category or do a keyword search for merchants via the partners interface, then click the next to last column to the right marked 1-Month EPC and the best offers will be at the top.

The top 5 EPC offers overall as of this post are:

ExclusivelyHome.com - Home furnishings.
EPC = $8.20

Vitalicious.com - Vitamin fortified desserts and goodies.
EPC = $2.41

Barstools.com - You guessed it, bar stools.
EPC = $1.96

PatioUmbrellas.com - Not just your average patio and beach umbrellas.
EPC = $1.69

LifeLock.com - Guaranteed identity theft protection.
EPC = $1.50

If you haven’t partnered up with Pepperjam yet, now is the time to do so because they are offering a $10 incentive to all new members that get approved. All you have to do is sign up and you get that $10 deposited into your account as a bonus.

Don’t miss out on Pepperjam steamrolling through the affiliate marketing space. Join up and check out their offers today and earn an easy $10.

It’s time for another income report here at AffiliateConfession.com and it’s a record month for affiliate earnings mainly due to some nice contest winnings in May which lets me cook the books a little. I didn’t report that I won $750 in cash from the Webmaster-Talk.com contest and I’ve used that to cover $543.66 worth of advertising expenses this month. When the $750 has been spent I’ll again take off advertising from the revenue total.

Google Adsense and the Microsoft Affiliate program contributed significantly to the record this month as well. The breakdown of earnings this month is as follows:

Google Adsense - $1,492.96
Commission Junction - $50.37
EPN - eBay - $778.60
Meal Planner Ebook - $119.00
TripAdvisor - $222.83
Clickbank - $189.95
Private Advertising - $105.00
AzoogleAds - $17.30
Microsoft - $400.00
Other Affiliate Programs - $103.60
 
Total Revenue - $3,479.61
 
Total Income - $3,479.61

You may have noticed that Commission Junction revenue is down by a large margin and that’s because most of what I was earning through them was from eBay who has now moved over to their own private program management and Pepperjam Network. Also, I was earning some decent money through generating leads with Apartments.com and had been up in the range of $200-$250 per month, but their landing pages stopped converting and now the same amount of clicks sent their way is earning me $40 rather than $200 per month.

I’m continuing to work on PPC and have had some limited success and with earnings this month I’ll have an even bigger advertising budget than last month, so things are looking up.

Pepperjam Network recently announced they have partnered up with eBay’s affiliate program and are now offering the same high payouts that eBay is. I don’t know if anyone has said this yet, but this is a huge coup for Pepperjam in the affiliate marketing space. Commission Junction isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, but for Pepperjam this signals they mean business.

I’m sure eBay was a substantial revenue source for CJ and since eBay’s transition over to the eBay Partner Network, it remains to be seen how much revenue this move will be able to generate for Pepperjam, but it certainly will be exciting to watch.

But you are probably asking yourself, ‘Why join eBay through Pepperjam?’ And I posed that very same question to Robyn at Pepperjam when I sent her an email asking, “eBay just recently brought their affiliate program in-house and they now manage it themselves, why would someone want to partner up with Pepperjam when they can join the eBay Partner Network directly?” To which she responded:

“There are many benefits of choosing to promote the eBay Partner Network through Pepperjam, including the dedicated team of experienced affiliate managers we have ready to help affiliates in real time, as well as aggressive payouts.  For more details, log into your Pepperjam Network account.”

And when you do read up on the info in your Pepperjam account you will see this:

**COMING SOON - Pepperjam is currently working with eBay to release access to EPN’s Link Generator, widgets, and more to Pepperjam Network affiliates. Stay tuned for other exciting announcements.

This is good new because my initial look at eBay through Pepperjam wasn’t all that exciting. At first the only creatives were just banners and links that all went to eBay’s home page and could not be deep linked. All that has changed as I checked this morning and saw that any banner and any link can now be deep linked to any page on eBay. I also see there is a section for eBay Advanced Links as well, although it doesn’t appear to be functioning as of press time.

Because I make most of my revenue from Build A Niche Stores that have to be directly linked to eBay, I don’t see using Pepperjam there, but I can see direct linking to individual categories and searches on some of my sites and on blog posts through Pepperjam to get a little better tracking. At least at this point there still seems to be some issues with EPN click reporting, indicating a large number of clicks occasionally for no apparent reason.

I continue to be impressed with the way Pepperjam Network is looking and especially with the eBay partnetship, in a very short time they are shaping up to be a serious contender for the affiliate marketer to do business with. It seem like on a daily basis they are adding new merchants and offers and may someday be the “go to” affiliate network on the web as CJ once was.

Don’t get left in the dust wondering what happened to all the good affiliate networks, join Pepperjam Network here and take advantage of their pertnership with eBay while you’re at it.

Over this last week I’ve been listening in live to Jeremy Palmer’s course, The Black Ink Project which Jeremy is graciously offering for free. This first week covered some pretty basic stuff, but was very good info for the beginning affiliate as it mostly covered setting up your business, finding niches and developing a plan for your business. Even though this week was basic info, the last session on Friday was probably the most important one for me as it dealt with time management and work habits of which I struggle with.

Now, if you don’t know Jeremy Palmer, he is one of the top performers at Commission Junction earning over a million dollars in commissions per year for the last 3 years or so. What makes Jeremy different from a lot of the top guru affiliate marketers is that he is probably the most transparent person in this industry. With his decision some time ago to get completely out of information marketing, because he doesn’t want to be associated with the clowns selling worthless ebooks, that makes him all the more trustworthy. Jeremy used to sell an ebook entitled High Performance Affiliate Marketing for $49 which I bought a while ago, but he now gives it away for free for the reason that there is very valuable information in it, but he doesn’t want to position himself as selling the six-figure-per-year-dream just from buying an ebook.

Along with the ebook being available for free, Jeremy also runs the Quit Your Day Job forums and came up with the idea for The Black In Project to get people excited and increase participation at the forums. With participation by some of the top money making affiliates and internet business experts, The Black Ink Project could cost you a couple thousand dollars or more, but if you click this link and join the course, you can get it for the unbelievable price of…absolutely nothing. That’s correct the course is free and you really don’t have to click on the link to get it for that price, I guess you could type in theblackinkproject.com if you wanted to. The course was originally intended for only 1,000 people, but it filled up so fast that Jeremy decided to open it up to 2,000 more people. But seriously, don’t even get involved if you aren’t committed to it.

The next three weeks will get more into the meat of the course and will cover topics such as designing an eye appealing site, individual landing page design, mastering pay-per-click marketing, building links, social media, outsourcing and more. It will also feature top name affiliates such as Amit Mehta, Aaron Wall of SEOBook and more. I’m really looking forward to the PPC marketing course because I am a PPC guru at losing money. If you want to know how to lose money at Google Adwords, I can definitely show you how to do that. I’m dedicating the next couple of months to taking a completely fresh look at PPC so someday I might actually know what I’m doing in that arena and be able to help people out.

If you are serious about improving your affiliate marketing, and I do mean serious, you can join The Black In Project here. You can also read more about Jeremy’s free ebook here.

Utter panic, rioting, confusion and general mayhem in the streets has subsided with the recent announcement that eBay affiliates will be given till the end of May to change all their links and completely migrate over to the new eBay Partner Network. eBay announced last month that they would be leaving Commission Junction to manage their affiliate program in house and initially gave affiliates only 30 days make the switch.

I’m sure multitudes of eBay affiliates are breathing a sigh of relief today knowing that they don’t have to cram in possibly weeks worth of work in the next 3 days. I was looking at a very busy 3 day stretch here because I have one site in particular that still has some 60 pages of rss feeds that need to be changed. And other affiliates have huge sites or networks of sites with tens of thousands of links that still need to be converted.

eBay made the announcement about the migration extension on their blog on April 25. Stated in the post was eBay’s admission that only 66% of their affiliates had made the switch to EPN thus far, leaving another 33% lagging behind. It was definitely a smart move on eBay’s part to extend the deadline because 33% of their traffic from affiliates may not have reached the correct destination making for a possible combination of lost revenue and unhappy affiliates.

The extension will end on May 31, but because of contractual obligations, no commissions will be paid after that date. However, it would be a good idea to make all your changes before May 24th because there is a 7 day cookie set on any traffic sent to eBay. So to avoid losing commissions from clicks in May that end up converting in June, it’s best to get er’ done before the 24th.

It’s good to get a little leeway, but if you are an eBay affiliate don’t let it go too long and end up against the wall at the end of May. I was planning on finishing up everything by Wednesday, so maybe I’ll extend that to Friday. It’s best to stick with your original plans as close as possible.