eBay PartnerNetwork Blog

Hello Partners,

We are taking steps to improve our payment processes. This month’s payment disbursement, occurring Monday, July 27th, will have no payment threshold. This means that as long as your eBay Partner Network account is in good standing, you will receive your outstanding balance paid in full, even if your balance due is less than 5 (USD, CAD, EUR, GBP or AUD).

Moving forward, we will remove the payment threshold entirely every November, once a year, allowing us to better serve you.

New Payment Threshold starting with August 1st, 2009

Beginning August 1st there will be a new payment threshold of 25 USD, 25 CAD, 25 EUR, 25 GBP, or 25 AUD (depending on your country’s currency). This will require no change on your part. The first payment with the new threshold will be on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009.

If your balance is 25 (USD, CAD, EUR, GBP or AUD) or more, and your eBay Partner Network account is in good standing, you will receive a payment from us as scheduled. If your balance is lower than this amount, we will hold it until you either surpass this threshold or until our November period, where we will pay out your accumulated outstanding earnings regardless of the size of your balance.

Note that as always, eBay Partner Network reserves the right to suspend payment temporarily if a Partner is placed under investigation for violation of our Code of Conduct or our Advertiser Terms and Conditions. In such a case, the Partner will be contacted.

Thank you for your continued partnership.

The eBay Partner Network Team

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to tell you about a small change in the way we estimate next month’s ACRU quality scores in the US program.

As you know, on the first of every month we make a prediction of your coming month’s ACRU quality score.  That way when you log into the system, you can see your estimated ACRU earnings for the current month. This is just a prediction, and your actual ACRU tier and earnings aren’t confirmed until the beginning of the following month.

We have recently made enhancements to improve the accuracy of our predictions for your coming month’s score using your account history and the latest data for your account.  As a result, it should be more predictive of your actual score for the month.

Everything else about value-based ACRUs remains the same.  Just to clarify, here are the reports and timing you see every month:

• 1st of each month, final quality scores for the previous month are uploaded.   Our methodology for doing this remains the same.  Reports you run for the previous month will have final accurate data for ACRU tiers as of the 1st.

• 1st of the month, predictions are entered into the system for the coming month (we’ve improved the way we calculate this as described in this post).   You’ll see these estimated ACRU tiers and estimated ACRU earnings like usual when you run a current month earnings report.

• 10th and the 25th of the month - quality score campaign-level report are available to see the most recent quality data at a campaign level

Thanks,

The eBay partner Network Team

Hello Partners,

We often get asked about our requirements for accepting new partners into eBay Partner Network.  Recently, we came across a great blog entry that gives some great insights into getting accepted into ePN.  TheNicheStoreBuilder.com’s “7 Tips for Getting Accepted into ePN - eBay Affiliate Network” offers interesting and insightful tips on becoming a new ePN partner.

In addition to the tips mentioned above, we want to stress the importance of giving valid contact information in your application.  Although we understand the desire for privacy, giving false phone numbers and/or contact information is an easy way to get rejected quickly from eBay Partner Network.  We want to ensure that you aren’t getting rejected for reasons that can easily be corrected.  When applying to ePN, please enter your current contact information and an explanation of how you drive traffic to your website and your plans to promote eBay.  The more we can understand about your business model, the easier it is for us to make a clear and correct decision.

We welcome your feedback and questions, please comment on this thread if you would like further clarification and we will be happy to respond to you.

To your continued success,

Amanda
eBay Partner Network Team

Last week we attended the first annual Affiliate Convention in Denver, where senior director Steve Hartman joined Peter Bordes, CEO of MediaTrust on a keynote panel discussing innovation and transparency in affiliate marketing. Other panelists included Steve Schaffer, founder and CEO of Vertive, Rebecca Madigan, head of the Performance Marketing Alliance and Wes Mahler, CEO of Prosper202.

Peter shared several interesting facts about the performance marketing industry, such as:
•    Performance marketing is the fastest growing segment of the exploding online ad industry, making up 57% of total online ad spend (according to PricewaterhouseCoopers)
•    17 percent of affiliates drive more than $600,000 annually in sales to their merchants (this is huge!)

Some of the other takeaways from the keynote included:
•    There is a need for better measurement of the performance marketing industry. Very little data exists. Few merchants and/or networks share publicly what they do have, making it difficult for the industry to measure results and the impact performance (and affiliate) marketing has on merchants and affiliates. Peter suggested finding a way to connect all forms of performance marketing for better measurement and results
•    All panelists agreed that better collaboration should be in order. When affiliates work closely with their network and merchant partners, they have an opportunity to influence policies and innovation, making the entire system work better. Getting to know your partners is key to building a trusted and prosperous relationship for both sides of the affiliate marketing equation
•    Paying for quality was noted by several panelists as the best way to ensure a healthy affiliate program. While some merchants offer as little pay as possible in order to make affiliate marketing a feasible expense, some merchants (including eBay) have realized that paying for quality is a better option. It allows merchants to pay its best affiliates the most, while discouraging lower quality traffic and activity. Affiliates seem to like this also, because they feel they are getting paid fairly for their performance and it allows for a more trusted relationship between the two parties
•    There is more education to be done on affiliate marketing. From the executive suite to reporters, analysts, policymakers and marketers – there is a major lack of understanding of affiliate marketing. The only way we will be able to continue the growth and prosperity of the industry is if we all work to educate the influencers. The more value that is seen in affiliate marketing, the more money merchants will be able to pay out and the more money on the table for affiliates.

After the panel we hosted an impromptu breakout session for affiliates interested in learning more about eBay Partner Network. The result was very valuable for us, and (we hope) for the affiliates, too. We received some great feedback and ideas for our blog, our tools and our reporting, some of which you’ll see the results of in the near future.

Thanks to Peter and the Affiliate Convention for having us, and thanks to everyone who attended our sessions! We appreciate the opportunity to work with you all!

Hello Partners,

We found the article Five Ways to Bulletproof Your Copy by Sean Platt very informative for affiliates who are interested in finding ways to write more persuasive copy on their websites and blogs.  Sean reiterates the mantra that “you will never sell to everyone”, and follows this thought by giving great advice on how to write copy that appeals to those that have an interest in buying.  Read the full article for more information on Sean’s five methods to create bulletproof copy.

To your continued success,

The eBay Partner Network Team

About the eBay Daily Deal Bonus Program

Take advantage of this great opportunity for a chance to win big money promoting the eBay Daily Deal through the eBay Partner Network. Not only will you be advertising some of the best deals available anywhere online and earning generous commissions on those sales, but now you’ll also have the potential to win one of nine $1,000 Weekly Bonus Prizes, the $1,000 Design Contest, and a $10,000 Bonus Sweepstakes Grand Prize!!! Click here to enter.

How to Enter and Become Eligible to Win
You’ll want to complete the entry form and place eBay Daily Deal ads on your site as soon as possible. That will get you entered in the program, but to be eligible to win one of the nine $1,000 Weekly Bonus Prizes you’ll also need to generate at least one eBay Daily Deal sale during the week of the drawing. So, to be entered and eligible for the first week drawing you’ll need to
register and generate at least one sale by 6/7/09. You will only need to register and generate at least one sale between 6/1 and 7/31 to be eligible for the $10,000 Grand Prize. However, the weekly drawings require that at least one Daily Deal sale is made in that particular week’s time range. Sales made in previous weeks will not carry over.

About the $1,000 Design Contest
The Design Contest will award a $1,000 Bonus to 1 (one) publisher who creates the best all around eBay Daily Deal experience on their site. The criteria we’ll use to judge will be:

1. URL name (eBay TM is not allowed in the domain)
2. Creativeness of Daily Deal integration
3. Overall brand messaging

Click here for official rules.

The ePN team will select the top 3 Finalists to be voted on by the eBay Partner Network Discussion Board Community to determine the winner. To be part of the community voting please visit our discussion board and find the Official eBay Partner Network Daily Deal Bonus Program thread to vote on your favorite design between August 5th and August 14th.

We are looking forward to seeing this eBay Daily Deal Bonus Program start bringing the heat this Summer to the already hot eBay Daily Deals!

Good Luck!
The eBay Partner Network Team

This is part 2 of a 3 part SEO series by Wil Reynolds, founder of Seer Interactive, an industry leading SEO consulting firm. If you didn’t happen to catch part one of his series, you can catch up and have a read here.

Ok, you’ve had 2 weeks to go through the beginner stuff, now let’s start talking about a more advanced tactic, using no follows to help craft how link juice flows through to your site. One of the most powerful, but also most easily misunderstood and improperly implemented strategies in all of SEO is the pushing more internal link value to the pages that need it to rank well. So we all know to not leak “juice” to about us and privacy policy type pages, but the real trick is in understanding how much juice does a page linked from your homepage need to rank well?

So let’s say I have a 9 page web site about widgets

• Homepage (widgets)
• Management team page
• Category Page (all widgets)
• Product page #1 (blue widgets)
• Product page #2 (red widgets)
• About Us
• Contact Us
• Blog
• Sitemap

With that as a given structure for my site, I should first take an inventory of what pages are likely to have content that my audience would be searching for and is important for me to rank well for, i.e. keywords. Pretty quickly I can eliminate pages like management team, about us, and contact us. I would recommend slapping a no follow on those in my navigation, that’s easy. I’d likely have a sitemap that has links to all sections of the site with fully followed links, this will help you rank for management team names and other non critical keywords.

Looking at the remaining pages, I then need to figure out if all of them need to be linked from the homepage (or main nav) to be able to rank well, to start making this assessment just go to Google and type in your desired keyword.  If you see over 50% of the results returned are the homepages of your competitors that should help you prioritize which words you may need to target on your homepage as well. For a more scientific way to determine how competitive a keyword may be try the SEOMOZ keyword tool. I like this tool much more than the seochat keyword difficulty tool which doesn’t give you much background into what makes a word more or less difficult than another. If you are already thinking, WOW Wil, you lost me already, I’ve got a link for you to get some background, go read this now then come back.

Let’s say that my big keyword is “widgets”, I might use the homepage and my widgets category page to tackle that term. If I find that blue widgets and red widgets when searched for in Google bring back mostly sub pages in the SERPS, I may be able to architect the link juice flow internally to better help me rank for those words.

My first option now that I’ve eliminated the pages of low value is: Linking the widgets, sitemap, red widgets, and blue widgets pages from the homepage.

In this scenario I am basically taking my homepage value and spreading link juice to 5 pages (all widgets, red, blue, sitemap, and the blog).  If I take an arbitrary homepage value of 5, what I have now done is just give each page linked from my homepage a value of 1. You with me? Good.

Or…

Creating a hierarchy by only allowing link juice to flow through to 3 pages from the homepage, the sitemap, the blog and the all widgets page.  Keeping that same arbitrary value of 5, what I have now done is almost DOUBLED the internal link value I am assigning to my blog and to my all widgets pages, allowing me to target more competitive terms there.  What you are likely going to find in this scenario is that the red and blue widget pages can achieve top rankings without being directly linked form the homepage (wasted juice) that may have prevented the blog page and the all widget page from ranking well.

This could be a big mistake…What if the keywords red widgets and blue widgets need more link juice to rank well? My hierarchy has just prevented me from doing that.

Now it’s time to determine how much juice a page needs to be able to compete. This is where the rubber meets the road, as an SEO you need to be playing with terms to see which pages need more juice to rank well.  The one thing to consistently keep an eye out for is bounce rates. If you put widgets on the homepage instead of the widgets page you may see a higher ranking, but you’ll also likely see a higher bounce rate.  So you need to calculate if getting more traffic at a higher bounce rate good or bad? You may find that it is better to rank lower and drive the user to the 100% correct page, then to drive the user to a page that is CLOSE to what the user is looking for but allows you to rank slightly higher.

Rookie SEO’s too often make the mistake of stuffing too many keyword links in a nav or a footer. What they aren’t realizing is that by linking everything from your homepage you are basically giving the search engines no way to value your internal content as anything other than a homepage or just another page. Obviously some keywords are more important to rank well for than others, you need to be linking your most IMPORTANT and most competitive words directly for your homepage.  Create a hierarchy to your site.

Sitting on a panel with Rae Hoffman at IM spring break she mentioned how she allows “juice” to flow from her blogroll to other sites but on the homepage of her blog only, which is a GREAT IDEA for a couple reasons:

1 – She passes link juice to the sites in her blogroll. She has a great site, so that link is a good one to get.

2 – Then she no-follows the blogroll on her blog subpages, which is 100% good for her to not leak juice on every single page of her blog, but on the homepage of her blog (the most important page on a site typically) she is passing juice.  This just makes a ton of sense, especially given that getting a link from every page on any site is not that much more valuable than one link from the homepage.

One of the biggest culprits to linking to everything is hidden divs used for nav items, ajax effects, DHTML, and other effects on a single web page.  If you have a feature box on your site and that feature box has 10 links, but you have other feature boxes show up what you may not realize is that you are loading your homepage up with a LOT of links. We had a client who at first glance looked like they had about 35 links out from their homepage, but once we asked about the tabs and nav, they had close to 150 links…definitely needs a no follow strategy. 

Before you go rushing off to start no following, advanced SEO’s know to test everything, and to evaluate the downsides of everything.  This video (also at SEOMOZ) will help you understand how using the nofollow can come back to bite you and have the opposite impact of what you hoped for.

This is an advanced tactic, keep a LOG of everything you are changing and limit the number of things you are testing at one time.

Hello and thanks for reading the first of R.O.EYE’s guest blog posts which will be covering some tips and tricks for publishers looking to launch and grow successful affiliate campaigns. In this post we will be addressing the topic of niches, and more specifically how to choose one to promote.  eBay offers the ideal affiliate programme for targeting niches due to the sheer number and diversity of products it has on offer at any one time. No matter how weird or wonderful your niche idea, the likelihood is that eBay will sell it. This of course poses the dilemma of how do I choose one that will generate me earnings? The following sections will hopefully aid that decision by sharing our experiences of what has worked for successful publishers.

Are you interested?

We have found that one of the most important factors in choosing a successful niche is whether the publisher is interested in it themselves. This usually links with an existing interest or hobby which means that much of the knowledge that is required to write content and optimise keywords is already known without the laborious task of researching product information. Some of the most successful publishers on the ePN started with, and continue to develop sites, that target their own personal interests. Because they already understand the target market well; motivation to develop is higher with the content and listings being more in depth and relevant to site visitor.    

Are they interested?

If you are interested in something it does not always necessarily mean that others will be. It is important that publishers carry out their own research to gauge the potential demand for a certain niche. Some of the publishers we work with do this in a number of ways but the most common and successful methods used include the following three techniques;

1)Use of the Google and eBay keywords tool highlight popular and alternative search terms associated with your niche
2) Search query the eBay site to establish the volume of listings associated with your niche. You can also use eBay Pulse which offers a daily a snapshot of popular searches and items on eBay. Each country has a relevant eBay Pulse page to so that you can view the appropriate results for your region.
3) Query your niche in the search engines to determine the amount of competition in that area through SEO and paid search.

By following these three techniques publishers have been able to determine the potential of their niche. If the idea fails in one of these areas then it is likely to be unsuccessful and not generate as much of an income. If the niche is too narrow then not enough people will be interested,  if it is too broad then the likelihood of good natural search rankings and low PPC click costs will be unachievable.

Market trends and Longevity

Many of the established niches tend to have high competition levels but fortunately there are always new fads and trends that mean niches are always developing and shrinking within each category. The most successful publishers in a niche are more often than not the ones who “got there first” and started targeting the niche before it took off. There can be an element of luck to this if they were in the right place at the right time but there are some indicators which publishers have used to ensure their timing is right and they are ahead of the game.

One indicator publishers have looked at is the product life cycle of a chosen niche. If the product is at its peak of maturity and popularity, before their site has even been developed then the expected volumes are likely to decline while they are chasing market share. The perfect example for such a product is the Nintendo Wii which has now gone through most of its unbelievable growth phase and the internet has already been saturated with Wii associated sites making it very difficult to compete. 

Another indicator is to keep up with the latest news on product developments and analyst predictions. This has worked particularly well for publishers targeting electronic niches as they have been able to find out months in advance when a new technology or product is being developed and the volumes it is expected to sell in. Of course not all of them work out as planned.

Still finding it difficult?

If you are still finding difficulty in choosing a niche that interests you or is not already saturated try and think outside the box. Anything you can think of can be quickly checked with a search query in eBay. By simply browsing the eBay category tree we have found niches that were unexpectedly popular. We had a quick browse and found that shoes for dogs, Viking collectibles and bonsai tree seeds all have potential.

The eBay Developer’s Conference is less than a month away and the early bird rate of $149 will increase to $199 after May 31st. eBay’s Dev Con is the premier event for eBay and Pay Pal developers and caters to companies and advertisers of all shapes and sizes. Learn how to put the eBay and PayPal APIs to work for you and get a first hand sneak peek of what is on tap for the next 6–24 months. eBay’s DevCon is June 17th and 18th and is going to be held in sunny San Jose California at eBay’s north campus, just minutes from the San Jose airport.

Aside from two full days of educational sessions and panels, there are two pre-conference workshops on June 16th, each is an additional $50. Both workshops are three hour sessions from 1:30pm – 4:30pm and they’re both at the same time, so you’ll have to pick the one that most interests you. One workshop is an eBay API platform jumpstart, the other is an eBay selling manager applications jumpstart. These are both great opportunities for new developers to get up to speed quickly on these topics.

DevCon is also a great opportunity for publishers to connect with eBay Partner Network managers and developers, as team members from around the globe will be attending this year’s event. On the first day, June 17th at 2:30pm, Jarrod Schwarz and Steve Hartman of ePN will be giving a presentation on application monetization with high quality traffic, providing insights into determining which marketing methods and traffic provide the the most desirable and valuable customers to eBay.

The day one keynote at this year’s DevCon will be from John Hagel, Co-Chairman, Deloitte Center for the Edge. The title of his keynote is “The Three Elements of Transformation” and is a focus on shaping strategies as technology-driven infrastructures constantly change. John is the founder of two Silicon Valley startups, author of a series of best-selling business books and has won two awards from the Harvard Business Review. The keynote on the 2nd day of DevCon is titled “Venture Capitalism in Silicon Valley: API Developer Stimulus Panel” and will be given by Rob Hayes, Sergio Monsalve and Ravi Mohan. All are well seasoned veterans of the venture capital world. Read more about this year’s DevCon keynotes and speakers here.

As a preview of what to expect, check out this video interview with 2008 eBay Star Developer Award Winner Christoph Buenger of Scendix Software. Keep an eye on the DevCon site, as well eBay Partner Network Blog and the eBay Developers Blog for future updates.

Aside from eBay’s DevCon, there are wide a variety of internet marketing conferences and events scheduled for the month of June. Here’s an overview of what’s happening next month.

SMX Advanced Seattle will take place on June 2nd and 3rd at the Bell Harbor International Conference Center. SMX is one of the most recognized events in search marketing and is well known for their high caliber speakers. Check out the full list of guest speakers and panelists here.

Dr. Qi Lu of Microsoft and Matt Cutts of Google with be giving the two keynotes at the event. Matt will even be doing the interactive “You&A” keynote where he’ll be answering direct questions from the audience. With engaging sessions on paid search, SEO and social media, SMX advanced is one of the premiere gatherings that gets down to the details of search marketing. The expo passes are free unless you register on site, then they’re $50. The full pass to the event is $1495 ahead of time, $1595 on site. Take a look at the full registration information here as well as the agendas for day one and day two of the event.

Coinciding with SMX Seattle on the other side of the globe is SMX Madrid on June 3rd and 4th. Note this event is conducted entirely in Spanish and is focused primarily on the Spain’s internet audience and consumers.

Search Engine Strategies Toronto is a two day conference focusing on a wide array of internet marketing’s latest developments and strategies along with an optional third day of SEM training available from the pros. This year’s event is taking place from June 8th-10th and is being held at the Sheraton Centre Toronto. Now in its 10th year, SES has become one of the top notch events in internet marketing. The sessions and panels at SES Toronto focus on topics including search analytics, information architecture, Canada specific search issues as well as social media developments and applications.

The opening keynote at SES Toronto will be from Tara Hunt, Author of “The Whuffie Factor” and Co-founder & Chief Marketing Officer of Citizen Agency. The day two keynote will be from Emanuel Rosen, author of “ The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited”.

A platinum pass to SES Toronto is $1295CAD and an expo only pass is free if you register in advance. They have quite an impressive list of speakers lined up and you can see the full list here, along with the agenda’s for day one and day two of the conference. Want a preview of what of SES is all about? Check out their free on demand webcasts today.

The first annual Affiliate Convention is taking place in Denver June 17th – 20th 2009 at the Colorado Convention Center, the same week as the eBay Developer’s Conference. If you can’t make it to the eBay Developer’s Conference and you live in the Denver area, Affiliate Convention is something you should consider attending. Kris Jones from PepperJam is kicking off the event with his keynote address on the future of affiliate marketing. Other notable speakers include Linda Woods of PartnerCentric, Heather Paulson of PMG, Peter Bordes of Media Trust and Gillian Muessig of SEOmoz. Check out the Affiliate Convention promotional video and the agenda for the full details or head over to the Aff Spot forums for the latest discussion.

This new affiliate marketing event is being promoted as “free to affiliates”, while merchants, agencies and others will be charged the normal conference rate of $700. After June 12th, the full conference pass goes up to $850. Affiliate Convention is being put on by Daron Babin of Webmaster Radio, Aunesty Jannsen of AffSpot and Marc Lesnick of Ticonderoga Ventures