Ah, Tax Season 2009 has come to an end. Two days out, I’ve now spent most of two days playing a lot of LEGOs and Mario Kart with my son while the wife is out of town. (Shhh, don’t tell her — I know Mario Kart is essentially brain rot, but what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her! ) Should probably consider looking for something a bit more productive to do eventually, but right now I’d say spending time with my little five-year-old is just about the absolute right thing to do.

So in the last two months, what have I actually accomplished?

• A couple hundred tax returns.
• Completed somewhere in the range of half a Campaign Blast Challenge. The brain and time just wouldn’t cooperate to allow me to finish the whole thing. Outside of the challenge, I built next to nothing.
• A hard slap of my eBay AdWords campaigns by Google — twice. You know Google, if you don’t want my money, fine, I’ll move them and the substantial amount I was paying to advertise with you to…
• Yahoo & MSN. Transferred all my campaigns over. The traffic isn’t quite up to Google’s numbers, but they are slowly building. And the traffic appears to convert even better!
• I’ve got another side business that is in serious need of, well, going the hell away. I just have to come up with a means of making a clean break with it. Now that tax season has ended, I have no excuse in putting that off other than not wanting to deal with it.

OK, so I guess I did at least get a few things done on this side endeavor that I’d like to make my main one.

Immediately after the slaps, my earnings took a major nosedive to the tune of around 10% of my peak. I’m back to around 60% and steadily increasing. Now that I have time and available brain cells to focus, it’s time to get back to the game and see where I want to be and what I need to do in order to get there.

After all, I have a single monetary goal for the summer: September 1st, I plan to write a check for the remainder of our mortgage…

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…

photo credit: TangoPango

A big hairy audacious goal commission payment is now pending. I figured they would choose this month to stretch out the payment period as long as possible just to make me sweat — ’cause it’s all about Sean, don’t ya’ know — but no, eBay just flipped the switch on November’s commission payment.

I’m anxiously awaiting it to clear because a credit card company out there is in serious need of being told to take a flying leap, and that sure would make a nice Christmas gift to myself!

photo credit: Jeff_Werner

As I thought, those little microbes just wouldn’t allow me to gather together any focus to get those last nineteen done. That, and I had a real bastard of a day at my ‘real job’. When I finally made it home, I really wasn’t in a do-more-work mode. I just wanted a little family time. Also known as answering a billion unanswerable questions from my favorite four-year-old. Sometimes I think he’s just testing me.

I did have one nice little surprise tonight as far as this side adventure I’ve been taking. Was playing around with the reports in the EPN dashboard, and I stumble across a pleasant thing. My total from September 9th through October 9th contains something new: a fourth digit.

$1,003.74 to be exact.

Looks like I picked a good time to be promoting UK items. eBay just sent me the following:

photo credit: vissago

Christmas is coming and it’s the busiest time of year for eBay.co.uk, as everyone rushes to buy their presents and stock up on festive goodies. The eBay UK Affiliate team want to encourage you to send even more quality traffic to eBay.co.uk across this period, so we’re giving you the chance to earn a 20% bonus and you could even win a Nintendo Wii!

How to earn your 20% bonus

We have set targets based on the Winning Bid and BIN Revenue you generated for eBay.co.uk in September and if you beat these targets, you will earn a 20% Rev Share bonus, which will be paid to you in January.

I have had an ultra tiny, UK-specific niche BANS site running for quite a while that I’ve done next to zero as far as promotion, so I do have a target to beat. And that target looks to be just over two bucks. Total. For the month.

Since the blasts to my UK-targeted mini money sites are averaging somewhere in the seventeen bucks a day range right now, I’m thinking I may just be able to top September and get in on this bonus…

There most definitely is money still to be made as an eBay affiliate. Last month was, by a long shot, my most profitable month as one.

photo credit: ethorson

That said, my future eBay efforts will likely not involve creating any more BANS sites. I’ll certainly keep my current BANS sites as they are as long as they continue to make a profit. For instance, I have one site that I literally have not touched since I set it up last November that has made me a couple thousand, and it is about to hit its peak season again. Why mess with it?

But I just do not much care for building sites the BANS way anymore. Nothing wrong with the software, but I have found ways I just like better.

Off On Tangents

I have gone off onto a couple different tangents as far as eBay affiliate stuff:

• For sites built to get search engine traffic, I’m using a great little product called phpBay. It lets me take a WordPress blog and quickly turn it into a store. With the billion or so themes available for WordPress, I can make it look however I want.
• Lately I’ve been focusing on using Adwords to drive traffic to eBay mini sites. I used the API version of phpBay to build mini sites specifically for PPC campaigns. If you happen to join Earn $1k A Day, I can’t recommend these three threads more highly to give you some truly astounding ideas along these lines:
  1. My First 1K day, now 2nd and 3rd
  2. Questions for Gary
  3. How I choose my keywords from ebay listing titles

  I’ve been following Gary’s system since midway through September, and am more than thrilled with the results I’ve gotten so far.

Tool Recommendations

Here are a few recommendations for tools I use I’ve found particularly useful as an eBay affiliate:

• Irregardless of the route you’re taking, finding a good niche is a given. I really like Hot Item Finder to find what is actually selling on eBay. I’ve hit on some truly oddball niches using it that have done very well for me so far.
• Some software to pull eBay listings and format ‘em with your affiliate links. Whether it’s BANS or phpBay or any of the other eBay affiliate scripts out there.

Those are really my only indispensables. Now that I’ve gotten into pay-per-click to get traffic to my mini sites, I’ll tack on two more, but if you’re not going into PPC right now, ignore ‘em:

• Keyword Transformer to let me easily set up keyword tracking.
• My membership at Campaign Blast. This site has really kicked me in the pants. I set up 44 mini money sites in around a week recently because of this membership. And will probably put up another 60 in the next.

End of the Day Job?

So, have I made enough to replace the day job yet?

Well, no. At least, not yet. But last month certainly reduced the multiples required to do so!

Seeing results really gets you motivated…

So I set a SMART goal of a cool 100 campaign blasts by this 28th of this month in early August, and what do you know, we’re creeping up on that date. With less than a week to go, I still have about 40 to go. What can I say? It was a lazy September…

That said, I easily have that number of potential campaigns to pick from mostly fleshed out in text files on my thumbdrive. But quite honestly, I may just make these last forty straight to quick eBay niche landing pages. My little experiment with them seems to be going well, with a few winning campaigns in the mix already and covering the experiment’s total ad spend so far. Cut some non-performers, optimize those winners, and I see some great things going forward.

While I got a half dozen done this afternoon, I didn’t get much accomplished on those last 40 tonight. My son insisted we build tunnels with blocks and race tennis balls through them for a couple hours. And who am I to argue?

That, and I left my thumbdrive with all my campaign info in my work PC, so I’m flying blind anyway.

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!

As an owner of a slowly increasing number of BANS stores, I don’t quite share the outrage of many eBay sellers upon hearing of the new fee structure.

I feel for the sellers, but considering I make a cut of eBay’s cut, any potential increase is just icing on my already tasty cake…