Hey everyone! As you may have noticed, I have been updating PPC Ian a little less frequently lately. It’s not that I’ve been slacking off, it’s just that I’ve been super busy. As you may remember from my 2010 goals, I set the goal to develop six new websites this year. Well, I’m actually on pace now to develop 75 plus. The best part of it? All 75 plus sites are amazing and deliver substantial value to the Internet. How is this possible? Stay tuned, I will be writing a post all about this in the coming months!
PPC Ian still remains a priority and I’m hoping to boost my post frequency going forward now that things are cooling down a bit. I’m particularly excited about today’s post about my October and November eBay Partner Network (EPN) earnings. You may recall that I posted about my Volatile eBay Partner Network Earnings not that long ago, back in early October. Well, the volatility continues, but this time in my favor!
My eBay Partner Network Earnings Skyrocket
It’s really funny! Just as I posted about my volatile EPN earnings in early October, things really started looking up. October was a strong month (compared to prior months) and I ended up earning $500.46. The crazy part of this is the earnings all came in during the first few weeks of October and then started tapering off like crazy. By the end of October, I was only earning a few bucks per day. So, the volatility was still there, it was just working in my favor a bit more. Want to see my earnings in October? Check out the first graph at the end of this post!
November has been even better than October. I’ve pulled in a solid $846.59 so far this month! While the month is not over, I do see my earnings tapering off just like October. Check out the second graph below, the month started really strong and then started getting weaker over time. The click volume has been somewhat consistent, and it’s really my EPC (earnings per click) that has been dropping over time. I’m definitely happy with my results in November and am hoping to break through the $1,000 mark, but definitely could be a challenge if I get back to that few bucks per day level. Again, make sure to check out the second graph at the end of this post to see a detailed view of my earnings.
eBay Partner Network Takeaways
My excitement for the eBay Partner Network is really taking off and I’d like to close out today with a few of my takeaways from this case study:
- People love posts about earnings! My last post about my Volatile eBay Earnings got 14 comments and was even featured on the ever popular blog Make Money On The Internet by Chris Guthrie, one of my favorite blogs!
- Don’t give up on eBay. When I wrote my last post about my volatile eBay earnings, I was definitely de-motivated with my earnings trends on eBay. While the volatility is still there, I’m now making some good money from it! These last few months tell me that it’s all about the long term and that seemingly permanent trends can and will change!
- It’s all about profit and not revenue. The numbers shared in this post are pure margin. The sites on which I run the eBay Partner Network get all of their traffic organically (read: no PPC). That’s a bit ironic on blog called PPC Ian, but I’ll be the first guy to tell you that PPC does not make sense in all business cases. The sites on which I run EPN are information sites. I have found the slow passive income SEO strategy ideal for these types of sites. The net effect: I’m able to pocket all of my EPN earnings! This looks even sweeter when you combine this passive income strategy with a full time job. It looks even sweeter still when you factor in passive income from Google AdSense, Commission Junction, ClickBank, and other affiliate programs. I’m going to be writing a post very soon about my overall passive income strategy and how I plan to retire rich from leveraging multiple income streams.
- eBay Still Pays On Conversions. About a year ago, eBay moved to their new Quality Click Pricing model where they smooth out commissions and pay on clicks (and not conversions). However, based on my experience, eBay is still paying on conversions, they’re just smoothing it out over clicks a bit more than in the past. There’s nothing wrong with this, but it’s just something to be aware of. When you drive conversions, you will see a spike in earnings like me. I’m hoping with the holiday shopping season approaching that my EPN earnings skyrocket as more people convert!
There you have it! If you have been observing lower earnings on eBay Partner Network, I encourage you to hang in there like me. Don’t forget to check out the graphs of my October and November (month to date) earnings below…
My October and November (MTD) eBay Partner Network Earnings
Thats awesome! It makes sense though, since its winter and the holidays are coming up, they need to step up their game as more and more people are searching to buy stuff around these months..!
Great graph as well!
Dino,
Thanks for the comment, much appreciated as always! Yeah, holiday shopping is a beautiful thing. 🙂
All the best,
Ian
Ian,
Pretty impressive earnings from eBay. My highest ever earnings in a month from eBay was $256. I just stopped using that since my other CPA campaigns were doing almost 12x better.
Thanks Abhik,
Thanks so much for the comment! Much appreciated. Yeah, I’m definitely happy with my earnings rebounding. 🙂 By the way, I really like your blog’s design!
All the best,
Ian
Hey Ian
This is definitely what I love about your Blog. Great Post!!. I’m also a big fan and lover of passive income and digital assets building. This kind of posts make me want to meet you personally in a near future.
As you may know from my previous comments, I am from Colombia, and here in this region (Latin america) online marketing as a whole, have an incredible potential. I will be glad to partner with a great profession like you, for future business in this region. 🙂 🙂 🙂 (Just my way to show you how much I appreciate the content of your blog and all your advices)
I have some questions for you, if possible.
¿How do you handle SEO with this sites? Do you update those sites frequently or you create quality content once, and let it run alone?
If you don’t mind ¿How do you research your niches?
I personally have my own methods, and you may not want to reveal yours, but I love to hear what are others doing (more or less) for niche research. Is my way to benchmark my methods and improve them in order to get better results.
Great Post!!…Regards
Juan,
Thanks so much for the awesome comment and kind words! I truly appreciate it. 🙂 You bring up some great questions which will be best answered through an entire post. I’ll give you the short answer now and then do a post in the future… Basically, I develop sites around niches that interest me. I try to find domains that have 1,000 or more exact searches per month, domains that are in categories with high CPCs, and domains that are in categories I truly enjoy. Then, it’s really more of a hobby than anything and I can really enjoy the process of building these niche sites out. Thanks again!
All the best,
Ian
This is really inspiring, Ian! I’ve been slacking on using EPN – I just applied to it for a few of my sites, and am still waiting to get approved. Seems like a longer process than with Amazon, but I’m sure it’ll be worth the wait.
As others have said, these are by far my favorite posts of yours. I’m not sure if you ever plan on sharing this, but I’d love to hear more specifics about some of your niche sites – not that I want you to share actual URLs, but maybe broad niche/product types? 🙂 I’m having success with niche sites as well (mainly for Amazon right now), but have yet to crack any earnings with CJ, which I know you’ve had success with.
Thanks again buddy.
– Eric
Quick follow-up question, related to your sites – do you generally host everything on one shared host (like a standard Hostgator or Bluehost plan), or do you take measures to have sites on different hosts or class-C IPs?
I’ve heard that suggestion before, and I’m trying to figure out when it makes sense (i.e. at how many sites) to do, or if it’s even really necessary at all.
Thanks!
Hello, I’ve been waiting a few days to get accepted after reading this post and finally got the call yesterday and set everything up. It was only up for about 4 hours yesterday but my simple text link managed to get 20 clicks in.
Looking in my account though its showing the clicks but no earnings, do these usally take a few days to appear? Anyway if the value of the clicks is anything like my adsense clicks it should double my revenue and may even consider getting rid of the day job!
Darren
Thanks so much for visiting my blog and for the comment! Man, that is awesome and inspiring news. 🙂 I have found that eBay will typically report the earnings for the current day anywhere between 1:00 pm and 2:00 pm Pacific Time the next day. Also, when I look at intra-day clicks, they tend to under-report, so you can typically look forward to even higher clicks than you’re seeing now (when the full day is over)! That is really great news!
All the best,
Ian
Eric,
Thanks so much for the comments – much appreciated as always. 🙂 You are doing some really big things on your end and your blog is at the top of my list. In terms of your question, I have several different hosting accounts: GoDaddy (3 accounts), BlueHost (2 accounts), HostGator, and even iPower.
The GoDaddy hosting is for some of my earliest launched sites. They only allow one site per account, at least with the setup I have that I started back in 2007. You hear people complain about GoDaddy hosting and tell you that it’s important to keep separate hosts and registrars, but I don’t buy it. GoDaddy hosting (and customer support) has been amazing and I’m very happy with it. In fact, they’re definitely at the top of my list.
I opened BlueHost and HostGator accounts to launch all my minisites. I got really big into domaining in late 2009 and especially 2010. I’ve leverage BlueHost and HostGator to keep my hosts diversified, in case one goes down. (Side note: You may want to check about my article about BlueHost and Add-On Domains.) I don’t really believe all this talk about different hosts and ips for the purpose of SEO. ALL of my sites are VERY unique and value add. I only link from one of my sites to another when it’s hands down adding a lot of value for the user. As such, I’d have no problem having them all on the same ip. I’m about as white hat as they come and don’t really believe in diversifying across ips.
However, what I do worry about is up-time. As someone that has more and more of their income coming from my wide portfolio of web properties, I never want to be in the situation where a host going down wipes out all my earnings for a day (or even longer). It’s really this reason, combined with the ulta-cheap nature of hosting these days, that I’ve chosen to diversify. I opened another separate BlueHost account that hosts this blog. I like to keep the blog and my minisites separated to ensure optimal performance of my blog and make it easy to upgrade my blog’s hosting in the future as my traffic builds.
Last, I have one site hosted on iPower that I acquired a few years back. iPower is a bit expensive, but the site earns a lot of money and I decided just to leave things alone.
Hope this helps! Thanks again, Eric, I appreciate the comments and questions!
All the best,
Ian
Hi Ian,
thank you for your interesting articles about the eBay Parnter Network. I made the same experience like you, sometimes I’m very worried about it, and another day, it’s great. So please keep on posting your experience.
Kind regards
Andy
@Darren: This is normal, it takes a time! When the clicks of your visitors earns money for eBay, then you will also earn money.
Andy,
Thanks so much for the comment, I truly appreciate it!
All the best,
Ian
Very interesting article, I really like it. I also use Ebay Partner Network, however my incomes are very much lower than yours 🙂
Sylvain,
Thanks so much for the comment and kind words! I truly appreciate it! eBay has been really good to me lately, and I’m hoping my luck continues. 🙂
All the best,
Ian
Nice post, I found it while researching about epn.. I’m currently a UK affiliate promote fitness products and send around 4500 clicks per month to merchants from 1 particular sote bit the average epc I receive is far below what I would like (around 5p) and I notice that your epc on the epn are very high, do you pre sell products via reviews or just promote high ticket items?
Cheers! Rich
If I could get the same kond of epc across my 4500 clicks that site would make me pretty happy 🙂
Rich,
Thanks so much for visiting my blog and for the comment! 🙂 4,500 clicks/month is a great number! Nice work! 🙂 I derive most of my EPN earnings from one site that’s an authority site around a particular topic. The topic is not necessarily high ticket, probably more middle of the road. From time to time, I do reviews of both products and merchants I’ve personally interacted with on eBay. I feel like the overall connection I have with my readers is high and my readers follow my suggestions.
I have seen my EPN CPCs fluctuate like crazy over time, but they’ve been consistently high for the last six months or so. At the end of 2010, I got some really sweet bonuses two months in a row due to a special program they were running. There was a time in 2010 where I was barely making anything on EPN, but am now looking to flirt with $2,000 earnings in March. I believe the key factor is the quality of the clicks. More recently, I believe a lot of my clicks have been converting either into new eBay accounts and/or winning bids. As long as that continues, I believe eBay will over-reward me. That said, I feel they under-reward you when you’re having a not so good month (I have had some really low earning months in the past).
Hope this helps and stay tuned! I’m probably going to post about my March EPN success in early April.
All the best,
Ian
I’d like to share some of your findings with my visitors but I have some questions Ian, firstly with this post. You say that your earnings come from one authority type site that you started in 2007 but you also link to the earnings rock post that says you built 75 EPN sites that year. Are you saying that building a lot of sites is not the way to go?
Also, if you don’t mind, how much do those 75 sites earn because in that post you sounded like they were doing well, at least at the time.
Some of my readers are new to EPN and looking for suggestions on what type of site do well with EPN, most of them didn’t start a single big site 6 years ago, unfortunately. Some can’t build a major authority site either but they can cover a small niche quite well, should they cover a few of them?
Thanks for sharing your results btw, many people struggle not because they don’t know how to build but because they don’t know what works and so they don’t know what to build.
Nick,
You bring up some very good questions here and I very much appreciate it. 🙂 The response to your specific questions is a long one. My strategy has changed dramatically over the years (not only because of the market but also because of my own goals/aspirations). The best way to respond to your questions is going to be a brand new post. Let me get this in my queue and please stay tuned. Thanks again!
All the best,
Ian
I just got accepted into EPN. I was looking for some information on how to best utilize it, and found quite a few articles on your site to be very helpful…thank you very much for the information.