Archive for the ‘news’ Category
Tuesday · Popularity: 42% · affiliate, ebay, news
Today eBay announced the official opening of the eBay Partner Network (or EPN) which, in 30 days no less, will replace Commission Junction as the sole affiliate program for eBay.
For those casual users of the eBay affiliate program, the email this morning might come as a bit of a surprise but they have been working on this for some time, and promise to have a better reporting and functionality, although I have been very happy with Commission Junction for many years now.
The news didn’t go unnoticed by those in the blogging world where you could find several posts this morning like eBay Partner Network now live by Sue from Tamebay, eBay Dumps Commission Junction from Net Profits, a good discussion from Shoemoney in eBay Affiliate Program FINALLY Drops the CJ Dead Weight, and several others. For those working with the eBay affiliate program in one way or another, this is big news.
What is an Affiliate?
If you are unfamiliar with how affiliates work, it is a simple concept that has been around for quite some time. A company offers an affiliate partner (the user) an incentive of some kind, usually money, to promote their company. At this point almost all companies do this in one form or another, and even small ecommerce sites can setup affiliates for their customer. I am both an affiliate partner and an affiliate provider through one of our small ecommerce sites.
You can even see this on non-eccommerce site and large B&M companies. DirectTV has offered $50 to anyone who gets a friend to sign up for a new satellite TV account for a long time, this is just a simple affiliate offering that can be done by anyone who has a friend who needs their service.
How Much Does an Affiliate Pay?
This is always the question. How much can I actually make using something like this. The answer is just about as much as you are willing to put into building your affiliate network. For most of us, we don’t have a 40 hour work week we can devote to an affiliate program, so we use it where we can, when we can.
I have posted my most recent report below, so you can see it isn’t much. We current run about $100 a month on the eBay affiliate program but it doesn’t take much effort to produce results like that below. We have made as much as $500-$600 a month and as little as nothing. It all depends on how much work you want to put into the program.
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Monday · Popularity: 15% · news
I just noticed some color in my inbox? Have you yet? It looks like Google has added color labels to the “labels”. It shows on one computer but not on another so it is probably an update to Gmail that will work its way through their system.
Funny how just a little bit of color can add some excitement to your email. In the screen shot you can see a square box next to each label. You click the arrow and it gives you the color options you see in the image. At that point it shows everything in that label in the color you chose. Looks GREAT Google, thanks.
For those of us who use Gmail, and a lot of it, this is a welcome addition to the labels. I will finally be able to see just at a quick glance a highlight color for specific tags. I know everyone uses Gmail differently, but I use the “all mail” label most of the time and to see some color will be great.
Wednesday · Popularity: 15% · adsense, monetize, news
Snap Shot announced that they are entering the monetize your site advertising program with Snap Shares. Much like other affiliate programs Snap Shot now has the option to include four different types of ads, and of course Google Adsense is one of those methods.
Snap Shares adds a new money-making dimension to Snap Shots by allowing Web site owners and bloggers to increase their inventory with context-based ads at the bottom of each Snap Shot.
New Way To Monetize Your Blog
For those monetize your blog folks out there, this might be something to look into if you haven’t used their service before. It works similar to those textual links where an ad pops up from some keyword from within your post.
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Tuesday · Popularity: 9% · channel advisor, news
When you logged on to ChannelAdvisor this morning you might have been greeted by a special notice about an inventory bug that was causing the quantities of SKU’s in the inventory management module to be inflated. ChannelAdvisor says they are working on reverting the inventories back to what they were on Sunday October 14th before the problem was found. I am not sure what all that means just yet but those with a ChannelAdvisor store should keep up with this issue, it could effect the accuracy of your inventory.
The exact post from ChannelAdvisor is listed below, but the most current information being posted right now is on their forum site. It looks like it was only an issue with inventory items that were using multiple attributes with their products, so it might not effect as many people as the release of the issue stated. Still, Matt with ChannelAdvisor customer service is stating:
I would recommend that you do double check inventory counts at your convenience to make sure there are not any lingering issues going into the next few weeks/months.
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Wednesday · Popularity: 6% · news
eBay just announced (see announcement) that it has opened the eBay Neighborhoods. From what I can tell this is eBay’s latest attempt to break into the social networking or bookmarking market area. It looks to be a combination of MyBlogLog, MySpace, and every other social networking site, while including links to their guides and listings. This sounds a little familiar. They keep trying these things that might bring more traffic to the site and enhance the users experience, can’t blame them for that. What I do see is a trend of adding features that are basically copied taken from other areas of the Internet.
Only eBay in his blog post, EBAY Launches Neighborhoods, mentions “It’ll be interesting to see if this initiative gets any traction”, well it will be interesting ok, but more likely, it will be much to do about nothing. I have watched as eBay added guides (uhmm amazon), blogs (uhmm google), bio (not confused with the aboutMe), guestbook, and added all this to “my world”, which includes all these goodies. With all that, I have to stop and mention the highly touted eBay Express, which seemed doomed from the start. At the height of our selling, over 5,000 items listed and 500 closing selling a day, we never once sold an item from eBay Express and I didn’t know of anyone else who did either?
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