Thought this would be interesting for those of us still active with EPN.
Chatting with EPN: Episode 1 on Vimeo
What do you make of it?
Chatting with EPN: Episode 1 on Vimeo
What do you make of it?
Chad Wehrmaker from EPN Speaks
- Thread starter kingofsp
- Start date
so basically, Ebay says they won't tell us how they are going to compensate us and pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
Haha, basically. I'm just wondering what was the tipping point that made them decide they needed to address it in a video.
This is weird: this guy kinda looks like me. It's like I'm watching myself in a video. Some things that stuck out to me:
I guess I can't fault the guy for trying, but he should probably get someone with a sunnier attitude to make the videos.
Hah, yeah, because it's one-way and there's no expectation for you to answer questions, like on that pesky forum.
By whom? I think even the few people whose revenue stayed the same would say they preferred the direct correlation between their actions and their income.
So why base payments on an algorithm? Why not align your goals with the affiliates instead of obscuring them behind some mystery-calculation? Pay for bids, pay for winning bids, pay for signups. Pay differently for a sale that I linked through to motors but who buys a cuddly plush toy.
Admitting the algorithm isn't currently fair (I know, picking on the guy trying to read his notes for a one-take video)
I guess I can't fault the guy for trying, but he should probably get someone with a sunnier attitude to make the videos.
serious question, does anyone actually make real money with epn or amazon? When I started with Amazon I had to sell like $4500 worth of shit to make $180. Everybody I know whose main revenue is from these is maxing out at like $100 / day. Plus their strategy is seo and based on thin ass (read: soon to be de-indexed) drip feed sites. Obviously some people are banking but it seems to me one of the hardest ways to get started in affiliate marketing or to diversify your earnings.
edit: i take that back, thinking more i do know of 2 people who are both doing ok on ebay (or at least who were prior to qcp) but neither of them is using seo for their shit.
edit: i take that back, thinking more i do know of 2 people who are both doing ok on ebay (or at least who were prior to qcp) but neither of them is using seo for their shit.
I have an epn micro-site which is thin, no link-building beside an Xrumer blast like a year ago, that's been up for about two-plus years. Even the domain name is sorta stupid.
Averages $150 a month. Can't complain at all for the amount of work I put into it, or considering that when I built it I was pretty much a newbie to AM/seo/internet marketing.
It's a weird niche. That's what consistently makes the coin on Ebay, those weird little niches that nobody has ever heard of.
I moved onto other things because like a LOT of people, I got tired of the random policy changes that just seemed to be implemented to solely bust people's balls. But if EPN was run more shareasale or CJ, I woulda stuck with it and put more way effort into it and probably made a good living. Not $1k a day but easily more than $100 a day.
Nobody wants to put in the effort to make $1k a day on EPN because then you would get a manual review and it's well known that Ebay hires the last of the living Nazis hiding in Brazil to review sites that catch their attention
Averages $150 a month. Can't complain at all for the amount of work I put into it, or considering that when I built it I was pretty much a newbie to AM/seo/internet marketing.
It's a weird niche. That's what consistently makes the coin on Ebay, those weird little niches that nobody has ever heard of.
I moved onto other things because like a LOT of people, I got tired of the random policy changes that just seemed to be implemented to solely bust people's balls. But if EPN was run more shareasale or CJ, I woulda stuck with it and put more way effort into it and probably made a good living. Not $1k a day but easily more than $100 a day.
Nobody wants to put in the effort to make $1k a day on EPN because then you would get a manual review and it's well known that Ebay hires the last of the living Nazis hiding in Brazil to review sites that catch their attention
EPN makes up a significant portion of my income. However, I abandoned the thin site model (more or less) early this year in favor of focusing on SEOing the shit out of my top earners. Three of my sites make up the vast majority of my EPN earnings, and its all organic traffic. Took a lot of work, though.
Lol!
Jesus, who the fuck is this guy, the white version of Carleton Banks?
I showed better communication at my grade 3 public speaking contest with a speech I wrote about cougars... COUGARS god dammit!
I showed better communication at my grade 3 public speaking contest with a speech I wrote about cougars... COUGARS god dammit!
I have an EPN site that makes me ~$200/mo down from ~$900/mo a couple years ago before I got slapped.
eBay fucked their affiliates hard and without lube. I stopped putting any further effort into my existing site the moment this rolled out and won't even think of future sites build around EPN because of this black box bullshit--there's just too much risk involved for the affiliate now. That said, I may sprinkle it in to future efforts if it makes sense to because it converts pretty decently.
eBay can go fuck themselves though--seriously..."optimize against these magic metrics you have no insight into." Give me a fucking break.
eBay fucked their affiliates hard and without lube. I stopped putting any further effort into my existing site the moment this rolled out and won't even think of future sites build around EPN because of this black box bullshit--there's just too much risk involved for the affiliate now. That said, I may sprinkle it in to future efforts if it makes sense to because it converts pretty decently.
eBay can go fuck themselves though--seriously..."optimize against these magic metrics you have no insight into." Give me a fucking break.
any more? no idea
I had several high 5 figure months off 100% organic SEO years ago and steady low.
but that was back in the glory days of $40 ACRUs and before one of my competitors decided to spill the beans on how to index to ebay themselves while I told their execs to kindly go fuck themselves on a conference call.
you'll now find that if you search for 1952 yellow sweater it's EBAY ranking up there (now- google dancing multiple times affected this a lot too), however for a good 18 months it was me and a few others.
long tail FTW
now I have one site that does ~$750/month on decent months and occasionally some super old stuff with spike up a little bit, but by and large I stopped even logging in a couple years ago. Long before all this pricing shit went down.
What fucking idiots over there though, it's unbelievable.
Never used them before. How does the EPC compare? Surely it must be lower as Shopping.com takes a cut for themselves right?
Not necessarily, Shopping.com is owned by eBay and has different budgets and target ROI to the EPN. eBay treats the comparison sites as a separate traffic source.
Your EPC will vary depending on your niche, but it's quite possible it could be higher. I've never worked on EPN so I can't offer a comparison, I would just advise split testing.
The other good thing about it is you won't be subject to the same scrutiny as you would on EPN, it's easier to get accepted.
Oh duh, forgot they were owned by eBay. If I'm already on EPN am I auto-approved on Shopping.com? I'd have to rejigger a lot because right now I'm using the crappy javascript editor kit and would have to figure out how to get an RSS feed to parse in the same format but if the money makes it worth it why not.
Do the product listings differ? If so how?
No, they're wholly separate companies in that regard. Employees, technology, payments, everything. They don't even sit in the same city.
They do differ in that shopping.com don't carry the entire eBay inventory, technically doing so is unfeasible and so they limit to new BIN items. Browse shopping.com and you'll get a good idea of how well it will work in your niche.
If you're talking how does it differ in a feed and technical sense, the answer is quite a lot. Shopping.com has a proprietary API that you'd need to query.
I recently wrote on their EPN blog, it was never published because it was a critisicism of the way they just change things without thinking things through.
For a massive business i dont think they look after their affiliates very well.
For a massive business i dont think they look after their affiliates very well.
That's the problem, eBay don't need to look after their affiliates. Truth be told they view them quite suspiciously these days. The cookie stuffing issues have damaged the internal credibility of all affiliates except a small handful who were allowed to retain the old privileges.
I also posted a couple of times on their blog, nothing very critical, just some pointed questions. Never published. After that I posted some scathing (but not vulgar) comments calling into question the quality of character of the moderator by name who was responding to questions in that thread. Just for fun of course no results expected except hopefully to make that fool feel like crap for being part of EPN.