Day Trip Media: Updating eBay Powered Links And New Sports Sites

Tuesday, 8 April 2008

Updating eBay Powered Links And New Sports Sites

If you use the eBay affiliate programme as part of your affiliate marketing toolkit, you're no doubt currently busy changing over the links to update to the brand new eBay Partners Network (EPN). If you're not then you'd better get going, you have until the end of the month to switch your links otherwise your commissions will not be tracked and as a result, paid.

News came of the changeover at the beginning of March, with the EPN being available for sign-up from the 1st of April. Basically everyone has a month to get their links changed over from the Commission Junction format to the new EPN format. I've basically got two types of site I need to be changing. The one lot are general Javascript links set up with the Editors Kit at eBay, the other are mini theme sites put together using the amazing Build A Niche Store (BANS) software. All in all, it's a lot of work for me to get done.

I'm going to have to leave some of the older sites be, as I just don't have time to go through and manually update all the on page Javascripts I created. As most of them don't convert to actual sales very often, I can get away with leaving them be if I need to. As for the BANS sites, only one of them was on the latest version of the software, which was easy to update. The rest however will need to be built again from the ground-up as they used the much simplified 1st version of the software. Still, redoing them will give me the chance to fix one or two things that need fixing.

Unfortunately, this clashes with my end of year accounts and my first VAT return, so I'll be putting these upgrades off as well. I've done one of my busiest sites, and will be working on one of the other busiest sites as well this month. I'm not sure I'll hit the deadline but hell, I'll give it a go.

Anyway, the newest version of the BANS software [v3.0 EPN] is pretty hot and easy to set up, so really it shouldn't be to much work to sort out, it's just sitting down and doing it. I've managed two new sites on the platform the last month, both of them related to recent local sporting events.

The first was Wales Grand Slam 2008 - taping in to the keywords that I believed many would be using to find products about the great Welsh Rugby win. It worked a treat and amazed me how quickly Google can pick up and index a site. I bought the domain on Sunday morning, had created the site by Monday morning, and then mid-morning on the Tuesday the site shot into Google's SERPs and was bringing in 300+ visitors a day for a couple of days.

Then it dropped out of the SERPs for a week or so, missing the peak of the traffic, but then it came back and is going strong. Obviously traffic has fallen given the event was a while back, but it should come back into effect come next Six Nations and hopefully any time Wales are on tour or playing.

I used the same principle (and templates) again Sunday night to do my second sporty BANS site. Sunday night I picked up the domain for my newest site, Cardiff City Final, the site was in place by Monday afternoon, and I'm currently sat here waiting for it to pop into the SERPs. There should be some good traffic off it the next 6 weeks. I was planning on getting the words FA Cup in the domain, but as it's a trademark, I held off doing that. I hope it can pop in as fast as the last one, but time will tell.

So, it's back to the paperwork once this post is done, it is the end of year after all. Then I've got a site to put together that I had the content written for a month ago, and have put off doing, then it's back to changing eBay links. that should keep me busy. My to do list is getting longer.

Posted by Dio Bach at 13:10

2 Comments:

beautyb said...: Is BANS something you would definitely recommend then as I have been trying to decide whether to buy it or not.; 09 April 2008 08:29
Dio Bach said...: It's a nice and easy way of setting up as site around a specific niche. If you can match it with a good URL that gets you lots of natural traffic it'll soon pay for itself. You pay once and can use the software on as many sites as you choose.

The nice thing is you can use other affiliate stuff alongside it, and make pages really easy. I can't get enough of it to be honest, and now I've got a nice easy template I can do all sorts of funky stuff like implement it with Blogger and the like. :); 09 April 2008 10:10