eBay To Cut 1000 Jobs in Q4, What's Next ?

It's in all the papers and on CNBC today that eBay will cut 1000 jobs and reduce new hire positions. This only shows what we in the affiliate world have seen coming for months. With fee restricting every few month's and the loss of confidence from affiliate marketers and eBay sellers we are sure more news will be coming from the company. Look for eBay to cut back even more as the economy slides down. Common sense would dictate reducing expenses during hard times. That what all business's do. Whether it's your local builder or painter or a huge company reasoning says to cut back on money going out until money comes in. Basic business.
Who will suffer. Well eBay employee's for one and then stock holders. After those folks take a hit look for eBay to cut back in other place's. Were we don't know, but advertising is usually on the list when a company is having issues. According to a story on Cnet eBay just purchased a Danish classified service which would show us that they are continuing to try expanding world wide with hopes of generating revinue abroad.
Face it eBay isnt what it use to be. People don't spend hours browsing sites selling stuff. Internet users are becoming more sophisticated and tend to do more research before buying. With so many websites to choose products from their are only a few reasons a shopper would go directly to the site. One is close outs and another is buying used items. Also consumers are using their work computers to buy during their lunch hours or free time. Since most folks use the Internet at work these days they tend to turn their computers off at the end of the day and not turn on it back on till they need to. People are just getting sick of the same old thing online. The desire isnt there anymore to sit for hours and browse the site.

ePN Blocks Hostgator Check Your Webmaster Tools

What a day today was in the Internet Marketing world. If you use Hostgator as your host you may have had your servers blocked by ePN/eBay. Well know one knew for sure but 100s if not 1000's of website were not pulling the API from eBay. A API if you don't know is how products or RSS feeds propagate to websites. Now at 8 PM the sites I had down are all back, but showing warnings in Google Webmaster tools.
WARNING "Some URLs in the Sitemap have a high response time. Some URLs listed in this Sitemap have a high response time. This may indicate a problem with your server or with the content of the page."
Resubmitting them seams to have taken care of the warnings. This started with me at 7AM EST when I couldn't get into the ePN Dashboard. I even twittered about it TWITTER. Then finally after finding a way into the ePN forum I found others having issues getting into there dashboards. I shut down for a couple hours and came back and BAM I was in the ePN Dashboard. Then during a search I found that all my sites on my Hostgator Baby Croc account weren't pulling in the API feed from ebay. After reading some more I decided to send a ticket to HG and they responded as follows.
"Hello,This is happening because Ebay has temporarily blocked our server from connecting to their api:" The statement speaks for itself or so it seams. It turns out eBay making big changes this week and something on there servers was changed and some DNS needed time to propagate across the Web.
No sweat though my Hostgator reseller accounts where all fine all day. No issues at all. Problems like this can be avoided sometimes by having a reseller account. When you use a shared server your site are on the same server as 1000's of others. If there is someone doing bad things on that server you get bumped with everyone else on that server. I'm not saying ePN banned any server in fact they stated on the forum that they were not blocking users and that it was a routing issue.
This is a typical day for web masters and Internet Marketers. Some days its like walking on glass. As long as the sitemaps go through I think all is well for now. These are issues that happen all the time but can be avoided in some instances by Using a Reseller Account

Are You Ready For Changes At ePN

If you use EBay or ePN to monetize websites this past week as been very stressful and hectic. This week EBay announced that more changes are coming to the auction site. Lower upfront fee's and a huge change in search. But I'm not going to get into the changes on EBay auction though.
The biggest happening in the SEO & SEM community is ePN closing accounts arbitrarily. This is a though one. EBay affiliates with years with the program simply dropped Via Email and there CPanels being locked to 7 day warnings. These are trying times for those of us who use ePN for monetizing our sites. This work building websites isnt easy and takes lots of time to learn and implement. Now we are all waiting to see if ePN will be doing these, as they say "expiring" regularly. I think it will happen again, but when is the question.
Protect you ePN account is the 1st thing users should be doing. If you are a total newbie I do not recommend signing up for a ePN (Ebay Partner Network). Beginners really need to know exactly what they need to use ePN and keep there accounts.
A few things I am doing to protect myself from the axe is archive non performing campaigns. You will not get commissions from any sales, but this needs to be done. I don't know the metrics EBAY/EPN use in there decisions, but they have used statements like "tier is based at a publisher level not a campaign ID level" take what they say to heart. That quote is from the manual under value based pricing. Even though this is for value based pricing it would appear as they are possibly using it to evaluate users. If you have 25 campaigns and just one is not performing it will lower the quality rating of all the sites for that publisher. ePN says this is only for ACRU's but I'm taking no chances. As someone who has been with EBay for many years I know how valuable accounts are, so even if I have to archive all my campaigns to fell safe I will.
Remove all links to the sign up page. ePN said that they do no not want low performing new active registered users. This meaning users who sign up and only purchase one item then never come back or doesn't buy enough. Like today I checked my account and on one site I had 2 ACRU's but the fees Ebay charged the seller for the items sold was under $50 (2ACRU's). This scares me because if these people don't come back and spend more money I haven't generated income for the company (ebay). So I have decided to pull all the links to the sign up page on all my sites.
Last but not least make sure you engage your users with tons of content. Any site that is lacking should be archived as well.
All the ePN campaigns I have or will archive will be converted in one way or another. Some I will move to pepper Jam and some I will completely drop from ePN and find other ways to get items to my customers.
Once all this is done I will build specific sites that meet or beat ePN's mission. That is if I last that long. I could get the axe any minute. Doing all this may not protect me. After all some user are truly real SEM professionals with 10's of thousands of readers. I think I'm up to 50. Thanks for that you guys.
If you are archiving ePN Campaigns I can honestly recommend the affiliate programs in the sidebar. I use them all. Pepper Jam is the most important one for ePN now. That could change ! We all need to get backup if you haven't, start now !!!!. Sign up for some other affiliate programs NOW.

In Depth Review Of US Free Ad's Free Classified Service

Hello everyone. Thought I would write about US Free Ads today. I have been using the US Free Ad Classified Service for about 8 months now. Seeing I promote the site here a review of my experience is in order. One thing to always keep in mind when you place a promotional item on your site is to use it. You will never see me recommend or promote that I haven't used first. This is very important for any web master. You want readers to trust you. If you recommend something that is costly and you haven't used it then a reader feel they have been riped off then you the blogger trust and authority arnt worth dirt.
Like I said I have been using US Free Ads for some time now. I have found it to be a tremendous benefit to getting Websites indexed fast in the search engines. Google loves the site. Probably because they demand you keep thing relevant and post your ads and articles in the correct / relevant area. This is good for us because we want every thing about out site to be relative. Posting on US Free Ads is a whole other post. For now I want to show some stats.
First off I use a premium account. I do this mainly for the advance capabilities. The premium service dose not get you preferential treatment with ad placement. The Free Classified Service does the same thing when it come to SEO. Your links are picked up by the search engines just as a premium account.
For the purpose of this post I will pick out 2 sites to look at the numbers. One featured & one not.
Site 1's ad was placed 48 days ago in featured listings and has been viewed 1677 times. The site has been visited from the classified 572 times. according to awStats. I use Pepper Jam as my affiliate provider for site #1. PJ earning are at $240.00 to date. Now there is no direct way that my abilities allow me to draw a direct correlation between any of the numbers. I can say that the site is less than 2 months old and the only promotion I have done is US Free Ads and some signatures in forums and blog comments.
Site 2 is a site that was put up a few day earlier than site one. Both sites target the same product. Site 2 is a regular classified ad. Site 2 has received 432 visitors to the classified and 55 users went on to the site. Site 2 made $73.00. Site 2 is a ePN based site.
All in all I think these are good numbers for two sites that are about the same age. 60 days at most ! What I get out of the numbers is the site I spent a little extra money on the feature ad and made more than 3x more. But as I said the only direct correlation is the fact that the only promoting I did was US Free Ads and a couple of forum signatures and blog comments. Nothing major and all natural SEO. No PPC, Spam, or Black Hat methods. PPC is gambling to me and spam and black hat are to risky. There are certain ways to layout and present your ads and I will cover them over the next few days.
I hope this helps anyone who needs it.