David Pitlyuk

There is a story going around about a guy under the alias of dooma350 at M3Post.com. He had given a deposit at his local BMW dealership (Husker BMW) for the sought after new 2008 M3, but decided to look and see what offerings he could find on eBay. He found one advertised as “LOWEST PRICE ON EBAY” that had a starting price of $60,000 with no reserve. The buy it now price was $66,926. Considering dealerships are marking these up as high as $100,000, they were probably under the impression that the eBay listing would generate a little hype and they wouldn’t have to be worried about the price staying at $60,000…which is exactly what happened when dooma350 won the auction.

15 minutes after winning the auction, he received a call from the BMW dealership in Nebraska saying that they would not honor the price due to it was a “mistake”. This was definitely a cop out, as the auction’s buy it now price was changed twice throughout the auction. This tells us that the auction was being watched by the dealership, and a “mistake” is pretty unlikely.

The entire story can be read and followed over at the original post on M3Post.com. Many of the forum members are very helpful, offering advices, contacting media outlets, and more. One member by the alias of “Xcellere” even called the dealership and threatened legal action. Another member who is a licensed attorney in Texas that offered some legal advice…and was even willing to take action at no cost had he been licensed in Nebraska.

All sorts of advice was given in terms of whom to contact, from BMW North America to eBay to the BBB to local media outlets. I think between this story starting to spread (It was just covered on Autoblog), dooma350 will get his price…and maybe even more. This is horrible PR on the dealerships part, as well as BMW. The dealership has already offered the car up for $3,000 lower than the MSRP price, but at this point, it’s not enough. The dealership may have lost a few thousand dollars by doing the right thing, but there is a great potential of losing a lot more than that by not.

Do you think that the dealership should have done the right thing? If they were really this hard pressed about not giving the $60,000 price, they should have either set a reserve on the auction, set the starting price higher, or worse…cancel the auction before it ended. They could have even tried to offer something up when they first said the auction was a “mistake”, instead of just saying it and ending it like that.

Let’s hope that dooma350 gets his M3 at the price he deserves it for. For now you can Digg the original Autoblog article here so that the story can get spread around even more.

I’ve recently been doing a lot of stuff to try and make money using the eBay affiliate program through Commission Junction. While I’m glad I’m really just in the beginning of using the program, it’s still going to be a huge pain. Since eBay is moving off of CJ, all of the affiliate links need to be updated. Imagine those with thousands of blog posts…starting May 1st, 2008, those old links won’t make money anymore unless they are updated.

There will be a couple of big benefits from all this though:

• Easy global registration to multiple countries simultaneously
• New, targeted banners and rich media creatives
• New landing page optimization and geo-targeting capabilities
• More detailed reporting capabilities for eBay’s programs
• eBay will be offering a 5% bonus for all traffic (through the new network) in April. For those that can migrate quickly, they will see the benefits

The last three could potentially be really good if eBay does it right. I’m always up for new, targeted banners if it can be tied into content better and can be more effective. I’m interested in seeing what they mean by new landing page optimization. Geo-targeting capabilities may be something really big that I’ll be able to use for an upcoming project I’m working on. One of the biggest things is more detailed reporting. I’ve always said that the reporting was too limited by Commission Junction, and hopefully eBay can make this right. Reporting can do a ton for a publisher to better optimize how they promote the affiliate network, which makes more money for eBay and the publisher.

Overall it seems like it will be a good thing, but a huge pain in the ass. If there is any way they can make old CJ links still work, they should do that. I don’t see how that wouldn’t be possible since the old links use the rover.ebay.com domain…it’s not like it’s a commission junction domain, it’s on their own domain! Just make the new ones a different non-rover.ebay.com and if there are some sort of less reporting or features from the old links, they’ll be able to separate them.

My other concern is auditing. Currently, Commission Junction is the middle-man…the third party to verify reporting and data is correct. I hope there is something in place to ensure everything is accurate.

You’ll be able to start migrating April 1st, 2008, and should be done by May 1st, 2008. Here’s the full e-mail I got:

Dear David Pitlyuk:

We are excited to announce eBay’s new global affiliate platform: the eBay Partner Network.

The new platform will go live on April 1st, 2008 PST, at which point eBay will no longer be running its affiliate program through Commission Junction. Beginning April 1st, affiliates should register with eBay Partner Network and migrate their links from CJ to the new platform.

While CJ and ValueClick have been valuable partners to eBay throughout the years, we’ve decided to give our affiliate community a customized experience for eBay affiliates.

All the great tools and benefits of working with the eBay program will remain the same – access to the Editor Kit and affiliate API, the flexible destination tool, the great payout structure. In addition, the eBay partner network will provide several new features:

• Easy global registration to multiple countries simultaneously
• New, targeted banners and rich media creatives
• New landing page optimization and geo-targeting capabilities
• More detailed reporting capabilities for eBay’s programs

The eBay Partner Network and Commission Junction will run in parallel for one month through this process, so please plan to complete your migration by May 1st, 2008.

You can receive an additional 5% bonus for all traffic tracked through eBay Partner Network in April 2008 (bonus applicable to traffic sent to Half.com and US, UK, Australia, Canada, Italy, India and Spain eBay sites). The sooner you migrate, the more you’ll earn! Just:

• Register with eBay Partner Network on April 1, 2008
• Confirm your registration, and obtain your new identifiers
• Update your links with your new identifiers.
• Reminder: Please plan to complete migration by May 1, 2008.

You will receive more information and step by step directions for the transition on April 1st. A special help desk to answer your questions about migration will also be available starting April 1st. You can find more details, including a list of programs that will be affected, at http://affiliates.ebay.com.

Thanks for being a valued partner. We’re excited for a successful transition, and the opportunity to grow your business through even more innovations, information and communication moving forward!

Sincerely,
eBay’s Affiliates Managers

At the beginning of this month, my friend Derek Semmler made a post about a contest to win $106.34 by referring the most amount of people to his site by February 25th. The winner would be chosen by the most number of referrals shown in his Google Analytics account. As I was reading his post, I came across one line:

You’re free to use any means available to refer traffic to my site - as long as Google Analytics counts the visit I will consider it valid.

As I read this, the light bulb over my head went on. This was just asking for some sort of evil method of winning the contest. My plan was to use a 1 pixel by 1 pixel IFRAME on the footer of all the pages on my blog. For those that don’t know what an IFRAME is, it’s basically a website within a website. You can specify the size of an IFRAME, and then load another webpage into it…usually it’s another page on your own site. I decided to load Derek’s site.

I wasn’t sure if this would register as a referral on Google Analytics though, so I created a test page loading in my own site. I checked to see if it came in as a referral…it did. Score! So I added the below code to every page on this site:

<iframe src=”http://www.dereksemmler.com” height=”1″ width=”1″></iframe>

If you can see this little black dot below, this is what the iframe would look like that would load Derek’s site inside of it and generate a referral visitor.

After a couple of days running the code, I got an IM from Derek letting me know I was evil lol. He agreed that it was ok based on his terms, so I left the code on my site for a few weeks to ensure my win. I felt bad, so I made sure that I’d post about the contest, and I also made this little ad which you may have seen running on the sidebar:

Yesterday Derek made a post announcing that I was the winner, and then PayPal’d me $106.34. Definitely goes up there as one of the easiest $106.34 I’ve ever made

Thanks for being a good sport Derek! If you don’t already read his blog, make sure to give it a chance. It’s good enough to make it onto my RSS reader, and I’ve been a subscriber and a commenter for quite some time now.

I’ve always noticed that a large portion of my Google traffic comes from Google Images.  I’m sure that part of this is because I do generally post a good amount of pictures in some of my posts, and I am usually pretty good about naming the file and alt tags correctly from an SEO perspective.  What I want to know is how much of your search engine traffic is from Google Images?  Is it a lot compared to the rest of your traffic?

From December 1st-Today I’ve had over 4,800 referrals from the images.google.com domain and over 11,000 uniques since the start of this blog.  Let’s take a look at the charts since the blog inception:

We can see that it took quite a few months before Google starting to index anything in Google Images.  I literally went from 1 visitor on July 10th, to 30+ everyday since July 11th.  Now I’m averaging over 80 uniques a day in February.

How useful is this traffic though?  Based on the stats, not very (although every bit helps of course).  From Google Images the average person only see 1.24 pages, meaning 1 of every 4 people is looking at one other page (or 1 of every 100 people is looking at a ton of pages, however you want to look at it).  The average person only spends 24 seconds on my site.  More than likely they are doing what I do with Google Images…Search for the image, find it, click it, click to enlarge it…bypassing the site itself.  Rarely do I look at the site.

The majority of the traffic is looking at a lot of my off-topic type posts also, so it’s not bringing too many targeted readers.  Mainly a lot of car-related stuff.

Take a look at your analytics software and respond in the comments or make a post on your blog to let me know how its working out for you.  If anybody needs help being able to pull this info out of Google Analytics, just shoot me an e-mail or respond and maybe I can make a post about it if enough need help.

I just got an e-mail from Aaron Wall, author of SEO Book that I found interesting:

Over the course of the past couple years it became obvious to me that the perceived value of ebooks was dropping, the field of SEO was getting more complex, and many people who purchased my book wanted to be able to interact with me and ask me many questions. This caused me to need to change the SEO Book business model away from selling a downloadable ebook, and toward selling a web based information product backed by a community forum that helped turn it into a service more than a product.

I already have affiliate tracking in place for the new affiliate program. On February 20th at midnight I am going to shift the default affiliate traffic location to pointing at the new landing page instead of the old landing page, as we have no further plans to sell the SEO Book ebook.

For those that haven’t heard of SEO Book, I’d say the majority of people in the industry would consider it the bible when it comes to search engine optimization.  I’m personally still working my way through the book, trying to learn as much as I can about SEO…it’s an excellent resource.  I knew it was popular, so this e-mail surprised me to find how Aaron was changing the business model behind teaching his SEO expertise.

Aaron mentions that the perceived value of ebooks was dropping, and I could agree to that…but they still do sell.  For example, FreelanceSwitch’s “How To Be A Rockstar Freelancer” book did about $20,000 in sales in the first month.  “Getting Real” by 37Signals has sold over 30,000 copies, and I’m sure SEO Book has done a decent number as well.

So do you think this is a sign of things to come for eBooks?  Are authors going to have a lot more trouble selling books, and having to figure out different alternatives to make money?  Or is this a one-off because of the fact that Aaron’s readers wanted to interact with him and other SEO-interested people?

I’ve recently been trying to learn as much as I can about affiliate marketing. Not only are a bunch of people I read on the internet making a ton of money doing it, it’s also helpful knowledge for my own pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns that promote my various businesses. As of right now, I’m like a sponge, just trying to read as much as I can about it since nobody I personally know can show me the ropes. One of the affiliate marketing blogs I read is The Affiliate Toolbox, which is done by Scott Weaver. In a recent post, he reviewed a book by the name of Affiliate Millions which he quotes:

“Much like the last book I reviewed, Moonlighting On The Internet, this book is all about Affiliate Marketing (as you might have guessed from the title). The major difference is that this book is completely geared toward the newbie. In fact, the authors divulge full knowledge about various campaigns“

I’d consider myself a semi-newbie when it comes to affiliate marketing! Therefore I decided to head to my local Borders and give the book a shot.

The book is a pretty easy read, I finished it in pretty much 2-3 days of reading…and I don’t really read books all that too often. So my impressions of it is that it is in fact geared very much towards newbies…those that don’t really know anything about affiliate marketing or pay-per-click. The book is semi-outdated, which is somewhat reasonable considering how quickly things change on the internet.

I found some of the personal stories intriguing, but I got the book to learn some new things….and I walked away not really feeling like I learned too much. I could see how it would be extremely useful for somebody that knows nothing, as it even goes through the steps of making accounts to advertise on the three big contextual networks (Google, Yahoo!, and MSN)…but as I mentioned, I only consider myself a semi-newb. The main thing that turned me off slightly was the author had done most of his PPC campaigns by making ads that go right to the company’s landing page…and not his own. From what I’ve been learning, you pretty much have to make your own landing pages.

Final Thoughts: While I didn’t feel like I learned too much, if you are just thinking about getting into PPC and affiliate marketing, but know nothing..consider this book. If you know some stuff, or consider yourself fairly internet savvy (Like I would hope most of my readers are ), I would just do research online and find the basic information out. There are plenty of blogs and forums that cover many of the basic topics for free. Note though, that the book was intriguing enough for me to read through the entire thing, and you always do learn a couple things here and there.

Many of us have ideas for starting a company up, but for those of you that haven’t done it yet…there are a lot of costs that you may not be thinking of.  A post over at DigitalMediaWire that was written by Glenn Kelman of Redfin and Guy Kawasaki covers just this topic.  There are two parts, the first covering all the numbers, and part two is the lessons you need to know.  The numbers are really interesting because it covers what they estimated the costs per employee were to launch Redfin, and then what it actually costs.

It turns out they actually spent less, especially on some of the bigger expenses such as accounting and legal.  If you are thinking about starting a company, or actually going through with it, make sure to give this article a read.

One of my best friends does a lot of business on eBay as he has some sort of a partnership with a family friend who happens to own a pawn shop.  When I started Carbon Fiber Gear, I knew that a lot of my affiliate sales through the site were going to be done through the eBay Affiliate Program.  For those not familiar with the program, it offers you 50% of eBay’s revenue on top of $25 per user registration.  It drops a cookie on a user that has clicked your affiliate link, which lasts 30 days.  This means if this person buys anything on eBay over the next 30 days, you will get paid out.  I never really understood the power of this until I found out that the majority of the people I was referring to eBay from Carbon Fiber Gear were actually buying totally different things.

This got me thinking about how I can try and monetize on this a little better.  The first thing I did was show Alex how to create an affiliate link with my ID and his tracking (so I knew it came from him).  I told him to try and use the affiliate links as much as possible, for example when somebody asks him a question about one of his auctions, he could respond to the question and somehow get the affiliate link in the response.  He doesn’t really get that many questions, so it’s pretty limited.  I needed to figure out a way to do better.

This is when I thought of an idea where he could do something like link his pictures from his auction to the same auction, but using the affiliate link.  More than likely a buyer would be clicking that picture, which would generate an affiliate sale for me.  On top of that, anybody else that clicked it and bought something else would do the same thing.  Plus, if any of them bought anything else over the course of the next 30 days, I would make money on that too.  Genius!  This was going to make some decent money I thought!

Before acting on this great plan, I decided to check the affiliate programs terms & conditions just to make sure there was nothing in there about this.  Was I glad I looked:

(5) Affiliate Links. You may use affiliate links to promote your own eBay listings or eBay Store, those of your Agents or those of anyone else with whom you are affiliated. eBay may terminate this provision at any time with 7 days notice. You may not include affiliate links on any ebay.com page or eBay-owned page, such as an eBay listing or eBay Store.

Unfortunately eBay does not allow this, and immediately stopped my evil plan dead in its tracks.  I’m glad I looked, I could have potentially gotten kicked out of the program and forfeited any future chance to make real money with it.  This is also a good lesson learned, always make sure and read contracts and terms & conditions docs…especially when you are doing something that you think might violate them.

When I first started to generate some commissions from the eBay affiliate program, I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how to find out what somebody purchased in order to make me the commission. This data would be important as I could use it to better understand what I should promote. I went through the CJ help, then through eBay affiliate help…nothing. You’d think this would be a common question. FINALLY I found a way. I knew there was a way! I figured I’d document it here to hopefully help you others out so you didn’t have to go through what I did.

1. First step is to login to your account manager on CJ.
2. Click the run reports tabs
3. You should automatically be in the “Transaction Report” page. Click the blue link that says “Report Options”
4. Change the report type to commission detail, and the advertiser to eBay
5. Select the date(s) you want to run the report, and then run the report
6. You’ll see a page with all of your commissions. None of this data shows you what items were purchased…this area was the main reason I couldn’t figure out what was going on. At the bottom of the data, you’ll see something to download the report. Download the CSV, and save it to your desktop.
7. Open the txt file in Excel and choose the options for a comma delimited file..this will break up the data into separate columns.
8. In column P (order_id), you’ll see something like this:

15090839;350009584948;75545;20080101;20080103;1;29.72;000US;10504852553

Here’s what these numbers mean between each semi-colon:

eBay User ID; eBay Item ID; Leaf Category ID; Click Date; Bid Date; Quantity Sold; Total GMV; 000US (or 000EX); Record ID

Aha! The second group of numbers is the eBay Item ID! Simply paste that number into the search box on eBay and there is your winning item.

Alternatively, Brandon Hopkins informed me about a neat little tool that automates this for you. The CJ report analyzer for eBay sales allows you to simply upload your CSV file, and they will output everything you need. Note that the way they make money is by revamping the links in the report they output with their own affiliate ID. That’s the cost of providing a free tool

A friend of mine is looking to hire a couple writers at $40 per post (about 1 per week). His new site that he just launched is called Most Listed:

A lot of the Internet is for sale, from domains, templates, and articles to complete websites. We aggregate the for sale listings from the popular listing locations for your convenience, and select a few listings we think deserve a little closer inspection.

He’s looking for good writers that can write about business type stuff like how to value a website, places to buy/sell websites and domains, etc. If you are in the field, or you think you can write good content about the field, get in touch with me and I’ll put you in touch with him. It’d be a cool way to make an extra $160/month with an opportunity to do more. It also gets your name out there. I think this blog has potential to grow pretty rapidly, get in early.