Well, it’s more than theory now. Looks like I’m pending no more…

With half a foot of fresh snow on the ground — and more annoyingly to me, a bit of ice — to drive upon, I’m anxious to see how this all pans out in the coming non-holiday months. It sure would be nice when the snow goes flying to be comfortable saying to myself

Hey, why don’t you put a pot on the stove, make a few hot chocolates for you and the family, and not head into the office this morning?

Because the office is wherever I would happen to be that day…

So I’ve been experimenting with my campaign blasting in the last couple days, attempting to drive traffic to a series of very niche-specific eBay affiliate landing pages rather than direct to merchant.

And so far so good. I’m seeing a fair number of clicks. Plus, I’m not freaking out by blowing through my daily ad spend budget in a couple hours or anything. But even with me taking it slow and steady, it sure would be nice to get a quick read on any successful campaigns.

But no, EPN has decided that just as I start paying for traffic, they’re going to delay reporting the prior day’s results from my standard 7pm or so until several hours later. Tonight is yet another night where midnight has come and gone, and I still don’t know if anything converted from the prior day.

I see all kinds of people freaking out over recent events, but I love ya’ EPN.

• Your program converts well.
• I don’t have to harass anyone to get paid.
• Your API is a snap to play around in.
• The potential niches I can try out are essentially infinite.

But sheesh, let me know where I’m wasting money already…

Sometimes, having too many things on your plate can be a good thing.

The last few days have seen the rollout of the eBay Partners Network aka eBay‘s in-house affiliate program. Being mildly brain damaged from it being tax season, I decided I’d put off any serious work at getting the portions of my sites that use eBay converted to the new, non-CJ program until, oh, the 16th. Or maybe the 20th — let a few brain cells grow back and all.

And honestly, even if the switchover date was June 1st rather than April 1st, I still would have held off. I don’t generally enjoy being a beta tester. With something this major — and I’d call switching over quite likely the largest affiliate program out there to an in-house program a major undertaking — problems are bound to pop up. And of course, they did, and likely will for awhile yet. Such as:

• Like the on-the-ball developers that they are, Kevin & Adam from Build A Niche Store had code ready to go when eBay threw the switch. Of course, since they really had no way of fully testing it before the system was actually up and running, there were a handful of bugs. That they were cleared up in no time is a testament to their attentions.
• Just today we see an extended bit of trouble with the eBay RSS feed (which many affiliates use). Namely, that they were slow as molasses. Oh, and that they were apparently not passing along your affiliate IDs. You know, just little things…

photo credit: RichieC

I did upgrade one of my sites to the new system, more to play than anything. Went smooth as could be. Of course, it’s essentially a new BANS site, so I wasn’t concerned about wasting the almost nonexistent traffic it draws right now.

What really gets me is the reactions I’ve seen online about these little snafus. Ranting and raving and foaming at the mouth and the-sky-is-falling-the-sky-is-falling. Someone needs a lesson in the law of attraction. I’ll just take it as my periodic reminder that time spent on most forums is a wasteful distraction to actually getting anything done.

Oh, and ROCK CHALK JAYHAWK! They sure tried their best to make it interesting, didn’t they!

Not getting much accomplished because of a little internal warfare, aka a heavy winter cold. It’s been ten days or so of this damn thing, but I think we’ve finally got the invaders in retreat.

I’ve decided to temporarily hold off on my grand plans until the fog encasing my mind lifts. After all, I hate to throw money at things that don’t make any sense when I’m thinking straight. But I’ve got quite a number of possibilities in my idea box, so I imagine shortly my domain stable is going to be expanding.

One thing I have been accomplishing is signing up for quite a few affiliate networks. It really is amazing how many different programs are out there. And the differences in payouts on the same programs from affiliate network to affiliate network is definitely something to look into if you are going to get into online marketing in any serious way.

The latest I’ve been messing around with is NetShops, which runs a network of online stores, all with pretty decent payouts (generally the 10-15% range). What I find really interesting is their datafeeds, and how simple they make accessing them. A little experimentation with these on the minisites (as well as the BANS sites) is definitely in order!