I really had no intentions of writing an update on my 100 EPN sites today, or anytime soon frankly, but I was so shocked by how my stats have been this month, I decided to post a mini rant.
So this month, my EPN sites – from the 100 site challenge, and other – are performing fantastic – EXCEPT in terms of actual earnings passed down to me. First off, one trend I’ve been noticing for the past several months, is that near the end of each month, my EPC always seems to go way down. For example, during the last week of January I was cruising along with an acceptable double digit EPC, and all of a sudden, it dropped to 0.5 overnight, and as always, the stats gave me no idication as to why this occured. It actually dropped even more after that over the next several days, despite strong numbers for this month to date. Specifically, I’ve got almost $3000 in gross merchandise sold in just 4 days so far this month. Not too shabby.
Anyway, as I said, every day this month my numbers have looked good, despite having an extremely low EPC for no apparent reason. Today was the biggest shocker of all. I logged into my stats, hoping to maybe see myself back in the double digit EPC again, and I was floored by what I saw.
Stats for yesterday: Bid/Bin:47 | Winning Bids: 13 | Gross Merchandise Sold: 1,214.92 | Winning Bid Revenue: 104.78
My Earnings for the Day: $8.16
Now let’s be real here. First off, these numbers are good, but are still basically small potatos in the grand scheme of things. There are EPN affiliates who probably make that in an hour, and I use to see numbers like this daily at this time last year.
BUT
The disparity between winning bid revenue and earnings is truly shocking. Going back to the month of September, the last month of using a coherent payout system, the total winning bid revenue for me was $821.23, with total earnings of 703.77. Nothing to write home about in terms of earnings, BUT, you can clearly see how close winning bid revenue and Earnings were to each other.
Compare that to this month, where literally the winning bid revenue right now is over 75% higher than my actual earnings – it’s truly unbelievable. The trend seems to be more distance between the two numbers each month – it started out in October, my earnings were around 10% higher than winning bid revenue. November, they were about even. December, which is usually a HUGE month for epn, earnings were slightly below WBR, and they were also WAY down overall. January, I saw the biggest distance between the two yet, probably near 30% at the end of the month, with disgraceful overall earnings, and this month I’m already down 75%.
The worst thing of all, is I can look at my stats from every angle, and I just don’t see any real trends that support this drastic swing between WBR and earnings. That leaves me in a position where, it’s difficult to optimize my EPN sites to increase their performance.
At this point, the best thing I can really do is consider switching more sites to Amazon. If you think about it, selling $1200 in merchandise in one day on Amazon will equate to a pretty big chunk of change – at least a hell of a lot more than the lousy $8.00 I reeled in yesterday.
As far as the actual 100 EPN sites – they are doing well. Traffic is up across the board, and I am generating sales daily, although still in modest amounts – but compared to previous months, I’m doing well. I’ve got at least 5 of the 100 sites – that I know of – listed in the top 20 on google now for their main keyword. Of those 5, at least 3 are on page 1, 1 of them is in position 1 with a double listing and an ezine pointing to it in position 2, and another is in position 4 for a fairly competitive term. So overall I am slowly starting to climb out of the sandbox. Now I just have to think of the best way to benefit from these sites in the long term. I really hope EPN does something to show they actually care about their affiliates, but at this point, I can only expect that things are going to go further downhill.
That leads me to my next point – about ebay in general. Not only have I been an affiliate for eBay for 2 years, I’ve been a seller on ebay since it was first launched in the 1990s. I have also owned an eBay store for over 5 years. I cancelled in January for good. From my perspective, eBay’s problems aren’t just with their affiliate program in general, they seem to be making awful decisions across the board. I’ll start with my eBay store. I was selling mainly hair piece tape in my ebay store, in an inventory format. Late summer of last year, my inventory ran out on one of my products. I went into my ebay store – probably the first time in well over a year – and attempted to adjust the inventory. I kept receiving an error that eBay had changed their shipping policy and I couldn’t resubmit my auction until I updated my shipping policy. Only problem – they gave me no way to do so. So the only thing I could have done, was to completely cancel my auction and relist it entirely from scratch. Not only that, but eBay kicked Auctiva to the curb just about a year ago, and sadly, Auctiva was just about the only way to easily manage an eBay store. Anyone who has ever tried to run a legitimate eBay store will probably agree that eBay has one of the least intuitive interfaces of any website in existance, and trying to do the simplest things like leaving feedback can be a huge pain in the ass. Anyway, recently, I got word that ebay was completely getting rid of fixed inventory listings, probably fine because they are a pain in the ass to manage, but I realized, I’ve been paying around $40/month for my eBay store for the past 5-6 years, and for the last couple years, I haven’t even made close to that much back in actual profit – not to mention the fact that I can’t do something as simple as update my inventory levels, and the same 5 people that continue to order from me via are breaking my balls literally every day about leaving feedback for a single $3.50 item they ordered. It’s so frustrating, and I get so pissed off when I look back on how much money I sank into it for nothing but headaches. So I feel the problems with eBay are broad, and not just limited to their affiliate program. In fact, even if their affilate program were running as good as it was a year ago, I would still be concerned because the decisions they are making with their business seem to be ones that will ultimately drive away traffic, and scare people away who find a valuable old lamp or coin in their basement they want to sell. Sure it’s great if you want to buy a cheap cell phone case from China, but it’s all just peanuts, and people get sick of doing business like that after a while. I can also see that Amazon is going in the complete opposite direction, so I absolutely plan to put more eggs in that basket. eBay really appears to be a sinking ship, and the hits just keep on coming. I’m extremely thankful that I switched up my on priorities last year to focus on AdSense, because it is really paying off, and I can really see the difference now and the advantage in working with a quality affiliate program.
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Tags: 100 epn site update, 100 EPN Sites in 30 Days, cpc, Ebay, ebay store, EPN
That earnings suck for the kind of conversation you have. One of micro site that I mentioned the other day just made 2 Amazon sales for 2 consecutive days and bagged me $4. Compared to your stats, I would say Amazon is much better. Btw, who can I read about Amazon snipers? I quite ok with Adsense but Amazon seems to be a different game and I want to learn from those who have mastered it.
Btw, I have using your current theme for my site and I love it. I had only one issue. How do I remove wpcontempo header at the top and just have my site name instead? Thanks!
Yeah no shit, that’s why I decided to write the post. Usually I can live with it, but this just seemed so skewed, I had to post the details to illustrate the picture I’ve been painting over the last few months regarding EPN.
I don’t know of anyone doing Amazon snipers personally, but there’s got to be a ton of people out there doing it. I would start by taking the formula for adsense snipers and adapt it for Amazon. I’m sure it’s not rocket science – it will just take a little testing to get it down.
You can remove the header by taking out the image in header.php in the image file, and replace it with H1.
That actually reminds me – I adapted the theme for suffolk university to use about a year ago, which basically consisted of making the header into text. I still have that template somewhere on my computer, so I’ll try to get it cleaned up and release it next week. It’s on my list now.
Something I won’t have to worry about, Ebay that is. In my trek to figure all of this out and applying for multiple affiliates, Ebay was the only one that didn’t like my poor excuse for a first website and told me to go pound sand.
Yeah they are really a bitch to even get into these days, which is ironic considering the overall poor quality of their program. You’re probably much better off learning Amazon anyway, as they are safer long term solution by far.
My feelings exactly. I’ve been switching to Amazon and selling on there is outrageously easy. Two pages with just one line of text to enter and the rest are radio buttons or similar and one of the pages is just the confirmation page where they give you the price breakdown and how much they will actually charge you to sell it there. Oh, and wait, it’s free to list so there’s no risk. Compared that to eBay’s (what?) five pages or so and piles of html just to have something that looks semi-decent? Listing fees, final value fees, Paypal fees, plus convoluted shipping, insurance choices… yadda yadda. There is no comparison. Amazon is sweet. Plus the buyers are there.
Thanks for your insight into the PhpBay penalty. Dying to know how things are working out for you since your last post – I am in a similiar boat with some sites that I own seem to be suffering from the penalty.
just posted an update about this today. Overall the results have been what I was pretty much expecting – rankings returned for basically all 100 sites as soon as I pulled PHPBay and the site was reindexed. The jury is still out on the effectiveness of the EPN ads, but so far I’m seeing a good CTR and time will tell how well the clicks convert to earnings.
Hey Everyone,
Wade from phpBay Pro. Just wanted to add some comments to this thread to hopefully clear up some misconceptions.
There is no such thing as a “phpBay Pentalty” in Google. Bans got a bad/undeserved rap over this several years ago. Most experienced affiliate marketers know that Google does in fact target “thin affiliate” sites. By “thin,” I mean little effort, no content, no unique content, no meta description/keywords, etc. Just sites built with nothing more than affiliate links are the source for the content.
This seems to have been covered here in a previous post:
http://www.wpcontempo.com/google-deindexing-phpbay-and-other-epn-affiliate-sites/
“I outlined in my EPN Tutorial the importance of adding unique content to each page of your site, including product pages. Unfortunately, we all know that getting the unique content to support each page of your site can be a real pain. I haven’t necessarily always practiced what I preach, and I’ve found that some of my thinner sites with very little content got hit the hardest.”
I’ve written about this in the phpBay Pro support forum in great detail, several years ago. Called “The Ultimate Roadmap to Success,” it covers many of these common sense issues. I wrote this because I’ve been doing SEO and affiliate marketing a long time and I knew many of my customers could use a roadmap, could use experience that others have gone through and tips and tricks that work as well as what doesn’t work.
It would be really challenging to setup 100 quality sites in one month. Quality is subjective, of course, but it would be difficult to setup 100 simple sites with nothing more than affiliate links in a month. You are talking three plus sites per day, every day (including weekends). Site setup, theme selection/modification, adding pages/posts/categories, adding keywords and meta descriptions, as well as unique content (more than a line or two). That’s a tall order!
Also covered in the roadmap I wrote is the importance of link building. Many beginning affiliate marketers are not aware of how important link building is to the success of a site. Of equal importance is the google sandbox, which has been around at least since late 2005. The idea is, that you build a new site and get some initial rankings. You think everything is good, then after about two months, go over to the sandbox. This doesn’t just affect affiliate sites, but virtually any type of new site created. The idea being, that google isn’t just going to start ranking a new site for competitive keywords without some effort to the site.
Just wanted to chime in with some views on this. I saw BANS get an undeserved bad rap over this sort of thing when the problem is really related to building thin affiliate sites that rely upon affiliate links as content.
The phpBay Pro forums has a great deal of information, including very lengthy discussions on the “Roadmap to success,” as well as ebay affiliates that make big money using phpBay Pro and getting organic traffic doing so.
Google doesn’t target any affiliate software products, they target “thin affiliate” sites and the key to success is not so much the software used, but rather the process used and the effort put into it. Two to three quality sites done the right way will always outperform 100 sites with nothing more than affiliate links for content.
Do a search for: “powered by phpBay Pro” on Google. As of today, there are 2,690,000 results (through the data center served in my part of the country). If google were targeting/deindexing phpBay Pro specifically, they could simply remove all those results in one fell swoop. BTW, “powered by phpBay Pro” is optional and can be removed from listings. Some use it for their affiliate link, some simply leave it in, so that’s a very small representation of the pages out there and would be the absolute easiest to target if in fact google were deindexing based on the product name.
Sam, give me a shout if you want. I’d be happy to go over some things that can help you and your loyal following. I want to see people succeed. There are also ways to make “thin” sites perform well too, using long tail keywords. Dan (OneLung) on our support forums has written a lot about this as well.
It’s never too late to start succeeding!
Hey Wade,
Thanks for stopping by. I think you mixed up a very old post of mine with the results of my more recent 100 EPN sites experiment. The original post you referred to was regarding a network of thin sites I had set up that were ranking well, and got deindexed. These were basically the definition of a thin site, with literally no actual content – just pages of PHPBay auctions.
My 100 EPN site experiment was completely different, and in response to what had transpired previously. I agree that it is extremely difficult for anyone to set up 100 quality sites in one month, and if you actually read my posts on this, it ended up taking almost 2 months. Not only that, but I spent over $5000 in outsourcing content both for the sites, and for link building on this project. Each site has many pages of unique, well written content. I show only a small amount of auctions per page, usually no more than 4 total or in some cases only 1-4 auctions in the sidebar and no auctions within the content. Not only that, but at least 80% of the themes I used were unique, and I spread the sites out amongst a lot of different servers.
The result was that none of the 100 sites ranked for any of their main or related keywords within the top 100 Google results. I continued adding content and link building for the sites. This started in August. By March, none of my sites had any kind of rankings in Google at all. On a whim, around the middle of March, I decided to take a handful of the 100 sites, remove PHPBay from the sites, and replace with EPN widgets. As soon as the sites with the EPN widgets were re-spidered by Google, they returned to ranking within the first 20 results for their MAIN keyword. This change literally took place on the same day I swapped the ads. As a result, I made the change to the rest of my 100 sites, and the results were exactly the same for every single one.
Based on these overall results, I have found it very hard to believe it was anything other than PHPBay that was causing me to get penalized. The fact that after over 6 months, all I had to do was simply remove PHPBay and replace it with an EPN widget, and the site would return to ranking overnight tells me that at least in MY case, PHPBay was the culprit.
I’ve done this exact same thing with AdSense and Amazon, and I’ve never had any problem ranking a site right away. I’m choosing incredibly easy keywords to rank for and I know what I’m doing. These sites aren’t thin, contain quality content, and in most cases I would feel comfortable standing up to a manual inspection with them. That was the whole point of me building the sites to begin with – to put together quality sites that would stand the test of time. Personally I would have much preferred to use PHPBay instead of EPN widgets, but at least now all 100 sites are making me money like they should, and I’ve recouped the original expense to get them all set up.
It’s not a knock on PHPBay at all. It’s one of the only IM products I think is worthy of paying for. It’s one of only 3 products I promote as an affiliate. Not only that, but I’ve continued to build more PHPBay sites on expired domains, and they work perfectly fine. In my case, the only time I am seeing any kind of penalty is when I put PHPBay on a brand new domain.
This is all just my own personal experience. A few others have chimed in here, but all I can say for sure is what I know based on what I’ve actually seen happen over the past 6+ months. I wouldn’t discourage anyone from purchasing PHPBay, I have a great deal of respect for Wade, who provides amazing support and work on the product, and none of this was an attempt to get people to avoid PHPBay. In fact, I would recommend it to anyone who wants to be an EPN affiliate. All of my top performing EPN sites run PHPBay, and I’ve made thousands of dollars using it over the past several years. The only caveat is that anyone who puts PHPBay on a brand new domain could POTENTIALLY see the same results as me. Then again, maybe they won’t.
“The result was that none of the 100 sites ranked for any of their main or related keywords within the top 100 Google results.”
That’s a given, though. Years ago, I built some sites that were neither ebay or amazon related. Clean, white hat sites. I got the initial “love” from google in the first six to eight weeks. After that? Well, it was nine months before the sites started having any type of ranking in the top 100. I did all the right things. I did link building, 100% unique content (with no skimping) rotate the top three keywords for links, on page SEO, articles, blog posts. Eventually, though, after that sandbox period, the site was generously rewarded. It just takes time.
I talk about that on the forum. The sandbox effect is prone to any type of new site, regardless of whether it’s affiliate or not.
I’d appreciate the opportunity to look at some of those sites.
“This change literally took place on the same day I swapped the ads.”
That would be a remarkable coincidence if so. I can’t recall anything in recent seo history where someone made a single change like that to a site and overnight, was re-indexed.
I do agree with you on the aged domains. That goes to back to part of the sandbox effect. New domains generally are not going to rank for any type of competitive keyword. There are lots of arguments over the “sanbox effect,” but I’ve experienced it first hand, many times over the years. Most of my sites, it’s taken around nine months. That’s why older sites will rank better, because they are past that sandbox effect.
Thanks for your continued support. I’ve had quite a few emails recently and even one forum post asking about all this. As you can imagine, one person’s experiences can cause concern for others, so I wanted to provide some input and let everyone know there is a very good article I wrote on the forums that address many of these things.
If I can do anything for you, Sam, please let me know.
The sites weren’t deindexed, they were just not ranking in the top 100 search results for their primary keywords, which in my experience is indicative of a penalty. It’s easy to recover from automatic Google penalties by simply fixing the problem. There are all kinds of things that trigger auto penalties, the problem is trying to determine what you’ve been penalized for. The niches I chose were uncompetitive. I did a similar experiment with Adsense and at least 75% of the sites ranked on the first page for their main keyword within a week, and remain there today – with only about 5 backlinks per site. These are exact match domains for uncompetitive keywords.
In the case of my EPN sites, as soon as the sites were reindexed and PHPBay was off of them the rankings returned and they ranked where I would have expected them to based on the results of the same project I did with AdSense sites – this happened in basically every case. You’ll see in early March I posted that I was planning to swap out PHPBay on some of my sites and replace with EPN widgets. I did it a few days later. That night I came home and noticed about 60% of the sites I had swapped widgets in on had been spidered and were ranking in the top 20 search results, then I immediately posted about it here: http://www.wpcontempo.com/100-epn-sites-a-new-development/.
I haven’t misrepresented anything that’s happened to me at all – this is pretty much exactly what happened. For the most part, this project was a complete failure and money sink for the first 6+ months, and I’ve been brutally honest about the results here. I’m definitely not making anything up. Like I said, I would have strongly preferred to use PHPBay over EPN widgets. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of some kind of problem on my end, but I took extremely special care to make sure there was no footprints on any of these sites. I’d like to see someone else make a handful of PHPBay niche sites on brand new domains, using wordpress, and see what their results are.
Footprints wouldn’t be an issue and are often over-rated. Footprints shouldn’t be a concern except where people are doing things against Google’s terms of service, typically black hat.
More often than not, I see users that go out of their way to mask anything that is related to Ebay, but in your case, you are using direct widgets, which illustrates the insignificance of footprints when we are doing things the right way.
Sentence one notes they were not deindexed, but later on you state:
“as soon as the sites were reindexed and PHPBay was off of them the rankings returned and they ranked where I would have expected them to based on the results of the same project I did with AdSense sites – this happened in basically every case.”
I’d still like the opportunity to review a few of the sites.
I have many customers that rely heavily on organic traffic and make a lot of money in EPN. The experiences you are reporting seem more along the lines of those that develop thin sites, or have sites still in the sandbox. Definitely not representative of many of my customers.
Good luck with your future projects.
Wade
Yeah my bad, I meant spidered by google, not reindexed.
Everyone, please make note of the update to this post – since initially writing it, I’ve done additional testing and found that RSS feeds caused this problem and not PHPBay specifically.
Sam, what was it about your RSS feeds that caused the problem?
I really have no idea. All I know is that I got the exact same result using a basic Ebay RSS feed that I did with PHPBay, so it’s obviously not a PHPBay specific problem. One thing that Wade mentioned to me is that maybe it has something to do with the fact that my pages are content rich, and targeting very specific keywords, and the additional content provided by the RSS feed could be skewing it. I’m not totally sure if that is the exact reason, but it’s one possibility. I’m actually running some new tests now – I’ve put PHPBay BACK on 2 of my sites, except I only use it one new PAGES, not any of my existing posts, and not on the home page. Both sites are ranking in the top 2 on Google for their main keyword – it’s been about 3 days since I made the change and they haven’t lost any ranking yet – one of them even jumped frmo being ranked #3 to #1… So we’ll see. One thing I know for sure – the current EPN widgets convert like shit, not even close to PHPBay so I’m really desperate to either find a way to make PHPBay work, or find a viable solution that will actually convert.