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May is turning out to be a very good month for my Build A Niche Store web sites and the eBay affiliate program. The final numbers won’t be in until Monday or late tomorrow, but it looks like earnings for my BANS stores should be around $900 for the month and earnings for the best performing BANS store around $650.

I did spend some money driving traffic to one of these stores this month, but only to the tune of a little over $100 and it has apparently paid off fairly well. Last month my top store produced $246.68 in revenue and I spent a whopping $2.90 in PPC traffic, this month $101.97 has been spent on PPC and revenue is at $629.44 for the same store. PPC search traffic this month has produced 304 clicks to this store resulting in 314 bids and 97 winning bids. Last month with virtually no PPC traffic, there were 139 total bids with 53 winning bids at the same store.

A little closer examination needs to be done on organic search traffic versus paid traffic to see where the real gains are coming from, but initially it looks as though paid search is paying off for this Build A Niche Store site. I’m working on another BANS site that I will be trying some paid search on, the earnings probably won’t be as significant for at least one reason. The store I’m sending paid traffic to right now is based on products that sell for between $500 and $1,000 and sometimes even more.

It is questionable as to whether paid search would work on a BANS site with items selling for much less than $300 to 400. The reason being is that you earn about 2% for a sale at eBay and earning anything much less than $10 per sale is hard to make work with PPC. Of course there’s always the chance of selling multiple items and earning a few $25 new member bounties which would make paid search worthwhile. The new store I’ll be sending search traffic to will have items ranging from $100 to $300 in price so it will be a little experiment to see if this theory holds true.

One last note is that the store bringing me good returns with PPC is a fully built store with substantial content in both articles and content on auction pages so I’m getting very good quality scores from Google on the pages I’m sending traffic to. PPC probably won’t work on pages that have nothing but auctions.

You can get more info on Build A Niche Store here.

If you’ve been following me on Twitter for the last month you may have noticed I’ve been dropping little hints about a super secret project in the works. It is now completed, but the results might not be available for a few days or so. I’ve been pouring myself into this thing for a month now and I hope I haven’t burned myself out.

It’s not what you think though. It doesn’t involve a web site, a blog, a BANS store, the eBay affiliate program or any of the things I normally blog about, but it could have an big impact on those things. It’s been a project more from the standpoint of trying to see how hard I could push myself rather than much of anything else.

Some may even be able to figure it out because there have been little hints left here and there on this blog. If the results turn out as I plan, then I’ll be posting about how I was able to accomplish what happened, if the results aren’t what I had anticipated then the posts will be more about how to persevere when you put just about everything you have into something and you don’t get what you expected out of it. Either way I’ll have something to blog about.

So stay tuned, results will be in soon.

Some days the the eBay affiliate program pays off in big dividends. Sunday was one of those days. Too bad this isn’t a consistent amount, but earnings for my Build A Niche Store sites came in at $278.01 for a single day and earnings for my top performing site were $273.52 and that was on 40 sales for a single site. But as big of a payoff as it was one day, it’s back to normal the next as you can see from the chart below:

Sunday’s earnings from eBay were 20 times what Monday’s earnings were, coming in at $12.04. Yes, consistency would be great, but at least from this example you can see the potential earnings you can get through eBay and BANS. Now, this isn’t some anomaly where The eBay Partner Network is paying back for missed commissions (even though some are wondering if they’re getting things right) because after downloading my eBay affiliate report for Sunday and spot checking some of the winning bids, these were all auctions than ended on Sunday and were paid for on Sunday.

Build A Niche Store really works.

Tags: ebay partner network, ebay affiliate program, build a niche store, bans

Well the first full month’s report is in from the new eBay EPN affiliate network thingy (I’m still not sure how to refer to it) and with the inconsistency of earnings it reminds me of the movie Jaws. As you can see below there’s not any more than 2 days of steady earnings:

I find the up and down roller coaster earning levels a little weird. I mean, what’s going on here? Is there an effort on the part of eBay buyers to only make good on their payments just every other day? Is eBay not correctly reporting and still working on getting EPN up to speed? What’s weird is that if you average out my clicks per day, discounting a couple of 3,000 clicks per day anomalies, I come in around 250 to 300 each day and that’s a pretty consistent line. So why the inconsistency in earnings?

Well anyway, just to be goofy, I took my earnings line through the 26th and made a little illustration. I hope there’s no truth to this? The shark’s teeth match up perfectly with revenue:

Anyone else seeing a roller coaster ride of eBay affiliate earnings like this?

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.