The Nicher

Updating The Ebay Affiliate Program Is A Pain

As far as I know, I don’t have the Ebay affiliate program on anything but my BANS sites.  But, for some reason, my BANS EPN updates won’t give me a confirmation screen.  So, I’m doing it the hard way.

 I’m deleting my BANS sites and re-installing them.  Yeah, yeah.  I know it sounds like waaaay too much work. But seriously?  All my income came from two sites despite my having 10 or so.  I had very little content, and what was there is a simple copy/paste.  So, I’ll have to upload the logos again, re-do the search boxes, and change the color scheme.  Irritating, yes.  But, not so bad.  After all, the color scheme can be done at work since it’s all online.  Copy/paste could be too if I put the content into an email first. 

 Plus, I just deleted- yes, deleted- 4 or 5 of my stores.  See that?  I can’t even count them, they meant so little to me!  As I said, only two of my stores generated cash.  Some of them I may rebuild one day, but for the most part they were the broad “niches” of which I spoke earlier.  I’d do much better to start from scratch anyway.  In the mean time, making the switch, heavy as it is, for the 6 that I have left will be much easier.  And, honestly?  I may delete a few of those and simply use the content elsewhere. 

 In fact, I just deleted one.  That leaves 5 for updates, and one of those is already installed. 

 Why am I talking about this?  I don’t even know right now.  I would normally say that the lesson here is to not bite off more than you can chew, but these were sites that I’d intended to build up over time.  If Ebay hadn’t decided to move their affiliate program in house, I may have never touched these sites again.  Not even to delete.  I guess I’ll just chalk these up to growing pains.

Affliate Earnings April 15th

Sweet! I just made another $5.31 on my BANS sites. A few days ago I had another commission for just over $1. I’ve now reached payout (payout is $25, and I’ve reached $28.50), which means that I only have $25 left to go until my Build A Niche Store software has paid for itself.Now, I know that this isn’t the kind of money that you can live off of. I bought the software in December 2007, and it’s now April 2008. I sold the BANS software once, which gave me a $44.36 commission (the program is $97), and now the sales through the program is $28.50, leaving $24.14 unpaid for.

Build A Niche Store Is Beginning To Pay Off

I’ve been checking my Commission Junction account on a daily basis, anxious to catch the smallest sign of potential profitability.

Well, this past week I’ve seen a huge jump in sales from my Build A Niche Stores. Or, one of my BANS stores, I should say.

Now, before you get too excited thinking that I’m about to tell you how to make thousands of dollars a day using BANS, you have to understand that my new total is $21.19. That’s for sales through Ebay, not any other affiliate programs including BANS own affiliate program.

I first started building BANS sites in December 2007.  I have about 1/2 dozen BANS sites all together, but only two have turned a profit.  And of those two, all but one sale came from just one site.

I posted about my first BANS commission on February 21.  That $3 commission was the sum total of 6 separate sales that happened to occur on the same day.  I didn’t receive any other commissions for over a week.  Then, in March- boom!

Note that I haven’t even touched my sites in over a month.  No tweaking, no new content, no sales pushes or advertising. 

Combined with the $44 commission for selling the BANS program to a friend, my new total of over $21 in sales commissions has made my investment quite small.  In fact, less than $32 left to go to break that magical number of $97.

Marketing Comics

Here’s a clever guy who uses his artistic skills to promote his marketing products.  Even if you have no interest in what he’s selling, if you’re into internet marketing, you’ll want to check these comics out.

Woot! First BANS Commission!

I logged in to Commission Junction, as I do every day, to check my stats.  Not surprising.  I have a click through rate of 20% most days, and yet no sales.  But I checked the reports section anyway.  Lo and behold- a pending commission of $3.24!  Woot!

This is my first commission from BANS, and it’s larger than most first commissions (from reports that I’ve heard- I can’t back that up).  Granted, I’ve got a long way to go to reach payout, let alone make back my investment.  But it definitely gives me hope.  I think I have all of 1 paragraph of content on the page that produced the sales.

And then I logged in to Squidoo and saw that I’d earned another $0.83 from an Amazon module.  I’m not retiring yet, but what a great start!

“So, What Does It Cost?”

I was talking to a friend at work about my websites.  He knows that I’m a bit addicted to BANS, despite the fact that I haven’t made back my investment yet.

He’s been interested in making a living online for a while as well, but he’s better at planning than I am.  Me, I get an idea and I fly with it. He actually takes classes.  We’ve always said that if we were one person, we’d probably be rich.  I think as partners we’d kill each other. 

He was only interested in the basic numbers, so that’s what I gave him.  I said, domains are about $10 a year.  I know where I can get codes to get either 10% off, or domains for $7 a year through GoDaddy, so that’s who I use.  I also told him that .info domains are about $2-3.  I wouldn’t recommend getting a .info domain if you want to build up repeat viewers, but for a site that relies on search engines for traffic, you could certainly do worse.

Hosting totally depends on what you want.  I told him that I pay about $8 a month with HostGator for unlimited domains.  I also told him that if he wanted just one website to build up, he can get hosting even cheaper than that for just one site.  I didn’t tell him about dedicated servers and such, because I don’t think either of us expects to become popular enough to need it- and if we do?  Then we celebrate!

He’s also interested in my affiliate accounts.  All of them.  So I told him about BANS since I think the program is well worth the one time $97 fee.  Even if you didn’t want to sell anything through the site, you could pay much more than that for a website template.  You’d probably get something more out of the box and ready to go, but BANS is highly customizable. 

I also told him about Commission Junction and ClickBank.  I think his mind began to boggle at that.  They’re both free to sign up for, and you get a cut of any sales you make for the other companies that you’re promoting.  I don’t think he understands much about affiliate marketing since he kept asking me “and you don’t have to actually have a product, right?”.  I’ll need to talk to him about that a little more.

All in all, I told him that if he started a blog and started pimping products on it, (rather than purchasing BANS or anything else other than domain and hosting) he’d be shelling out $6-17 a month.  And you know?  I never realized just how cheap that is.  Where else can you start a business for under $20 but on the internet?

It Pays To Not Take A Break

I built 7 BANS stores over a period of about 2 weeks. Towards the end, I no longer had to follow instructions, I could simply make all the transfers and set it all up on my own.

 Then I went on vacation.  I haven’t even touched my BANS sites in approximately 3 weeks, except to add AdSense to one of them.  Tonight I decided to set one up quick and then work on it tomorrow.  And you know what?  I don’t remember a thing.

This is why it’s so important to keep up on your projects.  Setting up the program is taking me twice as long as usual now, because I have to follow the directions, step by step.  And my CuteFTP free trial ran out, so I had to pay for the full version.  And set that up as well. 

Affiliate Income Update

Lo and behold! Mere hours after announcing my affliliate earnings, Squidoo has updated the lens master earnings. I’ve nearly doubled my account balance for a grand total of $10.10 . This may not sound like much to you, but I haven’t updated any of my lenses since January 10th. This month’s earnings are the result of doing virtually no work during the month, whatsoever.

My Affiliate Earnings January 2008

I haven’t been trying to earn affiliate money for long. Aside from sticking AdSense on a handful of personal blogs, and the occasional Amazon link on those blogs’ posts, I’ve really only been actively working on affiliate sites for about a month. And I was away for 1 1/2 weeks of that.Still, during that time I earned a little over $1 on AdSense bringing my total from AdSense to just under $8. I earned a little under $1 on Squidoo, bringing my Squidoo earnings to $5.50 plus $1.83 Amazon commission that hasn’t cleared yet, and a few cents that are being donated to the Grameen Foundation.

Why Use Squidoo?

For a while, Squidoo was touted as the best promotional tool in the world.  I think we all know that there is no such thing, but just because something doesn’t live up to the hype doesn’t make it worthless.  In fact, there are a lot of great reasons to build a lens at Squidoo. (Why, yes, that is a referral link.  I do appreciate any join ups.)

1. You actually can make money with Squidoo.

Believe it or not, I didn’t know that when I joined up with Squidoo.  The first lens I built had me so befuddled, I gave up half way through and let it go.  A few months later I decided to give it another shot and, lo and behold, my unfinished lens had earned me money!  I believe it was something like $0.37, but it wasn’t nothing, and it encouraged me to push through and finish not only that lens, but a dozen more.

You can earn money through direct sales (your own product), affiliate sales (someone else’s product- in fact, Squidoo offers sales modules for many different companies that you can use), and clicks on ads.  Squidoo sets up AdSense and other affiliate links on all lenses, and they share 50% of the profits on these with all lens masters.  So even if your lens isn’t successful on its own, you’ll still get a cut.

2. Low payout threshold.

This is related to #1 (above), but you can set your own pay out threshold as low as $1.  I have mine set to $10, but you can set it as high or low as you want to.  You can even have the income donated for you.  Just select one or more of the dozens of charities and causes Squidoo provides and put in the percentage you want donated.  You can mix and match across the board, or on individual lenses.  For example, on lenses that are automatically compiled by Squidoo (rather than hand built by me), I have 50% donated to the Grameen Foundation, and the other 50% sent to my account.

3. Draw traffic to your other sites.

For some reason, Squidoo lenses tend to rank high in search engines.  If you build your lens well enough, a visitor may be interested enough in what you have to say to follow a link to whichever site you wish to promote.  If you have a blog, even better as you can insert a RSS feed directly into your lens.

 4. Raise your Page Rank with links.

As I said, lenses tend to rank well in search engines which gives them a good bit of authority.  Insert one or two well chosen links into a popular lens, and you’ve instantly given yourself more authority on whichever site you chose to promote.

5.  It’s completely free.

While you can pay someone to build a lens for you, or buy one pre-built, building a lens is easy and the options are continually growing.  The only thing that you risk is your time.

6. There’s a referral program.

While Squidoo is totally free, they do offer a referral program.  For every person you refer, you earn $5 after they earn their first $15.  For some lens masters, this will never happen.  For others, it could be in their first week.

Once you’ve finished your first lens, take a look at my post on ranking high on Squidoo.