16/10/09- UPDATED 1.7.5 - NOW INCLUDES CLICK TIMESTAMP METER READ MORE BELOW

Understanding your ePN stats and being able to make changes accordingly could be difficult enough at the best of times but now that ePN have changed their commission structure, the way that you interpret your reports has also changed. Personally, one of the major flaws with the new program, other than the program itself, is the layout of the ePN dashboard. The fact that you have to navigate in and out of screens quite honestly makes things a lot harder than they have to be. Alan Lewis has come up with a solution for this in the form of a Wordpress plugin known as PiggyBank.

Piggybank is not a new plugin by any means, it's been around for a while now but since the change of the ePN commission structure from % to EPC this plugin has really come into it's own. What this plugin allows you to do is see all of your important report data in one place, helping you to better understand which sites are failing and which ones aren't. I was lucky enough to beta test the new PiggyBank and I've personally spent the last 24 hours playing around with the latest version (1.7.3) which I think is fantastic. Read the rest of this entry »

By now you should know about the new QCP structure which eBay Partner Network are about to impose from the 1st of October for current affiliates, if you don't know then where have you been?

ePN launched their new QPC preview in all member dashboards a few weeks back and since that happened there have been a lot of current affiliates talking openly about how they won't stay with ePN and how they want to walk away. The new QPC preview allows current ePN affiliates to view what their current earnings would have been under the new commission structure which is due to go live for all affiliates on the 1st of October. Many people have seen that their earnings preview is lower than their current earnings, causing them to react!

Now, I can understand to a certain extent why people are annoyed with the change, I'm not going to sit here and say that I am 100% ecstatic about it either. Even though I make sure I don't rely on one affiliate program, I still have a good chunk of my income coming from ePN. When I saw my earnings preview for the first week I was actually down by 40% which, as you can imagine, annoyed me somewhat but I didn't react in the same way that a good a majority of people did. Read the rest of this entry »

Many people have been struggling to understand how the new quality click pricing structure from eBay Partner Network is going to work. Essentially you are going to earn for every click you send to eBay through your website, but that doesn't mean you will necessarily earn more through this structure in comparison to the old structure. As the name suggests, what you earn will entirely depend on the 'Quality' of traffic you are sending to eBay and this is where people are getting confused and are likely to come unstuck. This is why I wanted to bring to your attention a post which Mark Hansen over at The Niche Store Builder has written. Mark gives his opinion of how he thinks quality click pricing will work and I have to say it certainly makes the whole thing a lot easier to understand.

So if your still unsure head on over to TNSB and take a closer look.

Unfortunately I am a little behind with the news, it was my birthday on Monday and so I decided to give myself a few days off where I stayed away from the computer completely. Upon my return I was shocked to see that eBay Partner Network had announced to change their commission structure from CPA/Click Per Action to QCP/Quality Click Pricing.

The current CPA structure basically means that ePN pays you for sales and leads. With QCP affiliates will be paid for each click sent to and eBay site. I'm not going to go into the in's and out's of this as you can read the entire story over on the ePN Blog.

The emphasis from now on, as it has been with ACRU's, is going to be on the quality of traffic sent to eBay rather than the quantity. So don't think that as long as you get loads of click throughs then you will earn a bigger chunk of commission because this won't necessarily be the case. Read the rest of this entry »

Building a successful affiliate site is not an easy task unless you have been at it for a long while and even then it can be challenging so the last thing you want is for all that hard work to be lost if something happens to your site. Wordpress 2.7 makes backing up your Wordpress pages, posts and comments very easy and so there is no excuse for you not to do it. In addition there is also a neat little plugin called Wordpress Database Backup which allows you to schedule all your database backups for a certain point in the week, making your life a whole lot easier.

To show  you how to do this easily with Wordpress 2.7 I have created this quick and very basic video which will guide you through the process.

Hi all, just wanted to let you know that this plugin recieved an update today to make it more secure and also easier to view items which were bought through your site. The following functions are included in te update.

1) Your EPN username and password is now masked in the config screen.

2) In the case of refunds, eBay still reports the sale amount as a positive number. I now override that, and your sale will now show negative in the case of a refund. Your bottom line total sales will now be correctly summed.

3) This is in response to user feedback. A new option is given in the config screen which allows you to display pictures of the completed auction in each transaction line. The images are clickable and take you to the completed auction on eBay. If the auction has no image then none will show.

All in all a great plugin.

Get it here:
http://www.psp-tubes.net/

Ben:)