eBay PartnerNetwork Blog

The whole eBay Partner Network team would like to wish our publishers a very happy Holiday and a Happy New Year! We hope you all enjoy a well deserved break and come back fresh in 2010 ready to continue our partnership and keep on driving quality traffic to eBay.

We’re also taking a break from writing articles for the blog until January, so check back then for more news, tips, tricks, and guest blog posts.

Thanks for a great year!

The eBay Partner Network team

With a new year quickly approaching, for many a smart, responsible and admirable New Year’s resolution is to find ways to ‘Go Green’ and become more environmentally friendly in 2010.

eBay is passionate about constantly finding ways to be more eco-friendly, and we want to share with you some of the things we’re doing and offer ideas on what you can do to make greener choices and promote eco-friendly products.

The Green Team

Did you know that you can take things that you already own and repurpose them into green items? You can join eBay’s Green Team and get free access to tons of information on how to do just that. You can also learn ways to Buy Green, Sell Green and get inspiration on how to Think Green.

eBay Inc.’s Green Actions

Take a look at some of eBay’s Green initiatives. Since 1998, an estimated $100 billion in goods have been reused, made possible only by the eBay community. eBay is committed to a Green campus, and with Green buildings, energy efficiency, alternative power and more, since 2007 eBay has been a carbon neutral company. In 2009, four of eBay’s buildings won Emerald Awards, which are BOMA’s green/sustainability awards which celebrate high performance, energy efficient buildings.

How You Can Promote Eco-Friendly Products

You can find great information about eBay’s WorldofGood.com in this earlier post. WorldofGood.com even offers an Eco Positive center, where you can find nearly 20,000 products from a wide variety of categories.

New WorldofGood.com Widget

We are very excited to announce our newly launched WorldofGood.com Widget! Once logged-in to your eBay Partner Network account, click on ‘Tools’ and then ‘Widgets’ to access this new widget. Implementing the WorldofGood.com Widget will make your pages more dynamic and rich by displaying beautiful handmade products from around the world.

Let Our Tools Do the Work

With our Tools, you can find sellers on eBay that only offer eco-friendly products and promote them. To easily highlight specific sellers, use our Widgets and API to select individual Seller IDs.

Utilize search terms in our Widgets and API to highlight the precise items that you want to show on your site. For example, enter “eco-friendly diaper bag” or “eco-friendly shoes” and see all of the corresponding items that return.

Finally, use the Link Generator to create links to custom URLs where the products that you want to promote on your site(s) reside.

Our tools offer a large variety of ways to highlight and promote eco-friendly items on eBay, so use them to your advantage.

If you have additional ideas on how to ‘Go Green’ with eBay Partner Network, we welcome you to share them with us!

To your continued success,

Amanda Lucas, Affiliate Program Manager at PartnerCentric

Although eBay Partner Network does not allow our partners to directly promote eBay through social media arenas, we want to make sure you know that you can drive traffic to your own website(s) through appropriate social media strategies.

Today it is easier, and more important, than ever to implement a few simple social media tactics to increase traffic to your site(s). Why should you build a social media strategy? It’s an easy way to promote your website to as many people as you can – and best of all, it’s free!

1. Add social bookmark links to your most important web pages and/or blog posts.

2. Build relationships by participating in existing social networks.

3. Do you send out regular newsletters? If you don’t already have one, incorporate a blog into your site where your visitors can comment and interact with you.

4. Try adding a series of video or audio podcasts to your site. This is a great way to implement or improve product reviews.

5. Give a Twitter Party a try!

6. Offer an RSS subscription and an e-mail alternative, the more ways that you can distribute your content, the better.

7. Review your inbound links, if you have incoming links from blogs you can build relationship with those bloggers by making relevant comments on their posts.

8. Respond personally to people that follow you through social media. Do not send out auto messages with your sales pitch.

9. Make all of your social media outlets interactive. Encourage people to respond to your messages and respond to other people’s messages as well. You want to be approachable and trustworthy.

10. Tie your blog to your Twitter account so that your blog posts are automatically updated into Twitter, in addition to your unique Tweets.

Always remember, social media is not simply a place to advertise and in fact advertising can be perceived negatively. Instead it’s often better to aim to be a helpful and interesting part of the community to make the most gains for your efforts! Have you implemented a successful social media technique that you would like to share? Feel free to leave a comment!

To your continued success,

Amanda Lucas, Affiliate Program Manager at PartnerCentric

We know that it takes a lot of effort and creativity to compose unique and insightful articles to build a valuable blog today.  Once you are in a stride and producing quality content on a regular basis, you might be asking yourself how you can finally turn your hard work into revenue.  Whether your blog is entirely focused on one specific niche, or you have a wider variety of topics that you cover, it is crucial that you serve advertisements that are relevant to your content. 

Driving traffic

In order to monetize, you must have traffic!  You’ve found yourself at a steady pace producing new persuasive content on your blog on a weekly basis and the next step is to grow your audience.  There are many ways to get eyes on your content, but you want to make sure you’re getting the right eyes for what you have to offer.  Taking the time to learn and implement good search engine optimization tactics is crucial to the longevity of your blog.  In addition to SEO, you can implement search engine marketing strategies to gain appropriate readers.  Perhaps you could become active in related forums and communities, and with meaningful participation you are likely gain additional interest in your own blog content.  Getting active in social media arenas such as Twitter is another great way to attract readers. 

Ensure your advertising is relevant

Now that you have a following, what’s next?  Key to finding success with monetizing your blog is the the relevancy of the products you’re advertising to the content of your site.  For example, if you publish detailed product reviews on the 5 hottest selling gifts this holiday season and then integrate affiliate links to each of those products in the review, that is highly targeted traffic and will likely return good results for you.  If you have great content and are serving up irrelevant ads to your audience, your revenue might be seriously lacking.

It’s important you choose to advertize an appropriate merchant, so with countless affiliate programs out there, what makes eBay Partner Network the right partner for you to achieve your goals of monetizing your blog?  The obvious answer is that eBay is able to fit every single niche imaginable, with products ranging from collectibles to vehicles to jewelry and everything in between.  As you most likely know, eBay is the only place to find most rare or discontinued products.   However, remember the relevancy of your ads is crucial, so in some circumstances promoting a larger number of merchants may serve your readers better, and this has the added benefit of potentially improving your Quality Score when it comes to SEM.

eBay Partner Network offers a number of tools that simplify the process of monetizing your blog, including Custom Banner and our robust API that will allow you to create some more customized integrations.  In order to make sure you’re showcasing the most relevant listings, take time to read James Skelland’s blog post, where he highlights some tips and tricks to help you do this.  In addition, we have geo-targeted tools to increase revenue from your international traffic, and other tools and widgets that will help you find very specific products in your niche to promote. 

Disclose that you are advertising

Finally, please remember that if you are generating revenue by product endorsements or testimonials on your blog, you must disclose that relationship according to the Federal Trade Commission. 

To your continued success & if you have many more tips on blog monetization, please share them with us!

Amanda Lucas, Affiliate Program Manager at PartnerCentric

In this third post in the ‘Successful Search Engine Marketing’ series, I’ll be providing some tips on how to make the clicks you send to your website convert better for you by optimizing your landing pages.  In 2010 we’ll be following up with a post on how to choose the optimal pages on eBay to which to direct your traffic.  However, when buying traffic from search engines, it is also important to ensure that you are sending visitors to the best possible pages on your own site, and that the look and feel of those pages is as good as possible.  Doing this successfully is key to making sure that your Search Engine Marketing budget is being spent profitably.

Landing Page Design Guidelines

One of the comments we hear most frequently from our publishers is that their performance is heavily affected by the way search engines (particularly Google) view their website.  Most search engines publish guidelines on what they consider to be good landing page experiences, to which they advise websites who advertise with them to adhere– for example, you can find Google’s guidelines here.  Websites which do not meet these recommendations often find that the landing page component of the ‘Quality Score’ search engines assign to their ads is very low, which can lead to being charged higher minimum CPCs in order to advertise your website.  In more extreme cases, some publishers have found that search engines have barred them from buying traffic to their websites until the quality of their sites has been improved sufficiently to comply with these guidelines.

Although the guidelines for each of the search engines differ, they all boil down to the general mantra that you should build your website with your visitors in mind.  Four common themes emerge from looking at these guidelines:

1. Unique, relevant content.  Ensuring that you have unique content on your website is critical for all websites, and the lack of original material is one of the complaints most commonly raised specifically against affiliate websites.  Original, value-added content can come in many forms – for example, reviews of products (whether written by you or generated by the users of your website), information about the category or niche you are promoting, or editorials about the newest product releases.  The important thing to remember is that as well as being unique, the content you are adding to your website should also be relevant to what the user is looking for – in other words, don’t place reviews of mobile phones next to listings for handbags.  Always think about whether the information you are placing on your site will make sense for users, and will add value to their browsing experience.  Many search engines will not allow multiple ads for websites which have the same content, so ensuring that you are offering something unique is crucial if you want to maximize the visibility of ads for your site.

2. Original look and feel.  Another criticism often leveled at affiliate websites by search engines is that they look too similar to the website for the company whose products they are promoting.  Again, the key here is to think about how your site design can add more value to the overall user experience than simply re-skinning your merchant’s site.  A few things that you might want to try testing out include different page layouts, giving a variety of different search options (for example, by price range or by location), and filtering the results you show on your website to the most relevant for users (for example, a site about an individual brand’s laptops may want to exclude accessories for that laptop from the results they display to users).  Again, search engines look very closely at how similar sites look to each other, and will restrict the number of ads they show for sites they consider to look to close to each other, in order to encourage a true range of choice for users when they search on the internet – so having a site which looks different from your merchant’s website is vital to running successful SEM campaigns.

3. Ease of use.  The easier you can make it for users to find what they are looking for, the better.  There are three broad elements to this.  Firstly, you should ensure that a user can find their way around whichever page they visit on your website.  In order to do this, you should try to make sure that the key features of your page (for example, editorial content, products and merchandizing, pricing information and display or text advertising) are laid out logically and consistently.  Secondly, users should be able to find their way from one page on your site to another.  For example, if you promote different product categories on your site, clearly signpost on each page how users can move to another category than the one they are currently looking at.  If your site offers search functionality, make it clearly visible to users where they can find it.  Also, make sure that your site has an up to date Site Map.  Finally, make sure your site offers a ‘clean’ experience to users – for example by not using pop-ups and pop-unders, ensuring that advertising is integrated as seamlessly as possible into the overall look and feel of the site, and that your pages load quickly.  For more information in this area, Google offers several useful hints and tips in its Webmaster Guidelines. (more…)

Hi all

We’re proud to announce that eBay Partner Network has won the Affiliate Marketing eConsultancy Innovation Award for our introduction of Quality Click Pricing.

It’s great to see that we’ve been recognized for our efforts to better and more fairly reward our best affiliates for the quality traffic they’re driving to eBay. eConsultancy also mentioned our aim to “elevate the quality of traffic driven to eBay sites through (our) affiliate programme,” and this is reflected by the fact that EPCs are on the rise across the network and we’ve seen plenty of publishers that were initially losing make changes to their site and then earn more.

Here’s what the judges had to say: “A fantastic idea from eBay. The Quality Click Pricing is a no-brainer. The decision to reward affiliates based on customer lifetime value and PayPal usage is a highly compelling incentive.”

Thanks to the eConsultancy judges and to all our publishers for making Quality Click Pricing a success!

The eBay Partner Network team

It’s that time of year again, we’re making our plans to head out to Affiliate Summit West next month! Several of our team members will be attending the show and hosting a Meet Market table at the conference. If you’re planning to be there, drop by and say hello! Here are the details of the show:

Where: Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino, Las Vegas
When: January 17-19, 2010
Pricing: Platinum Pass ($1,249), Gold Pass ($549), Silver Pass ($149)

Special Discount for eBay Partner Network Affiliates
We have secured a discount of 10% off the above pricing for our partners. This discount is valid for any type of pass you wish to purchase. Simply use code ASW10EBAY10 when registering.

Also, be sure to check out Shawn Collins blog Affiliate Tip for more conference news and networking opportunities.

We hope to see you there!

The eBay Partner Network Team

As many of you know, on November 21st eBay had some problems with the search functionality on the eBay sites. This affected some search results to queries on the site, as well as affected a number of affiliates that use the RSS feeds and the API through eBay Partner Network. The issues began around 5am US Pacific Daylight Time on November 21st and were resolved around 10pm US Pacific Daylight Time that same day.

We have finalized calculations for a makegood that will use the earnings on the days before and the days after the outage, along with a factor to account for Christmas seasonality, to calculate a makegood to make up for the decrease in affiliate earnings caused by this outage.

This makegood will be added to each account and will be paid out along with the December payment.

Thanks for your patience as we worked to resolve this issue.

Firefox has so many useful add-ons, it can be daunting to find ones that might be helpful to an internet marketer. Whether you are a blogger, specialize in Search Engine Optimization or utilize other internet marketing promotional methods, you should find one or more of the below add-ons helpful in your daily tasks.

1. SEO Link Analysis – Enriches the link data in Google Webmaster Tools & Yahoo! Site Explorer by showing the PageRank of the linking page, the anchor text user and whether the link is nofollowed or not.




2. Screengrab – Allows you to save webpages as images. It will capture what you can see in the window, the entire page, just a selection, a particular frame… basically it saves webpages as images – either to a file, or to the clipboard.




3. StomperTools – StomperTools features SNRanker, a visualization of Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Live for a specific query term using SVG. See how you rank! Useful for search engine optimization (SEO) assessment as well as exploring a topic. It also integrates with Stomper Scrutinizer, an Adobe AIR browser with a built in simulation of human vision, if installed.




4. TableTools – TableTools sorts, filters or copies any HTML table. This extension is the perfect first-glance tool for HTML data tables, providing better sorting and filtering capabilities than MS Excel (and directly in FF!), but if you need to make a graph or sth., just use the extension to copy the whole table into Excel!




5. Better Google Analytics – Enhances Google Analytics with a compilation of user scripts.




6. Save Complete – Saves a webpage completely, providing a better alternative to the flawed built-in save functionality of Firefox.




7. IE Tab – Allows you to embed Internet Explorer in tabs of Mozilla/Firefox.




8. KGen – KGen (Keyword Generator) is an extension that allows you to see what keywords are strong on visited web pages.




9. Live HTTP Headers - View HTTP headers of a page and while browsing.




10. SearchStatus – Display the Google PageRank, Alexa rank, Compete ranking and SEOmoz Linkscape mozRank anywhere in your browser, along with fast keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info and more.

We know that there are many more valuable add-ons, so if there’s one that you’re using and couldn’t live without, please feel free to leave a comment and share your favorites with us!

To your continued success,

Amanda Lucas, Affiliate Program Manager at PartnerCentric

We wanted to notify US Publishers of some important tax information.

You will receive a 1099 tax form for the year 2009 from eBay Partner Network if:

• you are a United States citizen or legal resident and
• you had $600 reportable tax activity for the year 2009

eBay Partner Network Forms 1099-MISC will be postmarked via US Postal Service no later than January 31, 2010.

To ensure the accuracy of the 1099 –MISC Forms, please log-in to your eBay Partner Network account and make sure that you have entered the latest information in your W9 online form:

Here is how to confirm your tax information:

In your dashboard go to Account – Payment Information, under Tax Information – Enter & Approve W9

You can find additional information about the 1099-MISC Form from the IRS website, www.irs.gov.

Please note that eBay Partner Network is not authorized to give you any tax advice. Please reach out to a tax advisor to get qualified advice about your taxes.

Warm wishes,

The eBay Partner Network Team