If you’ve been keeping up with my posts lately, you’ve noticed a strong anti-Google sentiment, fear over being a full-time affiliate marketer in this wonderful new year, and overall gloom over what appears to be Google’s all-out tirade against affiliate marketing as we know it.

Anyway, one of my websites which predictably pulled in about $3,000 per month for years through eBay Partner Network has been almost entirely de-indexed, has lost 70% of its traffic and is earning somewhere around $200/month. This was due to the site being completely pulled from four distinct keyword terms, of which I ranked #1 for. As for my site itself, it has a little over 500 pages — each of which has around 200 words of personally-written copy that wasn’t spun, nor keyword saturated. Page titles are clear and concise, and not spammy.

Google Page 1, Position 1…For EVERYTHING.

I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing SERPs for the keywords I’ve lost, and am trying to make sense of why Google decided to give several of my competitors ‘top of page 1′ status after cutting my head off. It was right around that time when I noticed a disturbing trend. One company dominated about 10 different major converting keywords, ranging from premium to long-tail. Page 1, #1 organic for every single one, even the insanely competitive one-word keywords.

How is this possible? It can’t be possible that this just happened without something scummy. And boy, was I right.

Let me just explain this niche to you: say that we’re in a niche called “widgets,” where widgets is a very big, expensive item that sells constantly and is a huge part of industry. My competitor is achieving Google page 1, #1 for “widget, widgets, widgets for sale, widget sale, buy widgets, sell widgets, cheap widgets, best widgets, used widgets, new widgets” etc. etc. etc., even though they hadn’t had those results a month ago. When I say the list goes on and on, I mean, it goes on and ON and ON for the amount of #1 organic SERPs they have achieved. I’ve even noticed that they rank #1 AdWords as well as #1 and #2 Google page 1 organic for some of these terms, dominating the entire fold of the page.

Scamming Backlinks & Getting Away With Murder

I went to one of my favorite old websites from yesteryear — BacklinkWatch.com — and did a little research on this company’s domain name. It turns out they now have a little under *13,500 QUALITY BACKLINKS* with exact keyword anchor text pointing from tens of thousands of relevant, quality websites in our niche. However, almost every single one has the same anchor text – the same one-keyword term. HMM.

I visited about two dozen of the backlinking sites that BacklinkWatch displayed, and looked to find the link. It was at that point where I saw the scheme in its full glory.

This competitor set up a web hosting service where small, local businesses in our niche around the US could host their website with them. One of the requirements a line of forced text like “Hosted by {keywordterm}” where {keywordterm} was the big one that we all wanted to rank for in our industry. That term, of course, pointed back to their site. What a total bloody sham. I was floored that they weren’t banned from almighty Google, the almighty champion of truth and justice in the search world.

Google Thinks This Is Helpful, Quality Material?

Before I continue further, I spent a good 10 minutes going through this competitor’s website. They’re a simple classifieds website using a VERY old content management system, 1997-ish graphic design, no search engine friendly URLs, and **NOT A SINGLE SENTENCE** of text on any of their pages. Actually, the website has no text whatsoever, and search engines must be working entirely off of backlinks to even figure out what the hell this site is about.

Regardless, the company has a Facebook page with 150,000+ fans, their Facebook ad pops up on my Facebook wall almost every damn time I log in, they’re AdWords #1 for every keyword under the sun at all times of the day (in other words, they are most certainly a big business) and due to the scummy gray-hat tactic they’ve pulled, they’ve made it impossible for me to ever achieve Google page 1, #1 as I have had for the past four years. When you take my hard work, my money, and my livelihood through cheating, I’m not going to sit back and let it go.

Immediately, I visited Google’s spam report form. I reported the site for running a “web ring” of farmed links through the ruse of a web hosting service, which vaulted the company to page 1, position 1 for over 12 major industry keyword terms (and I sent Google the list of keywords).

This isn’t the first time I’ve ever done this — years ago, I once noticed another scummy site in this same industry who achieved tens of thousands of backlinks by creating his own iframe-based web ring. He owned over 25 domain names  in the industry with garbage doorway pages and inter-linked them all to one website, which in turn hit the top of Google page 1 and got cemented there. I reported it, and about three of four months later, noticed the site fell back around page 10 for the keywords it previously had page 1, position 1 rankings for.

While I like the fact that Google is most likely reading these spam reports and doing something about it, the major issue is that they have to be sent in the first place. Google obviously had no problem torching my affiliate site, which continues to have a bounce rate under 28%, an average 4-5 minute length of stay and a large number of return visitors AND visitors who search the internet for my exact domain name (which I’d assume is a major determinant of BEING A BRAND NAME).

To Add Insult to Injury

After this entire fiasco today, I couldn’t help but notice something else in SERPs, at the bottom of Google page 1 for a very competitive term. Another guy had registered something to the effect of “widgetsforsale.org” (where “widgets for sale” is in fact a very highly converting, highly valuable term to rank for) and the site was nothing but a one-page doorway pointing to another site. I reported that one, too :)

Algorithms like Google Panda were supposed to stop scum. Instead, they stop honest, hard working affiliates and let scum go through the cracks. If you want to take a conspiracy theorist’s stance, consider the monumental Google AdWords expenditures that this competitor has, and factor that in to the “how the hell is Google letting them cheat organics in such a blatant manner?” There are a lot of conspiracies over how Google gives behind-the-scenes “support” to big AdWords spenders, but I’ll let you chew on that one with a Google search. Actually, make it a Yahoo or Bing one.

Recently, I’ve completed a new website advertising my local-area internet marketing & design services, and plan to make 90% of my promotions be offline and hyper-local. The days of counting on search results are truly over. I have no faith in Google – it is a money hungry organization that is about as capable of doing a proper job as your local DMV or tax collector’s office. I can’t have faith in Yahoo or Bing — even though I find it to still be far more simple to rank in both, I don’t have much certainty as to their futures as search engines (especially Yahoo).

Even though the majority of my websites are still going strong, this massive blow I’ve recenetly suffered was more than enough of a warning to me. Affiliate storefronts had a good run — we’ll talk to our grandchildren about them, one day.

1) Google is against you.

Take the direct quote of Google’s Frederick Vallaeys in response to the work of affiliate marketers: it is “…just an unnecessary step in the sales funnel.” Google has taken numerous steps to show their extreme favoritism to brands, and their very apparent efforts to bury affiliate marketing efforts in search results.

Starting in 2010, the search engine launched “extended brand results” listing actual brand names as links at the top of SERPs. The “Vince” update of 2009 tied two search queries (i.e., a user searching for “hdtv” and then searching for “sony” meant that Sony would receive a “vote” for the term “hdtv”), giving household-name brands — already established and known for a certain product category — another feather in their cap. Later that year, brands received an additional bonus in AdWords, where “sitelinks” would appear under an ad, pushing down the remainder of the page further.

Summer of 2011 showed the most definitive all-out attack against affiliate marketing, with the “Google Panda” update — a change that subsequently ended numerous small business owners’ careers overnight by removing their websites for certain keyword results from Google’s index entirely, and replacing those positions with big brands.

Later in 2011 was the inception of Google+ and “+1,” a social sharing tool that gives heavy bonuses and favoritism to big brands, who already have thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of followers who are able to +1 a new blog post by the droves within immediate time periods. Most recently, January 2012 saw an algorithm update to combat “excessive ads above the fold” on a website. Guess who runs ads above a fold? Hint: not brands.

If you thought you could simply go by the old adage “if you can’t beat em, join em,” think again — your affiliate storefront will NEVER achieve “brand” status. The brand signals that exist within Google’s algorithm know of the links pointing outward toward online storefronts that package and ship the products you’re promoting, identifying you as a “middleman” and therefore an “…unnecessary step in the sales funnel,” as Mr. Vallaeys puts it.

Although you probably don’t need more convincing about Google’s extreme bias against affiliate marketers and toward big brand name corporations, a simple glance at your flat-lined Google Analytics charts have probably clued you in at some point that your reliance on eBay Partner Network and Amazon Associate-driven websites are about as effective as attempting to make a new resurrection of the Million Dollar Homepage.

One more thing: when you lose a major keyword ranking, get dropped backward by several pages on Google and see that you’ve been replaced by big brands — don’t hold a shred of hope about re-gaining that page 1, position 1-3 position ever again. Sophisticated algorithmic signals have already given your ‘affiliate’ labeled site a brand new pair of cement shoes.

If you don’t want to believe me, check out this example of how Google torches affiliates.

2. Google is AdWords.

You might remember Google, it was a search engine that displayed organic results under a couple paid ads. Before it became completely filled with AdWords ads within the fold, it was possible to compete in search rankings for long-tail terms to get your affiliate sites some search attention.

However, a full computer screen’s worth of most Google page 1 SERPs is now entirely infested with AdWords, complete with a yellow box featured ad, subsequent ads and sidebar ads.

These days, the cost of appearing anywhere within an eyeball’s view for even a long term AdWords keyword is entirely unaffordable to the at-home internet marketer – give or take a few clicks per day. Google is now a place for the 1% to throw around their $2,000+/day budget to fight each other in an unreasonably expensive environment for the fight to remain on top. Perhaps you’ve taken your measly budget and used it for things more important, like lunch.

Besides…who on Earth would even spend a dollar on AdWords for an affiliate storefront? As anyone knows, it is *impossible* to track true conversions for an affiliate storefront, since you’ll never know how a thing about which clicks to your site led to sales on eBay or Amazon’s end. Spending money on AdWords for an affiliate storefront is like buying Pick 6 Lotto tickets every week and hoping for something to happen. It’s just AdWords 101.

3) Google’s “shopping results” in SERPs have ended your business.

If you’ve searched for a product and saw a SERP featuring a horizontal thumbnail image bar of products from different retailers with prices, you’ve probably noticed your imminent doom. Another nail in the coffin of any affiliate storefront: shopping results exhibit extreme favoritism to online retailers lucky enough to have muscled their way into Google Shopping, in a price comparison war against each other that takes place far above your current ranking.

The fact about these shopping price comparisons in SERPs is that they are nearly eliminating your chances of ever appearing for the keywords that trigger them. Due to the fact that the first 1/4 to 1/3 of a SERP is mostly AdWords, followed by one of these shopping results snippets that contain eye-enticing thumbnail images that break up an otherwise texty SERP, there’s barely any reason for the user to scroll down to get into organic results at all.

Since you’re nothing more than a middleman posting links to an actual supplier, you’ll never be able to appear on shopping results. Worse yet, the clutter of AdWords and product comparisons is enough to push organic results on to page 2 of results. This, above all else, is contributing to the extinction of the affiliate storefront.

So, What Now?

The changes I’ve seen, especially on Google, have really put an extreme perspective on my own personal business plans. It’s no longer worth investing time, money or energy in an affiliate storefront because they’re becoming extinct. In fact, affiliate marketing in general should be regarded as a past-time rather than a full-time job.

We’re embarking on a Google search engine experience that is entirely suited toward Big Business, where big AdWords spenders rule. If you won’t [cant] compete due to the extreme budget needed to join the existing fray, you’re left behind to hope for the best in organic, which is no longer a valid strategy in 2012.

As for Yahoo and Bing, the potential selling of Yahoo as rumored last year should be enough to make you realize that your measly Yahoo rankings are also not to be counted on — their days are numbered if anything should ever happen to the search engine.

Become A Brand

This truly is the only way to stay alive these days: brands, as defined by search engines, are most likely websites that have real shopping carts and checkout systems. They supply products themselves, instead of shilling affiliate links to real storefronts. They have real company names, not “exact keyword domains.” They have Facebook and Twitter accounts with real followers who actually interact with and care about the products being sold. They get real backlinks — not garbage links that their own webmaster scrounges for, since no affiliate storefront will ever have a successful, ongoing natural link portfolio.

Think about something you can sell or provide, and think fast. These days, you never know when the next iteration of Google Panda will re-appear and torch your remaining search rankings. Use your existing affiliate sites as 301-redirect fodder to give your new sites a boost in rankings, and start branding away!

It’s the quintessential part of being a webmaster: TEST YOUR LINKS! Click your eBay links. Try it right now on your eBay affiliate sites. If you see this message, you’re not alone:

Uh oh. Looks like your ePN sites have been sucking for quite awhile, as they have been showing your beloved customers a worthless error page for God knows how many days now. No wonder your sales have sucked. Yes, it’s time to panic, but only for 5 seconds. Then, slap yourself across the face and do this IMMEDIATELY.

1. Log into BANS, and click the “Setup” tab.
2. Look on the upper right red box entitled “4. Affiliate Details”. UNCHECK “Cloak affiliate links”. Yeah, it seems to now be broken. Now, save the change.
3. Visit your live site, visit a single page and click an eBay link. The item should now be showing properly.

If you haven’t been using “cloak affiliate links,” then you shouldn’t be affected.

I have to say, I’m rather pissed at Build A Niche Store. I know they don’t give a shit because they sold out to some new bidder who has completely neglected the community, but it’s no excuse.

By the way, you’re not done yet – if you run 15+ sites like I do, you’re about to get really mad. Every single one of them will need a code adjustment in order to avoid the June 8 eBay Partner Network ban. In short, you’ll have to replace your item.php file with a community-edited one (once again, because the original developers don’t give a shit, and haven’t been offering patches or upgrades in years).

Here’s your cue to make this change right now…the clock is ticking! This is NOT a time to procrastinate, my friend.

According to this official post from ePN on May 11th, eBay’s “gotta love to hate them” affiliate program is finding yet another method to roll some heads. If you’re too lazy to read the article, here are some Cliff Notes :)

• eBay Partner Network only permits 301 redirects, not 302 (temporary) redirects.
• Basically, a 302 page is like a “middleman” between your affiliate store and the eBay product page. ePN doesn’t like this.
• Anyone who still uses 302 redirects as of June 8, 2010 will be banned from eBay Partner Network.

That last bullet point was no joke…here’s a direct quote: “From June 8th 2010, we will treat this issue as an intentional breach of our terms and conditions and any affiliate exhibiting this behavior will be expired.” Yikes.

What to Do!

If you’re using Build A Niche Store, PHPBay or any other eBay affiliate add on or CMS, visit their message boards immediately. There’s no doubt that you’ll find a reference to the 302 issue in either the general forum or announcements forums of these sites. PHPBay has already issued a patch to absolve you. As for Build A Niche Store, you’ll have to tweak a little piece of code (as a registered member, simply find the thread for it on their forum).

Thanks to markowe from DigitalPoint for posting about this issue – if you hadn’t, I would probably have not noticed this latest ePN fiasco since I barely pay attention to the program anymore.

Today, ePN released a massive upgrade to the reporting dashboard. The account metrics graph received a little visual transformation: it’s no longer flushed to the right of the screen, but presented bigger and in the center, with Impressions, Clicks, EPC and Earnings running horizontally across the top of the graph.

Below it is a new “Traffic Optimization Report,” displaying a bar chart for the “Landing Page Report” (where on eBay.com your sales have been attributed to: the home page, search results, seller/store results, item page or other), and a “Winning Bid Revenue by Category” pie chart, which can be expanded by clicking a “View Full Category Report” link underneath it.

This pie chart lists all of the official eBay categories in which your sales have come from. The majority of mine are from the intended categories I’ve chosen for my ePN stores, with some really bizarre and questionable ones thrown in that have obviously come from random impulse buys. The full category report gives you a closer look at these categories by providing metrics like ACRUs, Bid/Bin, Winning Bids and Winning Bid Revenue.

The categories themselves can be clicked and drilled down further into eBay sub-categories. This is where you can see exactly where on eBay your sales are coming from, and it’s a welcome feature. In fact, you can keep drilling down as far as the categories go on eBay. If you’d like to read more about how to read it, check out eBay Partner Network’s article on getting the most out of the category report.

Overall, it’s nice to finally see an upgrade on ePN when it has been long-awaited to even see the littlest change on the publisher dashboard in years. The much needed transparency of this data should ease most; if only they could be as transparent about their ACRU/EPC/payment structure (and stop banning affiliates with no rhyme or reason), this program would see a whole new light in the affiliate marketing community.

BANS has quickly become a household name to affiliate marketers: if you wanted to get into or understand ePN, then you probably began with Build A Niche Store.

The $65 software has sold hundreds of thousands of licenses, has a massive community, and has been both hated and loved (depending on the white or black-hattedness of its users). In the 3+ years of its existence, it has fostered a number of at-home entrepreneurs enjoying four-figure per month incomes through eBay’s affiliate program, and has also been the starting point in affiliate marketing for yours truly.

Its only notable competitor, PHPbay, is a premium WordPress plugin that lets you “drop in” a custom tailored eBay affiliate feed into any page with a simple line of code. Between BANS and PHPbay, your options were unlimited: either use BANS to power a site on its own, or if you’re a bit more savvy, harness the incredible power of WordPress and PHPbay to make an authority storefront.

The Build A Niche Store Hand-off

Getting back to October 5, 2009: Kelvin and Adam, the co-owners of BANS, announced their business decision of selling the massively popular, game-changing software company. Undoubtedly, many pants have been crapped since that initial email. It reminds me of one of my previous jobs, where the owner, in his early 40s, wanted to retire early; so, he simply sold the company and bid us all a farewell while we flopped around like a fish out of water.

That’s basically what I saw with this situation.

Shortly after that initial email, a second communication was sent out on October 13, 2009 stating that a small development firm in the UK has expressed interest in buying the BANS name. A horribly long 1,700 word “dear diary” of an email (yes, I checked the word count in Microsoft Word) introduced the firm, the history of BANS and its potential future.

What Was Once Great…

On October 26, 2009, an email announced the birth of “The Niche Site Building Network,” located at none other than “thenichesitebuildingnetwork.com,” which would also go down in history as one of the worst domain names ever registered. The site itself is none other than a doorway page pointing to three separate websites (nichesitebuilding.com, thenichesiteblueprint and buildanichestore.com), which is none other than a dissection of the original “BuildANicheStore.com,” making everything more tedious and difficult to find. The website itself went from a clean and clear web 2.0 interface to a way-out-of-the-fold scrolling monster of a web page, filled with unnecessary information, huge text and terrible navigation.

Immediately, my aspirations of the BANS legacy was strangled, shot and drowned.

If the transition from good to (really) bad web design, coupled with the myriad of additional domain names wasn’t enough, the company has now renamed itself as “In Colour,” which has nothing to do with In Living Color. This has also spawned off yet another domain name, “MyDigitalProjectManager.com,” which is a guide for existing Build A Niche Store users. Confusing.

The BANS Community Gets Banned

Here’s the moral: transitions and acquisitions are never easy, and it’s up to the new ownership to make things move as smoothly as possible. Knowing, understanding and talking to the existing community that you’re “buying” is paramount. Understanding that you can’t screw around with the existing look and feel is equally as important, as is making things easy and as stress-free on the user base as possible. I haven’t seen any of these elements with the Build A Niche Store transition.

During the sale of a business, the sellers bid farewell to their baby. They say goodbye to the community/employees/whoever was involved, yet at the same time, don’t give much of a crap about the transition process. Why should they? I wouldn’t either, if I sold my company, collected my pot of gold and moved onward and upward. However, it really sucks to be a part of the existing community when these things happen.

I’m sorry to say that I no longer have any faith in Build A Niche Store, unless this new team really gets moving and proves themselves in doing the amazing job that its founding fathers Kelvin and Adam have done. So far, I haven’t seen any inclination of this.

Those are my current stats. I’m hanging on by a thread. I’m at the “danger zone” with a rock bottom 0.03. I’m almost afraid to even check my email at this point.

ePN Affiliates: For Whom the Bell Tolls

It’s not news to mention how ePN is ban-happy, and it has been worse than ever according to what I’ve been reading on the eBay Partner Network forums. More high-tier affiliates with many years of ePN service are being banned for no reason. When honest top performers get the ax, how else could it possibly look to the rest of the affiliate community? It’s like a crowd of chickens in a slaughterhouse watching their comrades getting their heads get cut off a few feet away. Especially with an affiliate program that has been notorious for invoking absolute terror in its affiliates, and even suspending and strong-arming them into handing over their server data (tell me where that was ever mentioned in the TOS?)

I’m scared. I’m doing nothing wrong, but I’m still scared. It’s because this program is merciless on people who perform well, let alone the ones who don’t. I rely on ePN as my main source of at-home income. Thanks to the newly [enigmatic, secretive] mathematical EPC/QCP/ACRU system that has been put in place, I am at an absolute loss as to how I can perform to fit ePN’s standards anymore. I’m ranking highly for many “action-based” keywords, I’m promoting high price tag items that don’t sell frequently, and I have an overwhelming feeling of doom over a program that doesn’t show any mercy, provide any assistance, or even any forewarning.

I don’t know about you, but I will be scrambling over the weekend to start up several more affiliate stores from other affiliate programs, as I have relied way too much on this program, whose outlook is very grim.

This is a bleak holiday season for eBay affiliates, to say the least.

Scenario 1: Tarnished Affiliate Gold on Commission Junction

In 2008, I searched thoroughly for the best affiliate programs to join on CJ.com. I wound up signing up to well over a dozen, and trying them all out over the span of six months. One of the most surprising and utterly ridiculous examples of “dumb luck” was found with Yahoo Toolbar’s affiliate program. It paid you $1 every time someone downloaded and installed Yahoo Toolbar. Sounded promising enough…so I tried it.

I created a very content-rich one page advert for this toolbar, with an affiliate link all the way at the bottom of the page. I promoted the hell out of this page with targeted backlinks, and eventually got it to appear at the top of page 1 on Yahoo.com for “download yahoo toolbar.” There were times where I appeared in the #2 spot, below Yahoo Toolbar’s home page itself! The result…I was making $500 per month just from this program, because I was getting around 15 conversions per day. Yes, you heard right – and I’m not lying nor exaggerating. I was floored. I was on cloud nine.

Then, something tragic happened. Later that year, my earnings went from a comfortable and predictable average of $400-500 per month to a couple dollars…then, eventually, zero. What happened?! I checked the SERPs. That wasn’t it…I was still there, dancing from #2 to #3 on Yahoo for “download yahoo toolbar”…I even had the same rank for “yahoo toolbar download”…

I jumped onto CJ.com and looked at my dashboard, earnings report, and any other chart I could find. Yahoo Toolbar affiliate program was gone. Yahoo pulled the plug on it. There was no email. There was no warning. No nothing. Just a big F-you. Nice to know you – thanks for the memories.

While I could go off on a new article explaining how Yahoo was a bunch of unprofessional bastards for doing what they did, I won’t bother. You already know that as an affiliate marketer – what they did was underhanded and wrong. Yes, it was their program and they had the right and ability to pull the plug on it, but look at the repercussions – I was now down $500/mo in my work-at-home efforts. I’m sure there are scores of other affilate marketers who nearly put their fist through the wall the day that program was axed.

If you thought that was a bad scenario, here’s one that is much worse.

Scenario 2: eBay Partner Network Changes Management

eBay Partner Network (ePN) has always been my #1 revenue stream. I joined in mid 2007 and started learning the ropes. As an SEO professional, it didn’t take long for me to earn around $200/mo, which later became $500, then $1,000, and finally, around $2,000/mo. At my peak, I was making around $2,500/mo. The potential to earn off of eBay Partner Network was obvious. I was so ecstatic over the returns from this program that I started to plan for the day where I’d quit my job, and be able to put 15 hours a day on a full time basis into this program, creating authority sites and promoting eBay products.

Then, I was banned.

The day I saw the infamous “ePN Dear John letter,” I thought I was going to be physically sick. I thought I was going to get a stomach ulcer. $2,500/mo to $0/mo – just like that, overnight. No warning, no suggestions, no contact – just the plug unexpectedly pulled from the life support system. As the letter states, they’ve decided to cancel your affiliate account and mentioned that you must pull all eBay feeds and links from your site.

There was no explanation why. I did nothing wrong – I never blackhatted a day in my life, and I never used PPC marketing. I never bought traffic, never did reciprocal linking or anything beyond traditional SEO and content writing. Thanks to this banning, my work-from-home career was officially over, as was my prospect of having a home business, let alone working full-time at one. ePN was 80-90% of my annual at-home salary.

If there is ever a way to make a webmaster feel like a chicken with its head cut off, it’s when an affiliate program sends you an email like that. As you already know, this goes much deeper than simply being dropped from an affiliate program. Now, it’s all about SERPs. You know, the fact that these ePN affiliate websites were getting over 500 organic hits per day and appearing on page 1 of Google for major two and three word terms. The fact that these websites were in MY POSSESSION, and were MY INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, and were about to lose the “meat,” rendering them entirely worthless and destined to drop in the SERPs at a dramatic rate once the bounce rate gets high. In essence, these websites were never mine – they were ePN’s. They were “god” in this scenario, with the full ability to give or take life away from these projects at a whim.

Yes, it gets even worse. Once the eBay links are gone, what do I do? I was selling stuff that can only be found on eBay. High cost used items. There are no affiliate programs that offer those things besides eBay. What do I do? Create a classifieds site and start promoting those sites as a “post your ad here for free!” service? Make nothing for a year or more until I start getting enough classified ads to justify charging $50/ad? Starve until that point in time happens (IF that point in time happens)?

In a moment of complete desperation, I wrote a letter forcefully asking for my account to be reviewed and considered for acceptance back into the program. I was one of the lucky few who were audited and allowed back in, once they reviewed my sites and saw that I had great content on each page (yes, they have an automated system that bans you. Your sites don’t even get reviewed, just banned because a machine deemed it necessary based on an algorithm). I was warned to drop my lower performing affiliate sites (which happened to be my newest ones, that weren’t ranking for anything yet). I was so gracious to be back in with ePN that I did what I was told, even though I felt it was outrageous to be told to drop any of my sites.

What’s most inconceivable is that no one would never expect an affiliate program run by giants like eBay to ever result in such a predicament. The reason why this happened is because eBay Partner Network had a complete re-organization from the top down that year, and its business model changed. The program began introducing confusing measures within the affiliate system that were never fully explained, which resulted in many more bannings as long-time and newbie affiliate marketers alike were unable to fall within the desired range.  It went from an affiliate program that anybody could use, to an elite, top-tier affiliate program that only advanced SEO professionals pulling nop-notch sales figures vs. sign-ups vs. click-throughs could be a part of. If your mathematics were off in any of those figures, your coffin got another nail in it.

At the time of this blog post’s writing, ePN bannings are still alive and well. Want to read something scary? Look at what an ePN member has just posted about how ePN now “suspends” your account, demands server logs, and then bans you from the program. They have officially become the Nazi regime of affiliate marketing programs. Fear mongering your affiliates is an atrocious way to run a program.

Avoiding Potential Affiliate Nightmares

Here’s the bottom line: never count on any affiliate program. Diversify. Run several affiliate marketing programs, a dropshipping program, one t-shirt business and several pay-per-click sites. Market them all equally. When one goes down, the others keep you afloat. Affiliate marketing networks don’t care about you – they follow orders from upper management. If upper management decides to send the program to hell, then to hell it goes. If they decide to drop a program altogether, so be it. The question is, are you ready for it at the heat of the moment? You better be. Otherwise, you’re nothing but a chump flopping around on the floor with a slit throat, not knowing what to do to save yourself.

Here’s a chart for my month’s ePN results (top) and an overall result for the past 3 months (bottom). As you can see, things started spiking near the middle of October, which I am attributing to the shift to Quality Click Pricing. I first thought that I may have ranked for a new term in Google or Yahoo and started receiving and influx of hits and sales, but Google Analytics proved that to not be the case.

There are two things that can be said for the campaigns I’ve been running on eBay: they get a LOT of clicks, and they are targeting extremely specific keyword terms.

Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about how to manage ePN affiliate programs. I’ve been banned from the program. I revolted and urged them to re-consider me, and they did. After that, I took on a newer, more paranoid and more strict attitude where all of my underperforming sites were deleted and 301-redirected elsewhere, while more focus was put on a mere handful of sites. These sites were given my utmost attention. I wrote content for them, I made them easier to navigate, better looking and pointed better backlinks to them, as well as to their inner pages. As a result, I think that all of these actions have contributed to better success with the new Quality Click Pricing model.

My EPC has gone from 0.03 to 0.06 – still a dismal and worrisome figure, since 0.03 is the point in which an ePN affiliate can be evaluated for a potential banning from the program. I’m currently working on de-manufacturing two more of my EPN sites, 301-redirecting them to other sources that I own, and hopefully getting better EPC figures on my dashboard once those poorly-converting sites are gone.

What you see here is a restructuring from the old mentality of ePN: creating tons of sites and hoping they all make a few dollars a day. The problem with that model in regard to the new QCP is that it is producing low-quality clicks, which won’t pay off much. Note that you’re no longer getting paid in commissions, but you’re getting paid per click. It’s a blessing for anyone whose ePN site gets tons of [relevant] clicks. If those clicks go through the unseen algorithm being run by ePN, and are deemed helpful and relevant, you’ll be rewarded.

With that being said, I’m looking at ePN in a whole new light. I made exactly 40.17% more between September 2009 and October 2009, and am looking forward to more success in November if all pans out.

Back in very early days of the eBay affiliate program, one could have made a full-time career out of selling used cars on eBay and making tremendous commissions. That practice was nipped in the bud with the inception of eBay Autos, bringing forth a new tier of virtually worthless commission scales for things like used cars, car parts and the like. Changes kept happening throughout the early 2000s, making that “percentage of a percentage of the seller’s fee to eBay” dwindle affiliate commissions.

Enter the ACRU

Then, in August of ’08, the ACRU or “Active Confirmed Registered User” value-based payment system came out. Instead of receiving your cool $20 per eBay user sign-up, you received anywhere between $1 and $50 (more likely the former) per sign-up, per ePN’s new algorithm that auto-ranked each sign-up with a quality rating. This rating determined how “worthy” that new eBay member was, based on their likelihood to continue coming back to eBay and purchasing more things in the future. It’s a ridiculous and irrational system that punishes affiliates for the behavior of other human beings. Either that, or it was a very poor way to punish the entire affiliate community for the select few cheaters who’ve created false accounts on different IP addresses. Reminds me a lot of when the entire gym class was given early morning detention because an asshole jock was fooling around in class, and the teacher wanted to make an example of him.

Later that same month, ePN got ban-happy and started cutting dozens of affiliates from the program with no rhyme or reason. In looking at the old forum posts, it was apparent that both high-earning affiliates and low-performing ones alike were cut. One guy was making nearly 6-figures per year on ePN and got the ban stick, while a newbie just learning the ropes got it, too. Those who didn’t were left shaking in their boots, overwhelmed with feelings of paranoia and wondering if the ePN Grim Reaper would be coming for them, soon…even though they were playing by the book.

Wait, Make That ‘Quality Click Pricing’…

On September 1, 2009, ePN announced that all new ePN members would now be transitioned over to a new “Quality Click Pricing” payment method, and all veterans would be transitioned on October 1st. Quality Click Pricing basically starts everything over at square one. Your traditional EPC (earnings per click) chart will disappear, and a QCP metric chart will take its place. It was then stated that the EPC system was somewhat of a beta test to see how affiliate sales have worked, solely for the reason of eventually transitioning to QCP. on Not only that,  but ACRU scores will also be removed entirely and will not be available for your statistical review.

What does this mean for you? It means that you better damn well be considered “quality” in ePN’s eyes, or you will be in for a heart breaker of a year in your affiliate routine. Rather than receiving commission like you always did, you’ll now be receiving payoffs on a per-click basis. According to the “How will this affect me?” writeup, you’ll receive the same commission as always. If you’re a high performer, you’ll get more – otherwise, you’ll be earning less. What’s a high performer or a low performer, though? ePN has enimgified (yes, that’s a word I made up just for this situation) their system so much that Einstein wouldn’t even be able to make it out. A blog post noting tips for success with QCP mentions that it’s all about being very drilled down and focused in terms of driving traffic. This might be a serious issue for those of you with “broad” product categories. Even during the EPC era of this program, ePN stated that anyone who had an EPC of .03 or less set off the red flag for a possible banning. At least you knew if you were in trouble with the EPC chart. That’s now gone, making the ePN program even more opaque than ever before.

How will the EPC program work out in the long run? This month will be the true test. Needless to say, marketing forums across the internet are buzzing with fear and grief. Keep in mind, there are people who use ePN as their full time revenue source. This goes to show that it is NEVER a good strategy to rely on just one affiliate program – you truly never know when something drastic will happen, or when they’ll simply die off.

Over the past year, ePN has done nothing short of making a complete jackass of themselves, instilling fear in their affiliate community, and becoming a PR nightmare that has spun out of control. Bannings still happen every day, without reason – and it’s nearly impossible to get back in once you’re banned…much like getting banned from Google AdSense. It also doesn’t help when your plea for a reason doesn’t even get answered by the team, especially since you get a generic “Dear John” letter when it happens.

ePN: where the strategy is “if it ain’t broke, fix it, then disassemble it, then put it back together, fix it, and re-paint it. Then lay off a percentage of your constituents. Then go back to fixing the system that ain’t broke once more. “