I haven’t done much in the realm of affiliate marketing so far, the bulk of online revenue thus far has been through PPC (pay per click) and direct sales. But that changed today with my first affiliate sale! It was through the eBay Partner Network. Previously I had setup two sites, discountroombas.com and joshhamiltonmemorabilia.com, that utilized the mcjiffy script and the eBay Partner Network search feeds.
My first instinct was that somebody had won an auction via joshhamiltonmemorabilia.com since I have two PPC campaigns, via Yahoo and Microsoft. However it was actually from discountroombas.com, the site has had less than 25 total visitors, most wandering in from digitalpoint so I’m pretty surprised somebody made a purchase, but I won’t complain. This actually validates my assumption, to a purely circumstantial extent at least so far, expensive items will tend to do better on eBay affiliate sites due to the gap between the aftermarket price and the retail price. I had been putting time and money into the Josh Hamilton site on more of lark and interest in him after his home run derby performance.
So feel free to share any stories about your first affiliate conversion, which network was it, how hard was it to get that conversion, was it worth it, etc…
One of the most common affiliate programs out there is eBay’s Partner Network, formerly administered via Commission Junction, if you go to SitePoint or Digital point their sites for sale forums are riddled with these types of sites. The most basic of these, of which 95% are, are implementations of eBay’s Widget Editor Kit. Affiliates earn money through referring new users that create eBay user accounts or a user winning an auction they found via your website. eBay’s affiliate program is enticing due to it’s massive scale, everybody is familiar with eBay and a significant percentage have transacted business, either as a buyer or seller, through eBay. Recently however eBay has been dealing with a seller revolt due to changes in the changes to how they handle seller ratings, long story short sellers cannot respond to negative buyer ratings and search results favor highly rated sellers over established sellers. It may seem like a small distinction, but if you’ve been around long enough as a seller you are bound to have at least some negative feedback, and new sellers with no history what so ever are ending up at the top of the search results which is threatening to put established sellers out of business. Naturally, people find a way to game system, in this scenario established buyers register new accounts to end up at the top of the search results until feed back forces them to abandon the account (lather, rinse, repeat). Here is a video a seller, at eBay Live, going off in response to the new feedback guidelines.
What remains to be seen is how this impacts affiliates, if you look in the video the place is pretty empty, in the past it had been extremely crowded. As markets tend to resemble ecosystems, collections of buyers and sellers that coexist, the long term impact on the eBay Partner Network could be dire. One of the sites I have on deck intended to implement the eBay Partner Network, I won’t have historical data to reference but we will at least be able to see whether the eBay Partner Network can be leveraged to create a reliable revenue stream.
