eBay PartnerNetwork Blog

James Skelland is the Technical Solutions Manager at R.O.EYE, the agency that supports the in-house eBay Partner Network team with account management and recruitment in the UK and Ireland.  James has been working extensively with publishers across Europe to help them optimize the products they showcase using the API or Custom Banner and here are his top tips to help you do the same.  And in case you are wondering why there are s’s in words where there should be z’s (that’s zeds not zees), this is because James is writing in British English, as he is based in Manchester in the north west of England!

One of the biggest benefits of an API or Custom Banner implementation is that it provides an automated pull of live data to your website – so why should you keep fiddling with it once it’s set up?  Well, with the quality of traffic now dictating how much you get paid, it is imperative to ensure that visitors who arrive on your site are given an accurate and relevant choice of live listings.  It can take only a matter of minutes to tweak your search query, and the benefit of displaying a tighter set of results can be a significant increase in your EPC.

The important word here is “relevancy”, so how do you make sure the most relevant listings are displayed to your visitors?  The first clue is in the reports available to you in the eBay Partner Network interface.  The blog article entitled “How to Optimize for Quality Click Pricing” already covers off various ways to optimise, such as splitting campaigns down, and using the different reports to work out where improvements can me made.

As an example, after reviewing the Transaction Download Report or the Category Report on a mobile phone Custom Banner campaign you are running, you ’ve deduced that it is the phones themselves which convert, not the accessories, so where do you go from here?

1 – Improve keyword search with negatives and positives
Level: Easy
Applies to: Custom Banner / API
The easiest thing to look at is the actual keyword query.  eBay provides a handy table here, which explains some clever ways of entering your query.  Try it now by logging into ePN and loading up the Custom Banner widget.  Select a program and a campaign id, and enter the search term “nokia n95” (without quotation marks in all cases).  You’ll find you get a lot of accessories, including chargers, cases and batteries, so the first thing to look at is negative keyword matching.  Any keywords which you enter with a preceding minus sign will remove all of those items from the results.  From the results you have in front of you, pick a couple of words which you don’t want.  In this case, I will choose “charger” and “battery”, so I end up with “nokia n95 -charger –battery” and the widget will now return items without those two words. 

But we need more negatives than that.  Multiple words can be grouped together by using parentheses.  “nokia n95 -(case*, charg*, cover, battery, accessories, screen, cable, etc…)”.  Note that I’ve used the asterisk character a couple of times.  charg* will match against charged, chargers, charging etc.  You can just keep adding more negatives until you are happy with the results.  Negatives should also be used in conjunction with more positives for best results.  In this case, the word “unlocked” is a common word for handset results, so we’ll add that into the query as a positive.  If you try the following keyword query, you can see that there are far more relevant listings now appearing in the banner: “nokia n95 unlocked -(case*, charg*, cover, battery, accessories, screen, cable)”.

2 – Use relevant Category IDs
Level: Easy/Medium
Applies to: Custom Banner / API
The next area to look at is the Category ID.  Using both the API and the Custom Banner, you can stipulate that listings are only pulled from a specific category.  In the above example, the mobile phones Category ID is 3312 and if you insert this into the Custom ID field in the Custom Banner, you will restrict results to only this category.  However, using the term “nokia n95” with this Category ID will still yield a few rogue accessories in the results, so to get the most relevant matches, category mapping should be combined with keyword matching.  In other categories, such as Vehicle Parts & Accessories, you can specify Category IDs right down to the make of the vehicle or the brand of GPS – for example there is a category just for Peugeot Workshop Manuals! 

If you are using Custom Banner, you can use the drop down menu to find a Category IDs.  If you are using the API, the UK Category IDs can be found here and to see IDs for other territories, change the .co.uk in the address to the country’s own eBay site.

3 – Map eBay’s categories to your own site
Level: Medium/Hard
Applies to: Custom Banner / API
Modifying the query string and the Category ID is all well and good on a small number of pages, but on larger sites, which use dynamic keyword insertion to make calls on multiple pages, this just isn’t possible.  One option is to set up a table, which maps your site’s category structure to eBay’s.  You could also include a third column in the table with any negative keywords you want to include in the query.  This table can then be referenced to insert the correct Category ID into your query, based on which page of your site the visitor is on.

4 – Querying multiple categories
Level: Hard
Applies to: API
One final thing to consider: if you’ve filtered by Category ID for better matching, you may want to include multiple categories in your query.  For example, if you have a site about Apple computers and you don’t want to show accessories, then the meta category of Apple Computers and Components is not appropriate.  However, the two leaf categories of Apple Desktops and Apple Laptops & Notebooks are much more relevant, but how do you show them both?  The answer is that you can make a separate API call for each category, and then collate the results yourself.

All of these tips are fairly straightforward, but you’d be surprised at the number of publishers who don’t optimise their live listings.  Hopefully this post will at least give you a nudge in the right direction, and speaking from personal experience with publishers I have helped to optimise, once unwanted listings are replaced with more relevant items in your results, there are considerable gains in your EPC to be made.

James Skelland, Technical Solutions Manager at R.O.EYE

While the announcement of Quality Click Pricing was only made recently, R.O.EYE, the UK based agency that supports the European team with account management in the UK and Ireland, already has a few months experience working with the model, liaising with a number of publishers from different business models to fine tune activity. During this time we have been able to identify what works and what doesn’t work in terms of achieving a profitable EPC.  From this experience we will offer some advice on how to take full advantage of quality click pricing and ensure you are achieving the highest EPC possible with your campaigns.

Targeted traffic
One of, if not the most important factors in Quality Click Pricing success is the targeting of your traffic. You are much less likely to succeed under Quality Click Pricing if the majority of your campaigns are promoting the eBay brand and linking to the homepage.  From our experience, the publishers that are set to gain the highest increases in commission are niche content, shopping comparison or review site publishers who direct link to the related product and category pages or publishers who surface some of eBay’s great deals or products available in a user’s area.   

From an incremental value point of view, directing a potential eBay customer to the homepage of the site with the hope that they will be able to find what they are looking for by themselves adds little value.  Good quality traffic should already be qualified with the customer already intent on making a purchase.  To give you an example of how traffic can be made more targeted, we worked with a price comparison site that previously just linked to the eBay homepage through a simple text link. While the other merchants being listed on the page had live accurate prices, the eBay option was simply an invitation to visit the site.  Customers were linking through to eBay without even knowing if the product was available, and whether the prices were competitive. Unsurprisingly, bounce rates were very high and the conversion rates were compromised. By simply replacing the homepage link with a Custom Banner widget, customers were able to view items and prices prior to click through. The knock-on effect was uplift in conversion rate and more importantly a higher EPC and earnings.

User experience
Publishers can add a lot of “value” by assisting with and influencing the customer decision process and you can do this by promoting the best and most relevant products that are available on the site, but also eBay as the best merchant from which to purchase. There is no point in disguising the fact that the products you are promoting from eBay.  A good publisher’s site will offer all the information that is required to decide on the purchase, before actually having to click through to eBay. If we look at the example of a laptop content site, a model specific page outlining specifications, pictures and reviews, combined with live listings from an RSS feed will undoubtedly result in a more qualified customer being driven to eBay. Publishers we have worked with have built out the functionality of their sites further by using the eBay API. Features such as showing the average selling price and plotting the location of “pick up only” items on a map added to the user experience.  Having a good user experience is what will encourage repeat visits from a customer base which is an important factor in your traffic quality. 

Relevancy
If you have gone to the effort of setting up Custom Banners, RSS feeds or even an API integration, make sure that the items that are being displayed on your page are as relevant as possible to the content. With the Custom Banner ensure that your keywords are as specific as possible e.g. model number, colour, brand to ensure the best match. This will ultimately lead to higher click through rates and conversions. Relevancy is even more important when working with the API as there are a lot of functions which will allow you to filter out products at almost every data level. We will be following this article up with another blog post in October with some advice on optimising Custom Banner and API integrations.

Utilising the reports
Because the EPC is calculated at campaign level, it is very important that your activity is broken down into separate campaigns. Depending on the size or number of your sites, this can either be done by category or domain.  With campaign level reporting, you will be able to identify both the successful areas of your activity and the activity that is diluting your EPC, as the EPCs are calculated and reported separately. We have worked with one publisher who used to run all activity through one campaign ID. Although the task of splitting down the activity into separate campaigns was initially deemed a laborious process, it resulted in highlighting that the publisher had been spending most of their resource developing sections which made them the least money.

Paid Search
One of the major positives of the new Quality Click Pricing system is that the beta publishers were able to manage their paid search budgets much more efficiently. Because the EPC is calculated the next day and the amount is locked (unlike the old revenue share a model which could change after the event date) budgets can be amended much more quickly in response to spikes in demand and product popularity. Whereas previously a spike in EPC may be discounted as a blip, only for the EPC to crash the following day, the QCP reporting makes it easier to identify trends across products that are performing well or poorly. Consequently the paid search campaigns can be altered in order to minimise losses and maximise gains from market changes.

Finally, by reading this blog article you may have realised that to take full advantage of Quality Click Pricing a level of proactive development will be required from you, the publisher. Regardless of your technical expertise, eBay Partner Network offers a range of tools that will help you improve the quality of your activity and increase your earnings.  In our experience with beta publishers, people that are willing to commit to the programme and work to better optimize and target their campaigns can improve their performance, which leads ultimately to higher commission.

The eBay Partner Network R.O.EYE team

Shannon Lisecki, Senior Strategic Partner Manager of EarthLink, one of our long-time affiliates, took the time to share some of her insights with us on various industry related topics.

As a leading national Internet service provider, Atlanta-based EarthLink has earned an award-winning reputation for outstanding customer service and its suite of online products and services to facilitate a safe and secure Internet experience.

Q: What percent of your overall commissions earned does eBay Partner Network represent?

A: Well, if I told you this, I would have to kill you. In all seriousness, we do not disclose that level of financial detail. However, suffice to say, eBay Partner Network (ePN) is a valuable and significant part of our advertising and partnership revenue stream. I see our ePN relationship continuing for a long time.

Q: How do you evaluate the economics of different advertising options on your website?

A: We look at the overall revenue stream to the company based on the placement and on our user experience. We may elect to go with direct partnerships, advertising, or affiliate advertising, or use one of our content providers. We also look for opportunities to promote specific items that interest our demographic.

Q: Which industry thought leaders impress you the most?

A: I was impressed with Lorrie Norrington’s presentation at a recent event. I look forward to seeing how eBay is able to capitalize on the secondary market [Editor: here Shannon is referring to eBay’s unique strategy of growing by being the best marketplace for out of season, outlet inventory, overstock/returns, and liquidation inventory on the web.].

Q: How did you get started in affiliate marketing?

A: EarthLink’s first foray into affiliate marketing was with eBay via CJ and Amazon.com Associates program. We later expanded our use of affiliate marketing to include additional advertisers on CJ and other affiliate networks. We continue to use affiliate marketing selectively on our site.

Q: How long have you been a member of ePN?

A: We joined the ePN as a beta partner. We have been an eBay affiliate as long as I have been at the company. Our affiliate relationship with eBay started on or before 2001.

Q: What new directions do you think the industry is headed in?

A: I think the industry will continue to move towards rewarding quality buyers and cracking down on shady practices.

Q: What concerns you most about recent developments in affiliate marketing?

A: EarthLink’s core business is Internet access. While we have affiliate relationships, we don’t use all the bells and whistles that most affiliates use. Many of the recent changes in affiliate programs have not affected our implementations.

Q: Which sites or feeds do you read on a daily basis?

A: I am old school. My husband and I read the paper. We get the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and the New York Times. There is something relaxing about reading the paper in the morning or, even better, in the evening after the kids go to bed. For my daily online fix, I check out searchengineland.com, searchenginewatch.com, sphinn.com, eBayinsiderblog.com, ebaypartnernetworkblog.com and affiliate-blog.amazon.com. I also use Google Alerts to keep up on my latest interests. I am on my.earthlink.net throughout the day getting my fix of breaking news, weather and my eBay watch list.

Q: One tip that you can share with other affiliates about improving their performance on ePN?

A: Your best bet for success is to bring quality buyers to the eBay site. That means understanding your users and highlighting eBay opportunities that resonate with them. For EarthLink this means integrating eBay throughout our start page including our “my eBay” feature, which allows real-time tracking of our users’ personal bid, watch, sell and won lists. We use eBay’s API and XML feed to pull in listings on our web search result pages and our deals page (deals.earthlink.net). Every year, I am always surprised at some of the listings that resonate with our users. Our users were very interested in the cave home that was for sale earlier this year. Not only did they look at the listing, they then went on to buy other items on the site. I am always looking for interesting content or popular products that I can promote. I rely on the eBayinsiderblog.com to find it.

Thank you Shannon, for letting us get to know you! We wish you and EarthLink continued success.

Amanda
eBay Partner Network Team

Mistake #1 – You Get Involved in SEO Drama

Be very wary of getting dragged into the trap. There are some SEOs who @ people all day long in lengthy back and forths. Every minute you spend chiming in and reading their banter is one less minute you spent on scouring delicious for links or digging though analytics to improve your ROI. Just can’t stay out of twitter SEO banter? DON’T follow people who get in public disagreements, and also install leechblock a great firefox plugin which you can limit your twitter, facebook, youtube, etc, time. It’ll cut off your access to those sites immediately.

Mistake #2 – You Care About What is Fair

Stop the whining people! Matt Cutts announced that no-follows are less relevant is it smoke and mirrors, who knows and who cares? Instead of complaining about what isn’t fair, start working on sites to test the impact of no-follows so you know when (or if) that change ever does make an impact. But Google is NOT a democracy, they are a private business, they can do what they want, if you don’t like them start using bing.com.

I can’t tell you the countless times I see people talking about what is or is not fair, whether it’s the no follows, big brands ranking well, Google knol, SEO profiling. There will always be the “is it fair” distraction, that rarely has any value, avoid getting caught up in these, read them and extract value, but don’t participate.

Mistake #3 – You Get All Wrapped Up in Rankings

Sure you got some terms rankings well and are driving great traffic, this is the time to continue to hustle and NOT start patting yourself on the back. Are you monitoring bounce rates for those great keyword rankings – are you trying to connect the dots between rankings and conversions by testing out things like this? Do you know that if your term drops from 1 to 5 how that impacts conversions? If the answer is NO, take that hand off your back, and click on that link! (Beware, our tests are showing that ranking data in Google Analytics is VERY spotty).

Mistake #4 – You Overload Yourself With Too Much Information

Given that there must be thousands of SEO bloggers out there, who do you follow / subscribe to? Be very careful, reading too many blogs can paralyze your day. Sticking to the basics before you go after some advanced tactic you see elsewhere is smart! Getting very good at scanning content for valuable insights is critical. I tend to use Google reader on my iphone to filter through the SEO noise as I walk to the office, just looking at posts quickly, so by the time I sit down at work, I’ve starred the most important stuff to really sit down and read, you can do this while waiting for lunch, walking the dog, or sitting on useless conference calls.

I recently went through the process of removing several aggregator style SEO blogs that keep track of the industry as a whole, as twitter has kind of replaced them for that. SEO news sites that may post 5-10 times a day just kill my reader, so I assume that if I follow enough SEOs on Twitter that I should see really big SEO news come across my stream.

Mistake #5 – You Refuse To Change Direction in Your Strategy

SEO’s are so used to being right that admitting defeat is tough, however even I am victim of this. My last post here referenced an advanced tactic of sculpting pagerank flow though a site, and surely in true SEO fashion, that has changed pretty significantly in the 3 weeks since its been posted.

I am not seeing that tactic hurt, but it is becoming the general consensus that it isn’t helping much either, I guess this is the issue with advanced tactics, you never really know how long they are going to work, which is why this is much more important that you get the basics right first, because they don’t change nearly as frequently as the advanced tactics – here’s another way to sculpt pagerank if you must.

Given than Matt Cutts has said to keep around 100 links per page as a rule of thumb, most of you would be surprised at how many of you have more than 100 links per page, you’ll have to figure out how to use programming to limit the number of links that Google sees per page instead of the internal no-follow. If you want to count your number of links per page use a tool like link gopher, its quick and easy. You just might be amazed that after you include your dropdowns, tabbed sections, and other parts of a page how many links you just may end up having. Before you spend a second on advanced SEO tactics, please make sure you’ve got the basic blocking and tackling done.

The things mentioned in that post above are far from fads that will be strong today but weak tomorrow. Thanks for letting me share SEO tips and thoughts with you, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter @wilreynolds for more info on SEO.

Many publishers can be put off by the thought of the API, but when promoting a site such as eBay, with its dynamic catalogue of millions of products and constantly changing prices, it really is too good a tool to be overlooked.

So what is it?

Good question – API stands for Application Programming Interface, which is a facility to allow a program to request a service from a library – or simply put, it allows your website, widget or application to ask questions to the eBay database and get a response. Just think of the things your website could do if it had direct access to eBay’s database! And the best part is that if you’re confident enough to build your own website the API might not be as hard to integrate as you may have first thought…

Three simple steps:

The first step is to get signed up to the eBay Developers Program. You will be assigned an AppID, which is your unique token allowing you access to the API.  You will also get a Sandbox and Production Key.  If you are building a listing tool, you will want to test it in the Sandbox with dummy listings, otherwise you should use the Production Key directly – this gives you access to live eBay data that you see on the site.

The second step is to construct your API call. The most simple of these is FindItems, and can take the form of a simple URL. There is a great tutorial on the developer site which shows a simple step by step guide on how to construct the call.

The third step is to format the data you receive into something readable on your site. You can request the data in JSON, SOAP, XML or text Name Value.

If you are a product feed publisher, parsing the data should be second nature. If not, the same tutorial provides a simple JavaScript example.  You can use JavaScript, PHP or any programming language you’re familiar with to dynamically render the live listings on your page. Perhaps you can use the eBay API to import results directly into your SQL database – but remember if you choose this option, filter results to items which aren’t ending in very near future, to prevent you displaying expired listings.

What next?

The real power of the API however comes with what you do with the data. Remember, you have at your disposal a live link direct to the eBay database, so the limit is only that of your imagination.  A good example is http://www.watchcount.com which picked up an award in the 2009 eBay Star Developer Awards. It utilises the API to look at what the most watched items are on eBay. Check out the website for more great innovative uses of the API. Another example uses API results to calculate an average selling price for an item, and then highlights the displayed items which are cheaper.

And if you need a nudge in the right direction, here is our code for the above console comparison page, and also some more example code to create a very simple search tool.

James Skelland, Technical Solutions Manager at R.O.EYE

James will be writing another post on more advanced API tips later in the year.

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.

Hello from R.O.EYE,

As many of you will be aware, R.O.EYE has been working with the eBay team in the UK for nearly a year, but if you are unsure of who we are and what we do, then we hope this post will help.  R.O.EYE is the largest specialist affiliate marketing agency in the UK, dedicating its resource to the management of affiliate programmes spanning multiple verticals of retail, travel and finance.

R.O.EYE was brought on board in August 2008 to work closely with the in-house eBay Partner Network Team and aid in the growth of the programme through the optimisation of existing publishers and new recruitment. 

The core of the R.O.EYE account team consists of Chris Worthy and Matt Holden, who have a wealth of experience managing multiple affiliate programmes and are on hand to offer additional support and advice to publishers looking for growth. We have aided some great successes over the past few months, assisting publishers with API integrations, tool implementations and traffic quality optimisation which has led to increased revenue and earnings.

We are looking to grow on this success in 2009 and forge new relationships with more publishers with ambitions to improve their traffic quality and grow their commissions.  Moving forward we will be contributing to the blog monthly with both the latest tips on improving your campaigns and news from the UK market, so make you watch out for our posts.

We will also be in Amsterdam at the a4u conference with the rest of the eBay Partner Network  team, so please come and introduce yourselves to us.

Chris & Matt

SEO is complicated, we all know that, so with this series of postings the goal was for me to challenge myself to think of the things that can be done to improve SEO results starting with a beginner series, and moving into more advanced ones. The idea is simple though, find things that you can do with 1 hour each day (I cheated a bit, some days require more than 1 hour).

Day 1 – Get webmaster tools installed

Why? – Google Webmaster Tools would be the first thing I would install as it will help you troubleshoot problems with meta tags, spidering issues, 404’s etc. If you have not installed the Google webmaster tools, it’s quick and easy and will help guide you at those times when you just can’t figure out why something is not working.

If you already have the Google Webmaster Tools installed, which many of you may have, are you USING it for anything valuable, like checking the 404 report? The 404 report can tell you pages on your site that have been changed and no longer exist, which may have gotten value links prior.

For some resources on things you can do with Google Webmaster Tools after they are installed to help your rankings check out this Search Engine Land post on Google Webmaster Tools used for correcting broken links and this TopRank post on 6 uses of the Google webmaster tool.

You should be seeking out people who linked to you in the past and are now linking to pages that do not exist to get the link changed. If there are a lot of links that fit this criterion you should be 301 redirecting those old links if you can’t get the original link changed.

Time – it should take 5 minutes to do, anyone with access to FTP can help you verify your site, spend the remaining 55 minutes reading the posts above and checking your site out.

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Day 2 – Keyword research, just do it!

Go to Google Adwords Sandbox for your initial keyword research – just type in terms and see what keywords come back – REMEMBER under the match type option select “phrase” not “broad” or your numbers are likely to be inflated, here’s an explanation on match types from Google. Never use one tool for all your keyword research, try using Quintura, MSN AdCenter Plugin for Excel and Yahoo! more results. Only focus on 10-15 words to begin with.

Why? – while you have all the time to go after hundreds for keywords you don’t want to bite off more than you can chew and overwhelm yourself. Keep your focus small when starting. Do not target any single word phrases and be careful of targeting words that bring back mostly big brands. If you are just starting out, seek out keywords that are a good match but might be flying under the radar of the big brands like we did here, which are often the mid tail to begin with. Do you really think you are going to unseat E-Trade for stock trading terms right off the bat? Probably not, find your niches where large brand competitors won’t go or can’t get permission quickly enough to take advantage of spikes.

Time – Ok this isn’t a 5 minute change – hunker down, spend 3 hours figuring out your 10-15 most critical words that are not overly competitive

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Day 3 – Lock down your social media profiles

Start with NameCheck

You probably don’t know what you are doing to do with social media yet, and that is OK. This little handy tool will let you know if a username is available on over 80 social media sites. I DO NOT recommend registering on all 80+, instead do the biggies: Twitter, YouTube, Stumbleupon, Delicious, LinkedIn, Flickr, and any others that are niche (for example: Kirtsy for women, Ballhype for sports enthusiasts). This post will allow you to get a synopsis of these social media sites.

If you want to succeed in search you’ll need to get links, and social media is one way to do that, but we’ll get into those strategies in a more advanced post in the series, for now job 1 is getting a consistent usernames on the most important social media sites.

Why? – You’ll need these for linkbuilding, community building, sharing content, maximizing reach of your blog posts, etc later.

Time – Pretty quick, you should be able to knock this puppy out in 1 hour.

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Day 4 – Analyze your work

Analytics is going to help your SEO? Yes! Here’s why.

You have to know who’s referring traffic to your site and then know if that traffic is quality traffic. You want to be able to connect rankings movement to traffic movement to REVENUES – or you are asking to get fired. So you want to first get your analytics installed right use the wasp plugin or SiteScan to make sure your pages are tagged properly tagged. Web analytics is a garbage in garbage out kind of proposition, if you don’t QA your install, that time when you absolutely need the data, you won’t be sure what you have is accurate.

So, back to the SEO value of checking out your analytics data. Measuring bounce rates and the ability to be confident in the data you are seeing in your tool is critical. If you pick the WRONG keywords or are landing people on a bad page for that keyword your analytics package will give you those insights by showing you high “bouncing” keywords.

The reason why you don’t track SEO success by rankings is that if you pick words that are a very high bounce rate, the fact they rank well and get traffic means nothing if people aren’t digging into the site to actually BUY things, fill out forms, read blogs, etc. The other factor that drives high bounce rates occurs when your keywords are fine but the page you are landing users on doesn’t have the info they are seeking.

Once you know you have your pages tagged properly. In addition you should sign up for a service to track your rankings like Raven Tools, Exactfactor or my personal favorite the FREE SEObook rank checker by Aaron Wall.

Take those 15 keywords you developed earlier in the week and drop them into one of those tools above, once you do now you can benchmark where you are and determine how much impact rankings are having on traffic and how traffic is impacting conversions.

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Day 5 – Get comfortable with Yahoo site explorer

Yahoo site explorer is the best FREE tool that I know of to see who’s linking to your competitors and who’s linking to you, in some relative order in terms of importance. This tool will really help you speed up the time spent on link building research. Another tool to consider is linkdiagnosis for reverse engineering your competitors backlinks. Understanding who your competitors are getting links from and devising strategies to go after similar strategies to get links will help you in the search engine rankings. So for now, just spend 1 hour understanding how the tools work – how to exclude their own internal links / subdomain links should be easy. If you have time left start off by reading this SEOmoz post.

Lastly, use me as your filter as I post everything good related to SEO to delicious, I have a ton of SEO videos on YouTube and on twitter I post SEO news like a madman.

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Wil Reynolds, the founder of SEER Interactive, a leading team of SEO consultants, has been helping companies with their SEO for 10 years, starting his career in 1999. Today the SEER team works with clients ranging from large fortune 500 clients to small businesses seeking excellence and accountability in their search marketing campaigns.