Almost All But Ready To Dump EPN

Written by Costa on October 20, 2009 - 16 Comments
Categories: Making Money

ebay-cracking-down
I had a tough time getting into the eBay Partners Network. During the heydays of BANS, I had to build up my stores first, apply through Commission Junction, got rejected twice before they finally let me in for the US program. Before I could make my first 100 bucks, eBay decided to dump CJ and set up their own Network called the eBay Partners Network. It was joy to many then, as there have been numerous complains that CJ is not reporting the actual figures. There was hope that they would see an increase in figures once ebay took things into their own hands. The joy was short lived for me though.

Even as an existing affiliate through CJ, I did not get the automatic transfer into EPN. I appealed again, 5 times, showing them all my good sites but somehow, they were adamant that I was not qualified. Finally, I got wind that it was not due to me or the quality of my sites, but primarily due to my location and where I originated. Ebay, like lots of other American affiliate networks, do not like Malaysians very much.

Desperate to get into this lucrative Network, I took the back door by applying through my daughter who is residing in Singapore. With a Singapore address, I was automatically accepted within 5 minutes. Is that called double standards or what, I do not know and have no intention of knowing. I was in. That’s the important part.

Bans

So started my BANs “empire” and I build like mad. Within the second month, my earnings passed the 800 dollars mark and I was jumping with joy. While others was building and making their sites as attractive as possible selling some high end items so when people buy they will earn higher commissions, I was taught to make sites that concentrates on the cheapest and hottest items. The idea is not to make money from sales but to make money from sign-ups. At that time, each successful sign-up will bring you 25 bucks, even if they do not buy anything. The strategy worked and it worked like magic. Then came the first round of shelling.

Ebay realized that they have been gamed and are paying for a lot of non buying sign-ups. They started to change their payout structure and started paying on different terms. Though income decreased significantly due to the change, I did not care much as I was still making reasonably good money. The second round of shelling came.

Ebay took out their big stick and started to deactivate a lot of accounts. It caused a big uproar among the thousands of affiliates. Some who were making a full time income from eBay and got deactivated was bitter and the Forums were flooded with name callings. Somehow, I avoided that round of shelling unscathed. The third round of shelling came very soon afterwords and it was the so serious that I was almost dead after the dust settled.

This time, Big Daddy G came into the picture. Maybe it is due to the overwhelming number of these “scrapper” sites, that Big Daddy calls it, that made him quite mad. The problem started when a lot of these BANs sites started to rank in the SERPs. It looked awful on Big G’s reputation as the best Search Engine in the world which promises his users the best and most relevant Search results. Thus, the banning and de-indexing of all these sites started. 90% of my sites got hit and was out of Google’s index. No one searching with Google can see my sites anymore. I am left with the trickle coming from Yahoo. Still. I have 10% percent which escaped that round of shelling and still I can mange to scrap about 100 to 200 bucks monthly. Finally, the last round of shelling came and that proved to be the last straw to break the camel’s back.

At the beginning of October, eBay changed their payout structure again. They will no longer pay commissions on sales or sign-ups. Instead, affiliates will be paid according to clicks. I thought, hey, that might actually be a good thing. Pay Per Click Ads is good and I do get hundreds of clicks per month. Even if they pay 10 cents per click, I still could make a couple of hundred bucks. That, unfortunately turned out to be a bad dream.

The payout is 1 miserable cent per click. Even then, those clicks have to be of some value, though I don’t think is it revealed how they benchmark the value of the click to be worth one miserable cent. So there are days when I don’t even get the one cent despite my stats showing I have more than 30 clicks. From the beginning of the month till the time of writing, I have sent more than 550 clicks. My earnings? $1.76! How’s that for Pay Per Click?

That’s Internet Marketing, I presume. Nothing remains the same forever and we have to keep evolving with time. Adsense, though horrendous as some makes it out to be seems to be the most stable of all. Chitika, despite being praised by many, still pays me 11 cents per click, no matter what. Affiliate sales are like the stock market. I can have good sales for one month and zero sales for the next despite the same amount of traffic. It’s the same with my own store selling my own stuffs.

I decided that I have had enough of 1 cent clicks. It is just not feasible anymore to be maintaing such sites. Furthermore, those sites have been blacklisted by Google and to transform them to a legit blog for Adsense is out of the question. “Scrapper” sites that have been de-indexed by Google stands no chance of being indexed ever again. It is best to just let them die a natural death. So yesterday, I went to my GoDaddy account and reset-ted all my 36 such domains from auto renew to manual. There will be no more renewals for these sites unless some miracle happens before they expire. With that, it’s final good-bye to eBay Partners Network. There is no heartache though. It was good while it lasted.

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Article by Costa Fong

@costafong

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16 Responses to “Almost All But Ready To Dump EPN”

Comments

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Sushine

October 21, 2009 at 6:56 am

Same hear buddy. Although I did not jump on the Bans-wagon, as I should have, and joined ebay’s epn last summer, I did have one little squidoo lens that was consistently earning a little dough. This site now only gets 14 cent clicks.

I was able to redirect my traffic to another blog with adsense, and wouldn’t you know, it does quite better than the measly 14cents ebay paid for the same traffic.

If I were you, I would consider possibly re-funneling that traffic from a hubpage, infobarrel type site to your bans site and replace those ebay listings with either adsense or strike up a deal directly with the store owners of the ebay stores for some sort of pay per leads deal before entirely giving up.

Remember as Grizzly has written about in the past, traffic is gold and although ebay may not appreciate it, someone else will.

Your blog is really nice by the way and always filled with quality tips.

All the best.

Sunshine

Reply
- Costa
  
  October 21, 2009 at 8:56 am
  
  Hi Sunshine,
  
  I too have considered that, but Bans Sites are built with a script and unlike phpPro, is not a WordPress Plugin. I can still insert Adsense to a Bans site, but no, I am not risking my Adsense account to do that. Adsense and Googles hates Bans. LOL.
  
  Furthermore, the traffic to a BANs site is too tightly targetted, because it is all “buy” or “cheap” or “used” + keywords. Again something that Google hates. Added to that, the domains have all been blacklisted as “scrap” sites so the future is bleak for these sites.
  
  My opinion is if I have to spend the time starting lenses or making a hundred hubpages, I might as well start a new blog and put all my articles there. No doubt it would take a bit longer to rank, but in the long run, everything still belongs to me and me alone. We never know what will happen to Squido or Hubpage a few years down the road. Mainly I used these sites for indexing and ranking purposes only.
  
  Thanks you for the compliment.
  
  Reply
Todd

December 1, 2009 at 11:45 am

Hi Costa,

I too finally dumped EPN about a month ago. For me though, I was actually liking the first 3-4 weeks of the quality click pricing. My final payment from eBay was actually pretty good … I was only getting .14 a click, but had a couple of sites with clickthru rates of 50-60% … life was good. Then one day, I logged into my EPN account, and for seemingly no reason, my EPC has dropped to a big fat ZERO. I gave it week, it never came back, so I pulled EPN from my sites and put up adsense and Amazon. CTR is not any where near as good … but at least they are still making some money.

I gave up on all my BANS sites a long long time ago.

Reply
- Costa
  
  December 1, 2009 at 11:55 am
  
  Hi Todd,
  
  Yes for some reasons unknown, days goes by with clicks that pays nothing! I have never bothered to find out why though I’m quite sure many others suffers the same fate.
  
  Good for you that you manage to convert your sites to Adsense. As for mine, all have been de-indexed, so I might as well abandon them totally. LOL
  
  Thanks for dropping by mate.
  
  Reply
Glen Cumbie

December 19, 2009 at 12:59 pm

Hi Costa,

Great blog. I am new to EPN and started getting .14 clicks about 2 weeks ago on my RSS feeds. My highest day is 24 clicks so I am not breaking the bank by any means, but will continue to pursue. Hope I don’t wake up to a .00 EPC morning. I am wondering if the EPN Ebay powers that be are doing that in response to no sales. I am so new and have been so focused on getting clicks that I didn’t even think much at all about the sales, but now I am thinking if I don’t get sales then my .14 won’t be around much longer.

Reply
- Costa
  
  December 19, 2009 at 2:39 pm
  
  Hi Glenn,
  
  Thanks.
  
  On EPN, I have stopped following recent happenings and spending my time elsewhere so I can’t really comment.
  
  However, I think it is safe to assume that the more sales you make, the higher quality your clicks will be valued. So if you are doing okay with your sales, I guess EPN would be still be a good option for you to stick around.
  
  But I do miss the days when we were paid $25 per sign up. It was like a gold rush. LOL.
  
  Reply
Glen Cumbie

December 24, 2009 at 4:48 pm

Thanks Costa,

I just wanted to let you know that EPN gave me an early Christmas present. Remember those .14 clicks I was so proud of a few weeks ago?

Well I have now joined the .00 per click club.. lol

All I did was work harder and longer to drive more traffic, only to get less. Not only less.. but zip.. zippo.

Think I will be moving on from EPN too.

Happy Holidays Costa.

Glen

Reply
ebay scam

August 7, 2010 at 8:13 am

eBay is counting their revenue like scrooge on Christmas eve but wait and watch, EPN is crooked and they will soon face a lot of bad press over it. EPN employees have access to member sites/statistics and the power to ban yet they compete with their own EPN sites, employees are members too, unfair and abusive. EPN also arbitrarily lowers payouts, right down to a penny, suggesting that from 1000 visitors they could only generate a dollar or two making them the WORST converting site ever… if you believe them.

The tides are turning, EPN leaders left and new ones are in place and it’s now worse than it was before. eBay’s position is TAKE YOUR PENNY PER CLICK OR LEAVE… good for you for leaving. Don’t de-activate the sites, instead point the links to ebay competition like eBid.com or Amazon.

Reply