David Pitlyuk

I’m just going to post the press release for ease of use about this latest announcement…see some of my comments below:

Pepperjam proud to announce that their affiliate network has officially partnered with the eBay Partner Network to bring eBay’s links and graphics to Pepperjam’s affiliates!

Stay tuned for access to eBay’s large selection of advanced links, widgets, and more. If you have any specific requests for the eBay Affiliate Program on Pepperjam Network please contact ebay@pepperjammanagement.com.

HIGHLIGHTS: Make up to 75% of all the transactions and up to an additional $35 for every new active user you send to eBay. Pepperjam has in place a dedicated eBay affiliate management team to work with you in real-time to maximize your eBay revenue. Learn more about our aggressive commission structure by logging-in to your Pepperjam Network account.

About the eBay Partner Network and Pepperjam Partnership:

It will come as no surprise that eBay is The World’s Online Marketplace®, enabling trade on a local, national and international basis. With a diverse and passionate community of individuals and small businesses, eBay offers an online platform where millions of items are traded each day. Founded in 1995, eBay Inc. connects hundreds of millions of people around the world every day, empowering them to explore new opportunities and innovate together. eBay Inc. does this by providing the Internet platforms of choice for global commerce, payments and communications. Since its inception, eBay Inc. has expanded to include some of the strongest brands in the world, including eBay, PayPal, Skype, Shopping.com, and others.

Coupling access to the unparalleled scope of eBay’s global marketplace with industry-leading tools and a dedicated support staff, the eBay Affiliate Program on Pepperjam Network offers success to all types of publishers, from the casual blogger to the experienced Internet entrepreneur. The eBay Partner Network is one of the most profitable affiliate programs in existence today, paying affiliates up to $35 per active new user, and 75% of its revenue on hundreds of categories of products.

I’ll have more information in the future, but I’m very curious about this. For one, I hope it fixes some of the problems I’ve been having with revenue. I don’t really understand the reasoning behind this as I thought eBay moved off of Commission Junction to their in-house network…not just to allow another third party network. There are two major benefit potentials that I see:

1. Pepperjam will have a dedicated ebay contact that affiliates can go to. Since eBay has been extremely uncommunicative to its affiliates, this could have some real potential.
2. Pepperjam was able to increase the minimum revenue by a few % points and $1 on new sign ups from eBay’s own program.

I’m an affiliate through Pepperjam Network, but I haven’t really used it yet. I’ve heard great things about them, so we’ll see how things go. The only problem now is that affiliate links will have to be re-coded again, and we’ll have to wait for BANS to update their code to allow the Pepperjam codes to be integrated.

While the title of this post may seem like this would be some sort of paid review, I am actually writing about a company from personal experience. I love to speak out about companies that I have good experiences with, because I want others to do the same.

Many of us are business owners, or people that are thinking about starting a business. Many times cash is a hurdle, and many times getting somewhere between $10,000-$100,000 is enough to overcome that hurdle. Or say you want to buy a car, dealing with your bank or a company like Capital One Auto Finance can be a huge hassle, especially if you’re not buying from a dealership, as there is a lot of back and forth.

When I was buying my Dodge Viper, I was also selling my Corvette at the same time. Since I wanted to pay cash for the Viper, I also wanted to make sure I had a safety net of money in case it would take me longer than I thought with my Corvette. I started to look for a loan option with a low APR, and came across a company by the name of First Again. The concept behind this loan company is awesome, and here’s why:

• You can only get approved for a loan if you have excellent credit
• Since they only accept people with excellent credit, it enables you to get way lower rates. I got at least 3% lower than what I could find for a used car from an actual person.
• It doesn’t matter what you use the loan for. You can use it to finance your business, buy a car, pay your credit card bills, do home improvements, etc. They call it an AnythingBill.
• Your loan comes in the form of cash. You don’t have to get a check to write out to a particular person or play any sort of waiting games.
• If you apply for a loan, and get approved, they transfer money to you right away. I literally applied for a $10,000 loan, got approved, and the next day I had $10,000 extra in my bank account. This was a huge selling point for me.
• There are no fees for paying the loan off early. I ended up selling my Corvette two weeks after getting the loan…I simply paid off the total loan right away, ended up paying that first months interest, and that was that. It was quite cheap for the peace of mind that I took the loan out for.

This was by far the best loan experience I’ve ever had, and I can easily personally recommend First Again for your next loan.

If you have any other companies that you recommend, post a comment and let me know (let me know why as well)…or if you’ve used First Again, let me know your thoughts.

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.

Last month I launched my first true affiliate marketing project, Carbon Fiber Gear. Over that past month I’ve generated 26 sales from eBay and 1 sale from Amazon, which has made me about $50.

In the back of my head I was pretty sure that the majority of sales were going to be for carbon fiber wallets (which I have been promoting pretty pro actively) or something else carbon fiber…but I was very wrong. Of the 26 eBay sales, here’s what was purchased:

• 8 carbon fiber wallets
• 8 coins (same user)
• 1 camera flash kit
• 1 dell laptop battery
• 1 electric guitar
• 1 greddy side-mount intercooler
• 1 harry potter action figure
• 1 motorola jesus faceplate
• 1 mustang wheel adapter plate
• 1 planet earth dvd
• 1 motorola portugal flag faceplate
• 1 turbo charger warning sticker

As you can see here the majority of my commissions have actually come from stuff that has nothing to do with carbon fiber…I’m just the gateway for the user to get to eBay.  On top of that, it’s interesting to look at the breakdown of the amount of time it took for the user to buy something from the day they clicked the affiliate link:

• 17/26 (65%) purchased the same day
• 2/26 (7%) purchased after 1 day
• 3/26 (11%) purchased after 2 days
• 1/26 (4%) purchased after 4 days
• 1/26 (4%) purchased after 5 days
• 2/26 (7%) purchased after 7 days

This is where we can really see the power of the cookie drop.  35% of the purchases weren’t made on the same day, but because a cookie was dropped I still generated revenue from that user.  I’ll definitely be watching similar stats to this over time (hopefully with a lot more data to work with), so we’ll see if the numbers stay about the same.

Last week I made a post about a carbon fiber wallet that I really liked. I posted about it on a couple car forums I was a part of because it’s something I knew guys from there would be interested in as well. The posts received a good amount of comments, and was even re-posted on some other forums. The cool thing for me was that I had actually used an affiliate link to eBay, which ended up getting a couple hundred clicks and converted into 3 sales that made me a few dollars.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with eBay’s affiliate program, you make a percentage of eBay’s revenue from any sales, as well as $25-$50 if the user has to actually sign up for eBay.

I know that carbon fiber car parts are quite popular, and I’m sure there is a ton of competition in that market. The wallet got me thinking about any sites out there that specialize in non-car part carbon fiber products…such as gifts, accessories, novelty items, etc. I started my search, and I could not find anything out there.

*BING*, that’s when the light bulb turned on in my head. This was a great niche to get into, carbon fiber is popular, it’s not that cheap, and nobody is really in the market. So I started thinking about how I can try and monetize on this, and I thought of a few ways:

Build An eCommerce Store

I could try and go out there and find a variety of carbon fiber products, build an inventory and/or a list of drop shippers/suppliers and open a store. This is potentially a great idea, but it will take a good bit of money and time to get everything setup. At the same time, it’s probably also the most potentially profitable option.

Create A Store, But With Virtual Products And No Inventory

As an alternative to the above option, I was thinking about creating a store with products in it, but when you click “Buy Now” it actually takes you to a product page on something like Amazon via affiliate link.

This isn’t bad, I would basically find as many products a I can find, and really work on promoting the site to generate conversions.

Blog It

The last option I was thinking about was doing a blog about featuring cool carbon fiber products. Obviously each post can have affiliate links in it to generate conversions. The benefit to this option is that I can really optimize for SEO to generate as much organic traffic as possible. Carbon fiber has enough of a cool factor to potentially have some Digg worthy articles I can write to boost some major traffic through the site.

I decided to do the blogging route, with a potential in eCommerce. The blogging route allows me to build the site over time, and become the trusted source for carbon fiber products. As I analyze which posts are generating the most interest in a product, I can consider actually having an inventory of that product and selling it directly to increase the amount of money I can pull in. First things first though, build the site up, generate traffic, and make some money through affiliate links.

On that note, I’m pleased to announce Carbon Fiber Gear dot com!  I’ve already posted a few cool carbon fiber products on there, so feel free to check it out, post some comments, and help get things going :)  I’ll make a post later this week about the process behind actually getting the site setup and launched so quickly, so look for that.  This is really my first opportunity to do any sort of affiliate marketing, so I expect this to be quite a learning experience.   If you have any suggestions or feedback, please share!

There are a ton of people that are celebrity obsessed. That’s why sites like TMZ and PerezHilton are so popular. Celebrities are usually the forefront of the latest fashion trends, and companies can sometimes launch a product with huge success just by having celebrity backing. It’s the reason why gift bags at big events are worth tens of thousands of dollars…companies want to get their products in the hands of celebrities.

So where am I going with this? I’m sure you’ve seen the major trend lately with higher end purses. From Coach to Louis Vitton, women everywhere are eating these bags up…and it doesn’t come at a cheap price. These bags range from hundreds of dollars to thousands, and you see them everywhere (many times they are knockoffs).

With such a huge market of women wanting these high-end bags, what can you do to monetize on that? A couple of internet companies have thought of a great way, and it looks like they are raking in the big bucks for doing so. They are renting out these bags to women using various payment models. The concept is why buy a $2,000 bag just to have it sit in the closet a month later because you wanted to get the next best thing. You can simply rent the bag for a fraction of the cost, and when you’re done, return it for a new one. This way you don’t have a ton of bags taking up closet space and being a waste of money.

Two companies that were profiled in a USA Today article are doing this, Bag Borrow or Steal, and From Bags To Riches.

Bag Borrow or Steal

BBOS was launched in 2004, carrys over 3,000 bag styles, has 450,000 members, and rents out tens of thousands of bags per month. Their payment model is based on a membership fee which ranges from $5-$10/month. Members pay less for a bag, which ranges from $6/week-$275/month + $10 for insurance and $10 for shippping. I’m assuming the 450,000 members aren’t 100% active, but lets say half of them are, and those half are paying the bottom line $5/month membership fee. This means BBOS is pulling in $1,125,000/month or $13.5M/year in membership alone at a very conservative lowball estimate. If they are also renting “tens of thousands” of bags per month, lets estimate the minimum at 20,000 at a very conservative $40/month. That’s $800,000/month or $9.6M/year. Add $10 for insurance to get another $200k/month or $2.4M/year to the bottom line. Add the same number for shipping as well.

All of this put together equals out to a conservative estimate of gross sales being $2,325,000/month or $27.9M/year. I would say that’s not too shabby at all. I’m sure that they also reduce their expenses a ton by reselling the bags after they are completely outdated, or too worn out to keep renting.

One thing to keep in mind is that BBOS also rents out other high-end products such as jewelry, so this may skew the numbers somewhat (which is why I tried to do a conservative estimate).

From Bags To Riches

FBTR was launched in 2005, and is quite a bit smaller than BBOS. They use a different model where you just pay a monthly fee to rent a bag, from $35-$300/month. Standard shipping and insurance up to $100 is free. Of course, they recommend paying the $40 for full insurance coverage. They carry 350-500 different bag styles, and rent out “thousands” a month. Lets work the numbers. We’ll say 2,000 renters a month paying 25% of the $35-$300/month fee ($101), which equals out to $202,000/month or $2,424,000/year. We’ll say that 15% of the 2,000 convert for the insurance for $12,000/month or $144,000/year. Obviously much smaller then BBOS, but still a lot of money, and growing I’m sure.

I think these are great examples of ways to monetize on a trend.

Revver is a site like YouTube where you can upload and share videos online. The main difference is that they allow you to make money on the videos you upload based on views. They give video owners 40% of their ad revenue. You can even make 20% of the ad revenue by just sharing other people’s videos.

This provides a great opportunity for people to make money, on top of a great reason for people to promote and grow Revver.

To better help grow themselves, Revver created their own Wordpress plugin that essentially creates a personalized video sharing solution made easy. You simply install the plugin and you have some awesome features at your fingertips:

• You can post videos by simply putting in their video ID
• The entire Revver library is available through your admin. This means you can find and post videos with just a couple clicks
• You can see exactly how much you’ve made through the Wordpress admin
• When your readers create an account on your blog, one is automatically made through Revver, so they can post video responses directly through your blog
• All video responses moderation are done through your Wordpress admin

This is an awesome all-in-one solution for anybody that is especially interested in having a blog to create and share their own videos.  It makes things easy for site owners, and it makes it a no-brainer decision to go with Revver.  That is why this is an ingenious idea for Revver to promote growth of their network.  I would love to see YouTube/Google Videos do something like this, but without a revenue share platform, it may not be as popular.

There are two businesses up for sale that seem like pretty decent bargains, and you should consider buying them.

1) The first is WootAgent. I wrote about WootAgent back in March when I wrote about Woot! in general. WootAgent is a simple tool that will track Woots for you. This is especially useful in a WootOff when new products are offered once the previous has sold out. A little display pops up in your taskbar to show you what’s new. As of writing this, WootAgent has close to 16,000 users. They are selling everything around the $2,000 mark (Auctioning off starting at $2,000). You can find full details of what you get in this PDF file, and to make an offer e-mail wootagent@gmail.com. $2,000 seems inexpensive, and I don’t think it would be too hard to make your money back.

2) The second is the blog, NorthXEast. This is a great blog that gets a ton of traffic, has good content, a great design, and many backlinks. You can read more details about the sale, and why it’s being sold here. The site is up at the Sitepoint Marketplace and is at $5,700 at the time of writing, with 7 days left. I think this is a great purchase, and the site can also make its money back easily with the right owner.

I’ll be interested to see how much both of these end up getting sold for.

I’m looking for somebody to do some custom coding to integrate a couple basic features into Wordpress for my new design. After stumbling with a couple word-of-mouth options, I looked to Google. My obvious first search was “custom wordpress coding“. The only sponsored link here is from eLance! I can’t believe there is nobody else that has sponsored links on this keyword! I’d say that a plethora of new business can be made if it is wanted.

Update: Even “wordpress development” doesn’t have much in it.  Sounds like it’s time for a development/design firm to step in and own this niche.

Google announced a new program called the Google Business Referral Representative. Google wants to pay people out up to $10 for each local business that you refer. By referring a business, you will need to take a picture of the business location, get some basic information such as hours of operation, payments accepted, etc and tell them about Google Maps/Google AdWords.

Google will pay you $2 for each approved business you submit, and then $8 when the approved business verifies the information you provide. They will not reimburse you for any expenses (ex: gas, digital camera), so don’t try asking…but remember if it’s a business expense you can write it off on your taxes.

This seems pretty easy to do, and successfully, it can easily work out to a nice hourly rate for those that get in early. Imagine how much you can make in a city, where there is just business after business next to each other. Just a few blocks could turn into a couple hundred dollars/hour.

Garrett Rogers brought up a good point…with over 24 million businesses in the US, Google is prepared to pay somewhere between $48-$240 million dollars for the information people will be collecting for them. I think for the information and accuracy they would be getting, this is nothing, and will be worth so much more to them. It’s a genius idea.