A discussion of earning with Affiliate Programs, SEO, Wordpress Blogging and General Motivational Ideas for Internet Publishers

I logged into my PepperJam account yesterday and noticed that I’d earned $7 for a PJN affiliate referral. I was rather suprised because the usual bird-dog fee for recruiting new publishers into PJN is $5. My questions were answered when I checked my email and found an announcement from PJN that they were offering some firecracker deal for the month of July.

Here’s the the skinny on PJN’s July incentives :

• Commission Payout Increase - For the entire month of July the Pepperjam Network Publisher Referral Program will pay publishers (aka, affiliates) a flat $7 for every new publisher referral. That’s a 40% increase from our baseline payout!
• $10 New Publisher Sign-Up Bonus - To assist you with recruiting new publishers to Pepperjam Network we are going to allow you to provide them with a $10 Sign-Up Bonus. This means that any new publisher that you refer will be eligible for a $10 bonus just for signing-up for Pepperjam Network. Keep in mind, in order for your referrals to get the sign-up bonus they must become an approved PJN publisher, not have an existing PJN account (spamming will not be tolerated*), and click-through one of the special “$10 Bonus” banners or text links provided to you within the generate links section of the PJN Publisher Referral Program. Referrals sent in from any links other than the special PJN $10 Bonus banners or text links will not be given the bonus.
• Blogger Incentive Program - Bloggers are the lifeblood of the PJN Publisher Referral program and tend to be our biggest supporters and closet friends. As a result, we thought we’d create a sort of “Pay Per Post” incentive program where any PJN publisher / blogger will receive $10 for each post you make (up to 5 per month) that promotes Pepperjam Network or any Pepperjam Network tool. If you are looking for blog ideas check out the Pepperjam Network blog - www.pepperjamnetwork.com/blog. So that our team can track your efforts and eliminate spam please e-mail bloggers [at] pepperjamnetwork [dot] com prior to making your post to gain approval of the topic (i.e. I want to write about Pepperjam Chat or the launch of the PJN Blogger Incentive Program, etc.). BTW - of course you can use your PJN Referral Program affiliate links and make even more money every time you post about Pepperjam Network!

Those are some pretty sweet deals for PepperJam affiliate publishers and especially sweet for those of you lucky enough to be signing up now and getting the $10 bonus.

As stated above, to receive the $10 bonus, you must click through one of the special affiliate banners such as the one below :

Good Luck,
Dave

         

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Publishers and affiliates worldwide who were less than enthusiastic about eBay’s decision to take their affiliate program “in-house” as opposed to operating it through Commission Junction have now been expressing distress about EPN’s shoddy tracking and reporting. Many publishers have been reporting a significant decrease in earnings since the switch from CJ to EPN and there have even been reports of EPN expiring affiliates for the quality of the traffic they are driving to eBay’s auctions. The EPN discussion boards have been flooded with disgruntled affiliates threatening Class action lawsuits and EPN stealing traffic from affiliates and in true eBay fashion, none of their moderators or representatives have responded to these discussions.

Yesterday, eBay sent out an email to all affiliates that I found in rather poor taste addressing network quality issues…

Thanks for signing up to the eBay Partner Network - we really appreciate your continuing support. Over the last few weeks, many of you have been asking questions about our policies regarding use of paid search campaigns and ad networks. We thought it would be helpful to provide some clarifications. This is important, because any affiliate that violates the eBay Partner Network Code of Conduct, Network Agreement, Program Terms or Privacy Statement runs the risk of being expired from the eBay Partner Network and/or having their pending commissions reversed. Paid Search What is Paid Search? * Direct Paid Search is where an affiliate buys keywords on a search engine and directly links the traffic to eBay from the search engine’s sponsored listings. * Indirect Paid Search is where an affiliate purchases keywords, but directs traffic to a non-eBay domain landing page that contains links to eBay. What is prohibited? * Direct Paid Search on the Tier 1 search engines of Google, Yahoo and MSN, and any of their content networks, in the US, UK, Australia and Canada programs. * Bidding on keyword eBay or any derivation of eBay on any search engine and directly or indirectly linking to eBay. * Utilizing automatic redirects to eBay from an Indirect Paid Search landing page with the intention of masking the true direct nature of the advertisement. * Please note the above list is not intended to be comprehensive. Please make sure that you are familiar with all of the eBay Partner Network terms and conditions. Ad Networks We understand that some affiliates purchase inventory in other ad networks to promote eBay. The eBay Partner Network does not explicitly prohibit the use ad networks; however each affiliate is responsible for the quality of all of the activity on their account. If you use any ad networks, we advise using great caution and that you thoroughly understand their product offering, because you are accountable any policy violations caused by activity within the ad networks you use. Violations we have seen in the past are mostly related to Section A of the eBay Partner Network Code of Conduct which states that the delivery of cookies or any sort of tracking tags not initiated by the affirmative action of an end user is strictly prohibited. Here at the eBay Partner Network, we consider maintaining a high quality network as a critical component of our job. It helps us ensure our valued affiliates get full credit for the activity they drive and helps us provide them with competitive payout terms. We’d like to thank the vast majority of our affiliates who are doing their part in maintaining the quality of their traffic as well. Regards, The eBay Partner Network Team

While I wanted to give EPN the benefit of the doubt and tried to not to be negative regarding the fact that eBay is possibly one of the most disgraceful companies regarding support, service and honesty (besides Google) and is generally not to be trusted, I kept quiet and wached as the scenario began to unfold. While everybody else was switching their CJ/eBay links to the new EPN links, I resisted and left the majority of my existing CJ links intact, only choosing to use the EPN links on new sites and pages. Now we have PepperJam Network announcing their partnership with the eBay affiliate program which makes even less sense than eBay pulling their program from CJ. Most of my readers know I am 100% supportive of PepperJam and have been a staunch supporter of the CJ/eBay affiliate program however I think eBay and EPN should spend more time concentrating on getting their end of the deal operational before they start slagging affiliates over quality. Especially when they are not exhibithing quality themselves.

It seems to be a slap in the face to us publishers and affiliates that EPN is trying to shift blame for their lackluster performance onto us. You would think a publicly traded company such as eBay who has already been the subject of unfavorable press such as this BusinessWeek article “Auctions on eBay: A Dying Breed” would realize that offending power affiliates with idiotic emails such as the one above can spell disaster to their shareholders.

EPN needs to step up to the plate and take accountability for their own actions rather than make asses of themselves with updates such as the one they issued yesterday.

Tags: eBay, EPN, Commission Junction, PepperJam, affiliate

         

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 If you read my post from a week ago First PepperJam Commission, you’d know that I was extremely impressed with nailing down my first commissions using Pepperjam Network. It only took about one week and 6700 impressions for my first conversion using PepperJam and the overall results, including number of clicks and eCPM have me singing praises about PepperJam’s innovative CPA program.

 Now it’s a week later and has been two weeks since I’ve signed up with PepperJam and I wanted to do a little follow-up about how my second week using PepperJam has concluded.

  As of today, I’ve had a total of three conversions for $41.50 in commissions. Incredible, for two weeks in this program to have already brought down close to $50 in commissions from a mere 108 clicks makes PepperJam one of the most lucrative CPA programs I’ve ever experienced. As of today, PepperJam is averaging around $.38 per click (at least three times my Adsense eCPM). It also seems that the PepperjamADS widget invites more clicks than any other ads I’ve used in the past. The beautiful part is that you don’t have to be paranoid about inticing clicks to your ads like you have to be when using Google Adsense.

  It seems to me that Google Adsense’s policy of restricting who, what, when and where we get our clicks from and their policy of banning publishers without notice makes having Google Adsense on your site a liability more than a monetization vehicle. Considering the fact that PepperJam network advertisers are not paying per click but per conversion, the stress, hassle and potential loss of earnings with Adsense make using it old hat.

 Many of my loyal readers here and my friends at DigitalPoint or Code4Gold fourms are aware of the circumstances surrounding my being unfairly banned by Adsense last November, right before Christmas and my two biggest Adsense months ever. Although I was re-instated by Adsense a few weeks later, it was nonetheless upsetting that they confiscated *ALL* of my October and November earnings (appx $1700) and have refused to make ammends for literally taking my children’s Christmas presents from under the tree.

 While I still use Adsense (reluctantly) to fill 10-15% of my ad space, I still cringe every time I load a page with Adsense or login to my account that they will pull the same business on me again eventually.

 With PepperJam, each time I login to my account, there are no suprises, unless you consider seeing fantastic commissions a suprise !!! I’d say that PepperJam is a knockout on Google Adsense, not only for publishers but for advertisers as well. Kudos to PepperJam Network on the victory !!!

Join Pepperjam Network today!

         

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