Archive for 'June, 2008'

Entrecard has changed quite a bit since I first signed up. There are probably a couple dozen more categories, and a thousand of more blogs signed up. One of the better new features is the one where you can add multiple blogs to your account. I have quite a few blogs, and keeping separate accounts at Entrecard was nothing short of a pain. Also dropping Entrecards can be a big pain too, but now you get 25 credits for every blog post you make up to 3 per week. So you can get advertising credits without dropping a thing.

Today was a day like any other, I dropped some Entrecards and did some advertising. I don’t spend a lot of time doing it, but once or twice per week I like to stay a bit active in the community. When people ask me what Entrecard does (beyond waste time), I tell them that it’s good for branding, getting your name out there, you can get new readers and RSS subs from it, and over time the exposure is pretty positive.

For quite a while I’ve only had 2 blogs listed in my Entrecard account, and today I felt a need to add a third. It was good to go through this process, because it led me to think about the benefits of blogging beyond the advertising aspect. These are the things that most bloggers see, but don’t talk about. It’s not like the benefits are hidden – you just might not think about them.

Add a new blog to Entrecard (or start a new account for the first time) and then…

Drop 30 Entrecards in your category

Immediately after you add your new account and place the Entrecard code in your template to display ads, the first thing you want to do is drop about 30 Entrecards on blogs in the category you signed up in. I use Firefox, and open all the blogs in new tabs so I can look at them one by one. Drop your card on each one as you view them.

Look for Advertising Widgets

As you’re looking at the blogs and dropping cards, the first thing you’ll probably see are different types of advertising widgets. Take note of who’s using what, which ones are more popular, and which ones you haven’t heard of yet and might be interested in signing up for. I did this today and I found some things I’d never seen before.

125 Exchange is a service like Entrecard, the only difference is it works a bit like blogrush – since they give you 2 free ad views every time 3 people click and ad from your site. I signed up because when you signup for the first time, you get 5,000 free impressions – who can’t use that?

I also found Link Referral, which seems to be like a free “ReviewMe”. I haven’t dug into the details yet, but it seems like it could be a good one to signup for.

Look for New Online Communities

It’s true that there are more online and social communities than you can shake a stick at – but sometimes just when you think you know them all, new niche communities crop up that could be very beneficial. For example, my first two blogs added in Entrecard were in the Make Money Online and Technology categories. The third blog was in the Cooking and Dining category. When I surfed 30 blogs and dropped my card I found blogging networks that niche I never even knew existed.

I found FoodBuzz to be a really cool niche community. BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog are great, but there are soooo many blogs, and most of them don’t have anything to do with your niche. In FoodBuzz, I know for sure that every site is about cooking, recipes, and food. Is there something like this for your niche?

The Foodie Blog Roll was another site I found for my niche, but they specialize in a BlogRoll widget of other food-related sites. That’s really cool, and this is another site I need to sign up for right away.

Look for Niche Content Directories and Tools

I already use Ezine Articles to submit food articles and recipes, so it never crossed my mind to look for food specific directories or tools. I found one site right off the bat called Tastebook that let’s you build your own online cookbook for free. They say it’s like an “iTunes for Recipes”, because you can build and sell your own cookbook. How can you beat that?

I also found Associated Content, which isn’t niche specific, but I saw that a lot of food blogs were using it. This is a service I’ll probably have to check out too.

My Free Copyright is also another site that surprised me, because I thought that Creative Commons was the only type of site for things like this.

How it Benefits You

Look at all the new sites and tools I found today for my food blog that I never knew existed. If I sign up for and use the best ones I found, I’ll get 10-fold the exposure I would have through Entrecard alone, but if I hadn’t signed up for Entrecard with the new blog and dropped 30 card, I never would have known these services (or blogs) even existed. Entrecard can benefit you beyond advertising – register a new blog of yours today!

Try our free niche mashup script and create pages with YouTube, eBay, Amazon, and Adsense!

I posted my free niche site script page last night, and so far it’s been pretty well-received. I first found this script on 45n5.com last year, but that version doesn’t work anymore. I found a new working version on JustAskRan.com – and it’s awesome! I modified it just a bit so you can add original content and create template pages, it’s pretty basic but works great for mini-sites. It could be a great complement to your BANS site or a niche blog – just slap it in a sub-directory with some keyword targeted template pages, and you’re good to go! Did I mention it was free?

Make sites like this one!

What’s the difference between a blog with 300 RSS subscribers and one with 25,000? Is it just the subject matter, or could it be the writer? I think that as we chase our online dreams by building niche sites and blog empires sometimes we forget that the crux of all of this is writing. I got interested in this whole working online lifestyle because I love to write. I had a web site online and was writing pages, tips, and tricks before there even was Adsense, before google was popular, and even before there were ways to monetize your web site.

I still blog because I love to write, but the goal now is to be able to work from home full time for a living. I watch a lot of the other affiliate and online marketers and how they build their own online businesses and many of them surround themselves with support staff that carry out menial web work for them. But the good ones all seem to blog and write heavily themselves, developing a following as they climb the ladder of success.

What does this mean? If you want to do the same, you may want to learn how to become a better writer. One way to do that is to read some of the most successful blogs on the web. The more good writers you read, the better writer you will become – and you’ll probably get some great blog post ideas along the way as well. It was chance that I came across this post today – the 20 Must Read Blogs for Freelance Writers. I have to say – this is the first time I read a blog list like this, and really had only heard of maybe 4 or 5 of the list of 20. I visited each blog one by one, and they are all not only great examples of outstanding writing, but the blog designs are impeccable, and each one has RSS readers in the thousands. To become successful it helps to watch those that already are so you can learn. I hope you can find as many great new blogs to read as I did!

I’m about to reveal to you the most unexpected form of blog traffic I’ve every received.

About 3 weeks ago I blogged about Incredibly Unexpected Internet Connections, and I eluded to a post to come about an unexpected form of traffic to one of my blogs. Unfortunately I got the publish date wrong and it took a week longer for the issue to come out so I could post this news. Check this out:

If you live in the US, if you go to nearly any drugstore or supermarket in the country you will see “Woman’s World” with the tabloids at the checkout counter. Yesterday (the 23rd) the June 30th, 2008 issue hit the stands – and if you turn to page #35, you’ll find a quote from me with a link to my geek tech blog The Smorgasbord.

Here’s a scan of the section of that page I’m on:

So, I’ve gotten national promotion for one of my blogs for free, and the publication I’m featured in has 12 Million weekly readers. How did I do this? I can’t take the credit really, because it’s not like I solicited the plug. I was contacted through my blog by Woman’s World and asked if they could do a phone interview with me about cell phones since I write about tech gadgets (and often phones). I was more than happy to oblige. I did the interview without knowing if I would get anything in return at all, let alone a link in the magazine for my blog. I’m very happy about this, and while I don’t expect it to make me famous or a millionaire overnight – it’s good exposure and only good things can come of it.

While opportunities don’t come along like this every day – my advice to you would be, make sure you have a working contact form (test it yourself), and be sure to personally answer every inquiry that comes through. When following up, don’t book a judge by it’s cover because you never know what even simple requests for info could lead to.

So, with 12 Million readers – how much new traffic will my blog get? I don’t know, that’s hard to say how a print magazine will translated to the web. The good news is, if they actually took the time to write down the URL and type it into a browser when they got back to the computer they must be interested in the content, so they may be more of a captive reader than someone coming through a search engine. In the last 24 hours, my traffic has doubled, and I assume it will increase throughout the week as more people read – especially towards the weekend. It will be very interesting to see how busy it gets.

What’s the most unexpected form of traffic you ever received to one of your web sites or blogs?

Affiliate Confession is putting on a contest in partnership with Market Leverage, and Vat 19.

There are more than $350 worth of prizes, which include a Nintendo DS and two games, a Flip Video mino (that I really, really want!), and more importantly a USB missle launcher and a Banana Bunker that has to be seen to be believed. All you have to do is post about the contest and leave a small comment – so get on that right away (there’s less than a week left in the contest).

Also – I’ll announce on Monday what some of you have been waiting patiently for – my “unexpected Internet connection” and a very unlikely stream of new traffic for one of my blogs. In addition to that – I will be releasing a Free Niche Store Script here very soon – so stay near your RSS reader!

Is a dot info (.info) domain good or bad for a BANS niche store? We’re going to do a little testing and find out!

This is installment #9 in the Watch me build a BANS niche site from Scratch series!

There’s been a lot of talk about whether or not a dot info domain is worth having any more (for a BANS store). There are countless forum threads in the BANS members forum about it. Until recently I wasn’t personally sure if google had a vendetta out against dot info (.info) domains or not. That was – until the other day.

I’ve had a few dot info domains for about a year now. A lot of hosts (goDaddy) were offering .info domains for only 99 cents for the first year, which led lots of webpreneurs like myself to grab up prime names quickly for just a buck. I grabbed a handful – like 10 I think. It looks like I was just small potatoes though – as I’ve read about many BANS site owners who bough 100+ for BANS stores. To make matters worse, with the .info so cheap BANS site owners weren’t the only ones cleaning up – spammers were buying up the names in droves, because for for only a dollar, surely they would earn their money back and then some before their domain was banned or blacklisted.

I think what happenned here is that BANS sites (with original content) got caught in the crossfire. If you were a BANS site owner that purchased 100+ domains and just did the basis setup (with no content pages) – to google you really were a spammer and you site had no value (beyond the auctions) to visitors. Our test BANS site for this series (Used Cell Phones) was de-indexed by google early on, and I attributed that to “google sandboxing”, since my other .info domains (which are blogs) have been fine.

Then, last week one of my dot info blogs (Top Jokes) got dropped by google like a hot rock for no good reason. I don’t sell text links, I regularly post new content, and I wasn’t doing anything even remotely unscrupulous to irk the ire of google to drop me. It looks like even regular sites (with lots of content) can get caught in the crossfire as well. My other .info sites are all still fine in the google index. So who knows what the rhyme and reason to it is.

As you’re read in previous posts, our BANS test site is making money and getting traffic from MSN Live Search just fine. Nothing is really coming from Yahoo! yet (although their crawler visits daily). So I’ve decided to move our BANS test site from .info to .com to see what happens! Now, mind you – I’m not going to take down the .info domain at all. Why should I? It’s making money and getting traffic from MSN Search, why give that up? But I’m very curious to see if google will index the .com version of our BANS test site as “original content”, since it won’t index the .info version at all. I think this is a very worth test experiment.

As luck would have it – I already own a related domain Cell Phone How To that established with a PR. So, I created a sub-directory “/used-cell-phones” to move the BANS site to for the test. I did this rather than purchase a new domain name because I don’t want to end up in the sandbox (again) and want to get on with the experiment.

How to Move a BANS niche store to a new domain

This is a very easy and quick process, I had my store moved in about 10-15 minutes. I’m going to assume you can navigate your own webhost control panel to do the following operations:

1. Create a new database on your new domain
2. Create a new database user
3. Assign the new user to the new database
4. Export your MySQL database from your old domain
5. Import the MySQL database on your new domain
6. Edit your /cont/cont.php file with new info
7. Login at the new domain

If it all seems very easy – it is. The first thing I did was change my meta description and title a bit to make it different from the old site just slightly. Then I checked my pages to make sure that the links weren’t broken. If you setup any manual links, you may have to edit them. Other than that – everything seemed to work beautifully right out of the box.

Next on my agenda is to remove my old (.info) sitemap from google webmaster tools and add this one. In addition – I’m not going to register the sitemap on this new test site with MSN or Yahoo at all (why screw up a good thing on the other site for now). The goal is to find out if I can get indexed on this new .com version of our BANS test site, and to see how long it takes. I’m not going to do any link building this week at all – let’s just see if we can get in the index or not and go from there!

As always – if you have something to add or a question, by all means comment now!

Don’t have “Build a Niche Store” yet? Click here:

If you’re reading this page to try and figure out is Build a Niche Site for you or not – please consider buying BANS through my affiliate link. I make a small commission, which would help defray some of my time and expense for putting together this BANS tutorial (and future BANS success articles) for you! I purchased my copy through an affiliate link in gratitude to the blogger who talked of his success with this niche building site script.

Also – if BANS isn’t for you, please consider reading How to earn money using Affiliate eBay WordPress Plugin BAYRss. With BANS you build content basically around eBay auctions, but with BAYRss you place eBay auctions in your posts and pages. Check it out, I use (and make money) with both BANS and BayRSS!

For a successful BANS site the importance of your store pages can’t be overlooked. Setting them up for ease of use and maximum monetization isn’t just to make more money, believe it or not it’s to build more traffic too!

This is installment #8 in the Watch me build a BANS niche site from Scratch series!

We’ve done a lot of things in this series so far, from keyword research, to building links, and creating content. But one of the things that we haven’t done (and I’ve overlooked) is manage our store pages properly. You see, if we’re going to own a store we have to begin to think about our BANS site like a brick and mortar store is setup. Imagine that you’re going to the supermarket to get some groceries. Think about the first things that you see as you pull up to the store. You see the sign, the name of the store, and as you park your care and walk up to the door you see some ads in the windows. As you go down the sidewalk and walk inside usually the very first thing you see is the weekly ad prominently displayed with a neat stack of them so you can take one. As you grab a cart and head toward that first aisle with the weekly ad now opened in your hand you usually have to pass by big pallets and piles of those weekly specials just to get to first aisle.

As you make your way around the aisles, at the end of each is an “endcap” display highlighting something on sale in that aisle. As you make your way through each aisle you see red stickers and signs pointing out all the specials and deals as you go, some of the shelves even have coupons you can take. Once your cart is full and you think all your money has been spent you head toward the checkout. As you stand in line you read the tabloid headlines, grab a cold beverage from the cooler or maybe a candy bar and think about whether you need to purchase the crazy glue, nail clippers, or eyeglass repair kit you see while waiting to put your items on the belt.

Now stop and think about everything you’ve just read. Compare your walk through the brick and mortar store to your BANS site. How many opportunites does the supermarket have to guide you towards something they want to sell you? How many times do they try and suggest something? How does the placement of items affect sales?

How can you use this knowledge and apply it to your BANS site?

Let’s go back through the walkthrough and apply what we’ve learned…the following real world principles should be applied to your BANS store:

Give your BANS store some CURB appeal: Nobody is going to stop, stay, or shop at a run-down store. Learn how to or pay someone to customize your BANS store a bit and make it look more professional. At very least have an eye-catching header, but there are other things you can customize too. Doing this will spice up every store page you have since your template is the frame for them.

Design your home page like a supermarket would design an ad or flyer for the week: What are you highlighting or featuring (if anything?). Are you linking to inside store pages? Do you have eye-catching pictures?

Design every top level “store” page like a store aisle: Have appealing ads and graphics before and after your top level store content and auctions acting as “endcaps” in a store aisle. Suggest specific products by using or creating specific search or product pages, point to content pages and reviews and keep visitors moving throughout your store.

Use the “checkout” technique: Suggest appropriate and relevant items in your store by playing links, ads, graphics, content, text or whatever is appropriate. For instance, if you’re selling camcorders a sub-page for “camcorder batteries” may have to be created because eBay has them buried in an “accessories” page – and then suggest and link to that page on the camcorder section with text or graphics.

I’m going to help you put those 4 concepts into action. Probably the easiest and quickest way to give your BANS store some Pizazz is to just change the template. You only get so many templates when you buy BANS – but you can sure install a FREE BANS Template with ease from one of these sites:

Concept #1 – Spruce up your BANS site

Blogger Unleashed has a free Brown BANS template for download

The Niche Store Builder has a download with 8 different colored free BANS templates.

Best BANS Templates has both Blueberry and Kiwi free BANS templates for download

Blog Explosion has both a Sniper and Prosense free BANS template for download

Build a Niche Store Blog has a really cool and impressive “Green” free BANS template for download

Nails Blog has a cool free BANS theme called magazine

SEO Zombie has a free BANS template called “Ice”

Maybe you don’t want to have to install a new theme, but would like to change the colors of your BANS store. If that’s the case just use the free Color my BANS free online tool to automatically select colors and get a free customized CSS file for your template (without having to know any code).

If you want to learn how to change the colors in your BANS stylesheet on your own, Niche Store Strategies has a nice tutorial on How to change the colors on your BANS site.

Concept #2 – Highlight, Feature, and Link to BANS store pages on Home Page

Look – if all you BANS site has is your navigation you’re sunk! You front homepage should have some good original content food for the search engines, but you shouldn’t overlook your visitors! Have you ever seen the adsense heat map? Visitors have a short attention span and their eyes are front and center on your homepage. Give them something appealing to click on NOW! If nothing more add some pictures to some of your products, but be sure to actually link them to pages inside you’re store!

Things you should highlight:

• Items for upcoming holidays
• Accessories
• Hottest selling products
• New Products
• Featured content

If you stick to those 5 areas you should have no problem creating eye-catching graphics for internal BANS store pages. Be creative, be sure to update for the holidays, add accessories that go with your main categories, keep up with what’s new and selling on ebay to match with hot products in your store, and be sure to feature your best content pages as well. Towards the end of this article I’m going to show you how to rotate these easily on your home page and other store pages.

Concept #3 – Treat BANS “store pages” like aisles in a real store

Building on the concept #2, you want to treat your internal store pages like aisles in a store. Wrap the content and auctions with “endcaps”. The first thing you can do is monetize your site beyond the usual “adsense” ads sitewide. If you’re a member of Commission Junction, or Pepperjam, get some banners and link codes for merchants that complement your niche store. On your store pages, just add them in the “before” or “after” content blocks in edit mode (or in the sidebar). You could add these in under “ads” to be sitewide, but people become blind to ads, and I think it’s important to have different onces on different store pages. Once again – I can show you a way to rotate these a bit at the end of this article.

Monetizing your store pages is great, but don’t forget to promote yourself. I think that every store page should some type of recommended products or pages before and after the content. Use graphics, text, again – be creative! You should be thinking here like a salesman would, a camcorder site should have tripods and batteries linked on the camcorder product pages – not just under accessories! You should mod your BANS site to make it intuitive, so people don’t have to think or hunt and peck to find what they need.

Part of this concept is actually creating new store pages that contain only specific hot or top products. For instance, I’m going to create a page for “Top Cell Phones”. It will be a store page where my main category is filtered to the keywords “used cell phones” and above the content is a list of top 10 phones linked to 10 other store pages I’m going to create. Each of those is a sub-store-page of “Top Cell Phones”, and they are limited to a keyword search for just that phone. Of course each individual store page will contain a mini-review of that phone. Now I’ve created 11 store pages that have content, and I can use them to feature on the homepage, and other store pages, etc.

Concept #4 – Use the “checkout” technique

I may not have explained this one very well earlier. In the supermarket the “checkout” bombards you with all kinds of things you might want to “impulse buy” at the last second. I think that a successful BANS store should behave more like a real store, and even though you may think that’s distracting your patrons from buying your niche product it will enhance it. I’ve witnessed people in retail saying “this is all you have?” I think (contrary to what I’ve read) having a niche store with a half dozen pages is a really bad thing. My advice is to do some research and think of your own items to use for “checkout”. On your BANS site people could buy at anytime, so you want to surround your products with relevant items that somehow didn’t either make it into your advertisements or your store pages.

For example, say your site is about digital cameras. Check all your store pages, and if you don’t have camera cases, flash memory cards, and batteries under your “accessories” sections – add them to your content and store pages. You could add them to your sidebar or advertisements as well. Doing this by hand is a little tedious, what might be better is to use a merchant to rotate the items or advertisements for you. You want to do this in a unique way to make the “checkout” items stand out from the auctions.

The way that you can do this easily (believe it or not) is by using Amazon. If you’re not already an Amazon Affiliate – signup now. I’ve seen some people say that it’s hard to make money with amazon, and really it’s not as long as your ads are relevant to the content. Amazon has some really unique widgets that will stand out in your BANS store – and they have nearly every product on earth. Stick with me here and watch some techniques you may not have seen before…

Amazon Ideas for BANS

The things you can do with Amazon are nearly limitless, but you may not new about some of the newer widgets to come out in the last year. Amazon has been pretty innovative with new promotional widgets.

Amazon MP3 Widget: You would not believe how attractive this little widget is. Amazon sells MP3′s now, and you can make some quick cash with this thing. I believe the commission is current 20%(?), which may not seem like much, but most people buy more than one song on an impulse buy like this. The widget looks like a video at first, and when people the play button it goes through and plays clips from all the songs and albums you added. This thing is awesome, and complements relevant content wonderfully. If you have anything in your BANS store at all music related, you should check this widget out. Here’s a live example:

Amazon Carousel Widget: I think this widget is ingenious because it’s eye catching and you can promote like a dozen things in a very small space with eye-catching pics. Put your mouse over any one and get details. It’s not branded too, which is great – nobody knows it’s Amazon until they click. Consider using these on your store pages (content pages too) – here’s a live example:

Amazon Unbox Video Widgets: Amazon also sells movies and video you can download to your computer. Take advantage of this if you have related content. If you have a store about comic books or characters let’s say – list all the relevant movies you can to sell through Amazon Unboxed. Here’s a live example:

Amazon Slideshow Widget: Much like the Carousel widget, the slideshow give a very appealing view of products and entices visitors to click. You hand pick the products to put in it, and this is isn’t branded as well. Here’s a live example:

Amazon Tag Cloud Widget: This is one of the coolest widgets I’ve seen because it’s intelligent. Unlike some of the others where you have to choose products, the tag could is intelligent like adsense and scans the content of your page to show relevant products. The look and feel is like a blog tag cloud, and when visitors mouse over a world – a product pops up! Here’s a live example:

Amazon Favorites Widget: The favorites widget is as close to “checkout” mentality as it gets, actually showing items that you recommend to your visitors. Here’s a live example:

Omakase Links Widget: This widget is very interesting because it tries to give a “best effort” to show a combination of what the user wants and what is relevant to the page. It actually uses the amazon cookie and knows what the user has search amazon for in the past, and displays things they like in addition to relevant products. Here’s a live example (that should be different for each and every one of you):

Recommended Products: This is by far one of the oldest widgets amazon has, but in can be quick and dirty solution in some cases. Just give it a general category you want to display things for and it gets the job done. Here’s a live example:

I just gave you a bunch of ways to create a “checkout” mentality in your BANS site to enhance your niche store. Earlier I promised to give you a way to rotate some ads in your BANS store to keep it fresh, and now we’ll get that done.

Using PepperjamAds to Rotate Merchant Ads in your BANS site

You may have read my post the other day Pepperjam and eBay What does it mean? You can now promote eBay (and BANS) through Pepperjam, but you may not know that Pepperjam has a widget of it’s own called “Pepperjam Ads”. If you’re not already a member, you need to signup free as a Pepperjam affiliate. Then at the top toolbar click on “Pepperjam Ads”. All you have to do is select the merchants and ads you want to display and create ad units for your BANS site. These are text ads that look exactly like adsense ads – so my advice to you is if you’re using adsense, don’t display these on the same pages. Choose a page and show only Pepperjam ads on it. Other than that – it’s a great way to show targeted rotating ads for niches and select store and content pages. Here’s a Pepperjam Ads unit I created for our test BANS site:

Rotating Ads in BANS with PHP

I’m currently working on an Ad Rotator PHP Hack (mod) for BANS so you will be able to rotate graphics, ads, features, links, or anything you want anywhere in your BANS store. Watch out for that as soon as I get the code finished!

As always – if you have something to add or a question, by all means comment now!

Don’t have “Build a Niche Store” yet? Click here:

If you’re reading this page to try and figure out is Build a Niche Site for you or not – please consider buying BANS through my affiliate link. I make a small commission, which would help defray some of my time and expense for putting together this BANS tutorial (and future BANS success articles) for you! I purchased my copy through an affiliate link in gratitude to the blogger who talked of his success with this niche building site script.

Also – if BANS isn’t for you, please consider reading How to earn money using Affiliate eBay WordPress Plugin BAYRss. With BANS you build content basically around eBay auctions, but with BAYRss you place eBay auctions in your posts and pages. Check it out, I use (and make money) with both BANS and BayRSS!

As you probably already know, eBay left Commission Junction and took it’s affiliate program in house – which is now called the EPN or “EBay Partner Network”. eBay was Commission Junction’s largest merchant and I’m sure that CJ made the most money from them. It was a huge loss when they left, and I bet that eBay is saving millions monthly by moving the program in house. So it was a big surprise when PepperJam Network announced that you could signup to be an affiliate for eBay through them. Let’s be clear, eBay is NOT shutting down EPN. You can signup to promote eBay as an affiliate through EPN or Pepperjam (or both, but I don’t know why you would).

So – if you don’t know who Pepperjam is, you are probably wondering first “Why would eBay do this“, and second “Why would I want to promote eBay through Pepperjam – I’m signed up through EPN“.

On the first point, I believe eBay is working with Pepperjam because they are the fastest growing affiliate and Search Engine Marketing company (SEM) in the world. They are a small but very aggressive and rapidly growing company with just enough saavy to have the abilty to do more in months than Commission Junction had in years. In this digital point thread Pepperjam says that eBay actually reached out to them. So – the second point is probably what you’re really wondering, why would you signup to promote eBay through Pepperjam? If nothing more, it should be for the fact that if you plan on being even a mildly successful affiliate for eBay – you’ll make more money. If you are wildly successful – you’ll make a LOT more money through Pepperjam. How much more? Let me tell you…

eBay Commission Structure Through Pepperjam

Bid Revenue Tiers:

$0.00 – $99.99 – 50.00%
$100.00 – $4,999.99 – 55.00%
$5,000.00 – $199,999.99 – 60.00%
$200,000.00 – $699,999.99 – 65.00%
$700,000.00 – $2,999,999.99 – 70.00%
$3,000,000.00+ 75.00%

New Signup Tiers (ACRU’s):

0 – 49 – $25.00
50 – 1,999 – $28.00
2,000 – 29,999 – $31.00
30,000+ – $35.00

You can see under the bid revenue tiers – that if you make only $100 or more per month in eBay affiliate revenue – you can earn 5% more per month. If you earn $5,000 per month or more you can get 10% more in earnings. That should be enough reason to exclusively promote eBay through Pepperjam and not EPN. You can get more money in new signups too. I know, you have to get more than 50 per month to get more, but I get 5-8 new signups now per every $250 ebay affiliate revenue on one of my niche sites.

Now, if you promote eBay through BANS, a niche store, or a WordPress plugin – not to fear! The first thing Pepperjam did was work with BANS and PHPBay to have the authors update so their products will work with the Pepperjam network. Yes, I know this means changing the affiliate code and updating your software in ALL your sites and niche stores, but for more money isn’t it worth it?

I think that this is the beginning of really good things to come. I say “things to come” because it’s not like you can login to Pepperjam and start creating eBay widgets or anything, you can create banners, text links, and the “advanced links” section right is limited to search boxes. Pepperjam does have a single widget called “Pepperjam Ads”, but that’s for creating ads for multiple advertisers to rotate in a widget. You can’t (currently) create ebay specific widgets like you can through EPN using the editor kit. This is probably the reason that Pepperjam contacted BANS and PHPBay authors right away to grab that audience quickly. In my opinion – what they should (also) do is create custom widgets and scripts you can’t get anywhere else at all to set themselves apart from anything else out there.

There was as time when eBay was creating some pretty cool flash widgets to make it really easy to add them to web sites, blogs, and even things like MySpace and Facebook. They were calling them “eBay to go” widgets. eBay didn’t have them ready by the CJ to EPN transition, and in face they only showed up on the EPN web site in the last week or so. That means I’ve been losing commission on the ones I created for my niche stores all this time. I’d like to see cool widgets like that available through Pepperjam. They already have “deep linking” available, so hopefully cool widgets aren’t that far off.

One of the things that was speculated upon when this was first announced was whether or not Pepperjam would release anything to basically create a BANS or niche type store (without having to buy BANS or a script). Maybe some of us mis-interpreted Pepperjam when the commented (in the previously mentioned DP thread) “We are working to implement BANS or a BANS-like solution ASAP.“. In fact roughly a week later it was announced that both BANS and PHPBay were updated to work through Pepperjam (which is awesome!) – but it may have left some of thinking – “well, will be you creating your own Pepperjam tools to create niche stores for free?”. Maybe they’ll comment on this post and let us know one way or the other.

Regardless, (in that same DP thread) Pepperjam did give enough basic info to allow anyone to create a script or tool for a simple BANS or niche store using their linking structure. Just by using the Pepperjam tracking ID, like http://www.pntra.com/t/2-4881-770-6928?url= (use your own of course if you create a script), all you have to is add the URL encoded eBay destination after it to have trackable Pepperjam eBay links (thanks to Zeropaid for this). Seems like a script to hack the trackable URL into eBay URL’s from an eBay RSS feed wouldn’t be too hard (anyone out there up for it?).

Pepperjam did say in the end of that thread (again) that they were working on some cool tools that would be released in the near future – so keep your eyes peeled! If you aren’t already – be sure to signup for pepperjam yourself, so you don’t miss out!

Back in Mid-April I wrote Forbes Likes my Web Site. They started the “Forbes Blog network” and hand-picked 400 blogs worldwide to take part. I think their initial idea was to be able to sell ads beyond Forbes.com to a stable of business and finance blogs to not only generate income, but also to expand their reach and audience.

I was contacted in Feb 2008 and asked to participate. Flattered to be considered (and contacted) by someone at Forbes.com I readily accepted. I was told that we would be paid per impression and not by click, and that from time to time posts from bloggers would be linked or featured somewhere on Forbes.com to be determined. It wasn’t guaranteed, but the prospect of this was exciting. By Mid-April they had even hired a new VP exec to head up the Forbes Blog Network and to kick start media buying and ad sales.

In the last two months I’ve only seen 4 maybe 5 different advertisers launch campaigns in the network. Out of the 55,000 impressions I have personally served, only 5,000 have been paid ads and the remaining 50,000 have been free advertisement for the Forbes Blogging Network (unpaid). CTR has been an abysmal 0.5% or less (due to non-targeted ads), and I have earned a ridiculous $30 to date.

It’s for these reasons that I’m calling “shenanigans” on Forbes and (as you may have already noticed) have removed all ads from my site from them. As a result, my pages now load about 50% quicker as well. I have inquired via email to my account manager twice about the status of the network and my concerns for ads served, but have received no response to date.

There are lessons to be learned here:

First – just because you are a well respected (print) company doesn’t mean you can start up a new (web) advertising network and be successful overnight. Especially when it’s a “blogging” network and those in charge aren’t bloggers OR familiar with the Blogosphere.

Second – when you deal with bloggers, don’t be surprised when they write about the details of dealing with you. Take this into consideration when you ignore their emails.

Third – as a blogger, feel free to try new forms of monetization and exposure – but don’t be afraid to kick them to the curb if you don’t get results.

I’m sure someone’s getting paid on the Forbes Blogging Network, but I have a feeling it’s a stocks or trading site with 50,000 pageviews per day and not me.

I read a feelgood story today that made me stop and think, it’s posted on ABC dot com and was on Good Morning America this morning. It’s the story of Tommy DeCarlo, the new lead singer for Boston. The original lead singer of the classic rock band “Boston” Brad Delp, committed suicied in March 2007. The band was staging a tribute to their fallen singer in August 2007 and Tommy desperately wanted to go (as a fan). He had even written a moving tribute song to Brad, and since he couldn’t afford to go to the concert, his 19 year old daughter created a myspace page to share it with other Boston fans. She knew how much her dad loved Boston and also posted some Karaoke tracks of her dad singing Boston tunes on his myspace profile as well.

Tom Scholz’s (original founding member of Boston) wife was surfing the web one day and just happenned to land on Tommy DeCarlo’s profile. She was listening to his Karaoke Boston tracks as Tom walked through the room and he asked where those tracks were from (he thought it was actually Boston). His wife said it was some guy singing karaoke from Charlotte, North Carolina – and at first he didn’t believe her. He pumped the music from the computer to big stereo speakers and realized that it was a backing band and a different singer – who just happenned to sound nearly identical to the original Boston lead singer. Tom Scholz emailed Tommy DeCarlo, which led to him first performing with the band Boston at the tribute concert, and now in 2008 he is officially the new lead singer of Boston and touring the world. To make this story even more stunning, DeCarlo is 43 years old, has a son 17 and daughter 19, has never been in a band in his life, and he was working as the credit manager for a local Home Depot.

You hear about stories like this more and more, it was only in December of 2007 that Journey found their new lead singer on YouTube. The power of the Internet is unbelievable. It takes down all barriers, levels the playing field – and if you’re talented you can showcase your skills on the web for free. How can you use the Internet to showcase your talents and skills and connect with other people? The story that I described was a complete accident, what you want to do is to orchestrate and cultivate connections through the web to help build your online business. You should take some time today to think about how you’ve tried to reach out in new ways to build your reputation online.

How to set yourself up for unexpected connections…

1. Update or create online profiles (myspace, linkedin, mybloglog, blogcatalog, youtube, entrecard, etc)
2. Volunteer to guest post on blogs you read
3. Ask bloggers you respect to post on your site in specific areas
4. Feature and review blogs your like
5. Interview successful bloggers
6. Ask successful bloggers and affiliate managers to review your site for improvement
7. Create, review, update, and test all contact forms on your site(s)

In the coming weeks I will reveal an unexpected Internet connection that I made from a very unusual source that will fuel one of my blogs with new traffic and visitor like I’ve never seen before – and it was completely for free and unsolicited on my part. Keep reading in the coming weeks – I think you’ll be very surprised.