www.affiliateconfession.com

Even though I had major revenue reductions this month from eBay, Adsense, Azoogle, Market Leverage and a few others, I still managed to have a record month in affiliate earnings. Most all of the increase came from pay per click earnings to the tune of more than $2,100 profit. I owe nearly all of what I’ve learned about PPC to PPC Coach. The bottom line you see below would have been $2,100 less with out it.

I’m not sure what’s going on with eBay, but many an affiliate are seriously complaining about revenue drops in September. I was down $300 in eBay earnings this month and nearly $750 from the month before that. What’s very odd is that my earnings per winning bid have gone from $4.80 in July 2008, to $3.52 in August, to $2.25 for the month of September. That’s a 55% reduction in revenue earned per winning bid in 3 months time. There will certainly be shifts in earnings, but I’m not liking the trend. Time to contact eBay.

Regardless of the inner workings of eBay I’m very thankful for the overall increase this past month. Total revenue for September was $7,292.33 with expenses at $2,551.70, making for a net profit of $4,740.63. It all breaks down as follows:

Google Adsense - $1,055.10
Commission Junction - $109.28
EPN - eBay - $458.61
Meal Planner Ebook - $170.00
TripAdvisor - $105.76
Clickbank - $45.83
Private Advertising - $35.00
AzoogleAds - $694.45
Microsoft - $200.00
Pepperjam - $33.00
Market Leverage - $73.35
Neverblue - $4,042.50
Other Affiliate Programs - $269.80

Total Revenue - $7,292.33

Total expenses - $2,551.70

Total Income - $4,740.63

My goal for September was to earn $5,000 profit, but I missed it by only $260. Hopefully with Halloween promotions and PPC looking nice this month so far (and maybe some favor from eBay), the $5,000 will be reached in October. As always, remember to diversify your affiliate income to make up for when eBay and Adsense aren’t as nice as they could be.

On the heels of Monday’s PPC earnings of over $200, yesterday was a significant milestone in my affiliate career as I realized a record profit of over $500, of which $446 came from pay per click. The two PPC campaigns that are the most profitable for me more than doubled in volume and earnings from the previous day.

The last few days of nice profits have been a really great way to end the month, however I don’t think it will be a record overall for the entire month. I got hammered this month on eBay earnings and Adsense income suffered a bit because of the slowdown during this time of year in the travel industry. I make the bulk of my Adsense earnings from travel. While earnings from PPC is up significantly this month, combined Adsense and eBay income is down by more than $1,000.

While it is great to earn this much in a day, and do the bulk of it from PPC, it’s not really where I want to be with by online endeavors. The earnings from paying for traffic are very tenuous and could go away tomorrow. One of the campaigns is a little more stable than the other and should be able to  make a profit for the next few months, but I don’t expect the other to last that long.

This is why it’s so important to diversify your income as an affiliate and why I sometimes harp on this point. You just never know where your income might come from month to month. It has been the story of my affiliate career to do really well with one source of income only to have another source drop significantly or even completely dry up. I used to make $200 to $300 per month producing $1 leads for Rentalo.com from my travel sites, but no longer use their program.

It’s nice to make $500 in one day, but at this point I’m only considering it bonus money. I’ll get really excited when I make that kind of money every day for a month. 

The time has finally come to remove the Entrecard widget from Affiliate Confession and make better use of the sidebar space it has occupied. Over the last couple of months some major bloggers have dropped Entrecard and some of my favorite places to advertise (that have brought me the most traffic) have left as well, but the last straw in helping me make that decision was when Lisa from To Create A Website rejected my Entrecard advertisement because she is also leaving Entrecard.

I’ve had a 9 month love, hate relationship with Entrecard and sang it’s praises when I first installed the widget on this blog at the beginning of December 2007. Through those 9 months I’ve tried massive advertising experiments, purchased credits from eBay and Entrecard itself, won thousands of Entrecard credits and spent massive amounts of time dropping cards and trying to find blogs worthy of advertising on.

And that’s where my main issue with Entrecard comes in. Trying to locate blogs worthy of spending your hard earned credits to advertise on is a huge time waster mainly because 97 to 98% of the blogs in the Entrecard system are one small step above being spam blogs. And unfortunately the pricing system for advertising isn’t based on actual traffic a blog receives, it’s based on how many ads are waiting to be shown in the blog’s que. This sometimes creates hugely overpriced ads that bring little to no traffic.

The process of hunting down blogs in your niche, visiting them to see what they look like, weeding through blogs that have advert prices above 1000 credits, yet have less than 10 rss readers, getting less than quality traffic from your ads and then sticking with that process week, after week, after week is just too cumbersome. Where Entrecard fails in my opinion is that the adverts you place only last for 24 hours. In my last advertising blitz I spent somewhere around 8 hours using up 30,000 credits, advertising on 300 different blogs and did get some low quality visitors to the tune of 250 to 300 oer day. But that only lasted for 10 days and the whole process starts over again.

That just doesn’t work economically for me. If I’m going to spend 8 hours doing advertising for my blog, it should last longer than 10 days and bring better quality traffic. Entrecard is too much like those lame traffic exchange systems where you earn traffic credits for visiting other sites in the system you aren’t interested in just to get people who aren’t interested in your site to visit you. Sadly, Entrecard is not much different than that.

If you have an ad already in my que it will run, but as of today, I won’t be approving any new ads. See ya later Entrecard.

For the last few weeks I’ve been toying around with a new store building script called StoreStacker that I believe has potential even though I had quite the adventure installing it. Yes, StoreStacker has potential, but if you don’t have the right hosting that includes Zend Optimizer and the ability to easily run cron jobs, this could be one seriously frustrating install for you.

StoreStacker is a script that you upload and install on your server that grabs products and feeds from eBay, Amazon, YouTube, Clickbank, Overstock, RegNow, HotelClub and any RSS feed that mashes everything up into a nice little store that could have anywhere from 50 pages to 1,000’s of pages. With the exception of  products featured on your home page, StoreStacker creates an individual page for every single item in your store. For instance, I created this digital camera deals web site with products from eBay and Amazon, photography videos from YouTube and photography books from Clickbank and Amazon, with every product having its own page.

As you go to each product or video page, StoreStacker grabs the product description, tags and other pertinent info along with automatically mashing up different products, books and videos related to the content on the page, giving you unique content for search engines to index. I installed the digital camera site as a test only 3 weeks ago or so and as of this post I have 11 pages indexed by Google so far.

While StoreStacker does create a lot of content for you, I would never suggest you just throw up one of these stores and not add any of your own original content. There’s just too much garbage on the net today and we certainly don’t need to add to the cyber-landfill that spammers and spolgs have created. StoreStacker allows you to add content to any page just by navigating to each one and adding your own product description or whatever you want and I suggest you do this to as many pages as you can (my store still needs a lot of work).

Since your store will change over time because of updating you will do through a cron job, you probably aren’t going to want to add content to your individual eBay pages. They will obviously change once your store updates. What you can do is add content to your home page, each individual category page and to pages that will be permanent such as product pages from Clickbank, videos from YouTube and some Amazon pages.

Now for hosting StoreStacker. I have to be totally honest with you because that’s why I call this blog Affiliate Confession. Installing this script was a huge pain, no joke. It’s probably more the fault of my hosting company 1and1.com rather than StoreStacker, but it took me 3 days to get this thing working correctly and I was almost to the point of dropping the entire project. However, I see the potential of something like this to make some decent cash and I decided to stick with it.

I think the problem is that 1and1 doesn’t have Zend Optimizer installed and doesn’t use cPanel as as the default interface once you log into your hosting account. Most hosts either have Zend Optimizer installed or will do it for you because it is not something most companies want you to try on your own. After trying to install Zend with no luck on my own and a few emails to tech support pleading with them, they finally installed it for me and I was able to complete the installation of StoreStacker.

Another obstacle I ran into was the ability to run cron jobs at 1and1. Amongst many other things, cPanel allows you to easily set up cron jobs which will automatically update your StoreStacker Store with new products as eBay, Amazon, Overstock and other sites update their products (of course it is especially important for you to be able to update eBay at least once a day). Since 1and1 doesn’t have cPanel, it is a little more complicated process to run cron jobs there. You can still update your store without running a cron job by going into your store interface and updating each category page by hand.

I think StoreStacker can be a nice product for building a quick affiliate store or 2 or 3 (actually you can build as many stores as you want for the price of admission), but you definitely don’t want to host with 1and1 if you decide to use it. If you do get StoreStacker, make darn sure you write to tech support at your hosting company and ask them if Zend Optimizer is installed (or if they will do it for you, for each store) and ask if they use cPanel or have a way to easily set up cron jobs.

Pricing for StoreStacker is $97 for the script and includes the Amazon and eBay plugins. Additional plugins for Clickbank, Overstock, YouTube and others are $25 each. However if you are one of the first few customers some of the plugins will be free, but I’m not sure how many.

Check out StoreStacker and see if it’s for you.

As an affiliate it’s great to dream a little and think about those what if I had more money scenarios. Well I came across one of those what if moments a couple of days ago with a hefty price tag of $8,000, but it is actually a pretty good deal. Here’s what I’d do if I had a quick $8,000 windfall.

Since I’m a drummer I’m always perusing the percussion category on eBay for deals or just to see what people are selling. I’m especially fond of drum sets with very exotic woods and finishes and I found the DW drum set below just a couple of days ago and I’ve fallen in love with it. 

The set is made by Drum Workshop, DW for short, and it is one of the most incredible looking  set of drums I think I’ve ever seen for sale on eBay. They are truly a thing of beauty. If you aren’t a drummer it would help to know that DW drums are some of the highest quality and most expensive drums in the world. At full retail price you may be able to find a set like this, drums only with no hardware, for around $12,000 however, this looks to be an exotic wood and paint fade that may have been a custom order so it could possibly be retailed for somewhat more.

The auction ends 4 days from this post and the price is up to a little over $4,000 right now and there is a Buy It Now price of $7,999. And let me tell you what, if the cash were available, I wouldn’t even hesitate to pay the asking price and be done with it. Even though the person doing the auction has a 100% positive feedback rating, I might send the guy an email just to make sure the whole thing is legit before spending $8,000, but that’s about it. You can see more pictures of this once in a lifetime find and check out the drum set auction here.

Now I just need to find the affiliate offer or product that can make $8,000 in the next 3 or 4 days. Any suggestions?