Being fairly new to this make money online thing I still struggle with monetizing my sites.  I have been using eBay’s Partner Network to monetize with the phpBay plugin but not very efficiently.  My focus has been content and link building and these two things are going very well so far.  I can do effective keyword research, I can pick out good domain names, I can get a site up and running with outsourced content and I can drive traffic through search engine optimization.  So far I have set up around twenty sites with a good amount of content and they are getting a steady stream of traffic every day.

I was doing okay with ePN and thought that I would keep setting up sites and worry about the monetization stuff later.  Recently the eBay Partner Network did some major restructuring with how they pay out traffic to their site.  You can read about the changes here although if you are using ePN you are well aware of this.  This change in payment structure had a big impact on my ePN earnings as soon as it kicked in and it prompted me to dig into what was hurting my earnings.

Before I was not using different campaign ID’s to track what each of my sites was making daily.  I would just use the Tool ID features or track sales through my Transaction Downloads.  I knew this was not the best way to track my different sites’ performance after awhile but chalk it up to newb status, I just left things as is.  With the changes to ePN however it was time to get my hands dirty with creating different campaign ID’s for each site and tracking which sites were doing poorly with ePN and which sites would keep eBay ads.

Biggest Affiliate Month Yet

A few days after creating the new campaign ID’s and changing each of my sites phpBay settings I immediately spotted the problem.  It was a site I own that was getting the most traffic but had the lowest EPC!  That was the last thing I would have suspected.  I took action right away.  I did not remove very much of the phpBay ads, I just added Adsense at the top of each page using the All In One Adsense plugin and some sitewide Amazon ads.  I also signed up to be an affiliate with the actual product that site is promoting.

Within a few days the results were VERY positive.  I am not doing much with adsense, that’s just another monetization option that I hadn’t gotten around to yet.  So far I am very happy with adsense on that site.  It is making as much as eBay was before their changes.  And my eBay earnings have tripled!  I think because of the volume of visitors that site gets, there were many clicks going to the eBay listings that were useless to eBay.  Now the clicks on those eBay listings are from customers who are more interested in purchasing, not just from random visitors clicking around.

Amazon is doing very well for me on that site as well.  The only monetization strategy that is not working out on that site is the actual affiliate links to the official product page.  I think that is pretty wierd but whatever works.

Tracking Affiliate Earnings

The main thing to learn from this is to track your affiliate earnings!  If you get a good grasp of how your visitors react to content and ads you can fine tune that sites earnings potential.  Use channels for adsense ads.  Use different campaign ID’s for each of your sites that promote eBay listings.  If you are running multiple sites with different monetization strategies it is best to implement tracking methods from the go with each site.

I gotta say I love the changes ePN has made.  I have heard complaints from other affiliates but I really think there is a ton of room to make more money with the eBay Partner Network with these new changes.  Besides that, these changes have gotten me to focus on my monetizing a bit more.  I saw a post from Mark at the Niche Store Builder on ways to increase your ePN earnings and he seems to have had similar results by decreasing his ebay listings clicks.  This just goes to show that more clicks are not always better.