Along with WordPress 2.6 release today phpBay also released its 3.0.6 version.

It is a minor update and if you do not use the sidebar widget, you don’t need this update installed. This update comes with a sidebar widget that displays auction listings of your choice. This feature was requested many times by the users over at the forum. I’m glad Wade really listens to his customers.

A number of BANS forum members suggest that one should target niches that can be bought anywhere but at auction. But I disagree with this. The majority of my BANS sites sell things that can be purchased in stores, but I also have vintage auctions that sell only the things that can be bought through auctions.

What I learned from my EPN transaction stats is that people who buy stuff from auction sites regularly are likely to have eBay account already. I have more ACRUs generated from a kitchenware BANS site than anything else. That kitchenware I’m talking about averages $20 and it can be purchased at any local stores like Walmart and Target.

The advice given by the BANS members are good, but ignoring the other half of the market isn’t a good idea. I suggest that you build BANS sites for both, because both work well.

Just a quick thought.

EPN (eBay Partner Network) has been actively sending out account termination letters to the publishers. The termination looks something like this…

“After reviewing your account transactions, we determined that your account has been generating non-bona fide transactions related to new registered users. This violates our Code of Conduct and breaches the agreement between us. Your account will be terminated immediately and no pending commissions will be paid to you. You are not permitted to rejoin the eBay Partner Network.

Almost all of the publishers who was banned claim that they’ve done nothing wrong, but I found a pattern from their explanation. People who got banned from EPN usually purchased traffic from unknown sources. I don’t know if this triggered a flag, but I think this is why their account was banned; Not from purchasing the traffic, but from the quality of traffic generate from these traffic brokers.

Like I said, I don’t know the definite answer, but it seems like purchasing traffic to your EPN affiliate website is a big risk. Don’t do it. If you really want to do it, you should filter purchased traffic with a landing page. I think that should be safe.

Please share your thoughts. Why these people are getting banned from EPN without an apparent reason? I hope EPN gives out a warning first before closing an account.

Thanks to Google, you can now view the real search volumes for your keywords with Google’s Keyword Tool. This is a great news for both webmasters and affiliate marketers like us. I’m so excited with this improvement.

As you can see from the screen shot, you can view the real search volumes for June and average search volume for the last 12 month period. Don’t miss the “Highest Volume Occured In” column at the end. With these stats, you can adjust your seasonal ad campaigns easily.

I just wanted to give you a quick update first before I go play with it more. Have fun!

Visit : Google Keyword Tool

I use both BANS and phpBay for my niche affiliate websites for a quite a while and I’ve experienced ups and downs of both scripts. Both scripts are excellent money makers, no doubt on that. I know that because both made money for me.

Because BANS and phpBay basically work similar to each other, I want to spend some time over the next few weeks to compare the two eBay affiliate scripts. In this post, I want to compare how both scripts deal with international traffic to your site.

Both BANS and phpBay were designed to work with international eBay sites. But the main difference is that BANS doesn’t have the capability to provide the international auction listings by Geo-targeting automatically. What I mean by this is that if you want to display Canadian auctions listings for Canadian visitors, you will have to build a separate BANS website just for that traffic.

With phpBay, you can build one affiliate website and make it display the international auction listings to the particular international traffic. In other words, if someone from United Kingdom visits your phpBay website, it automatically matches the Geo-IP and displays the auctions listings from eBay.co.uk instead of eBay.com.

This is a true advantage of phpBay over BANS. This translates more revenue from your eBay affiliate website. But in order to use this feature, you have to go through some steps describe on Brewsterware’s “Optimising your ebay affiliate profits” post.

Now, it took me a while to make it work right because the instruction was somewhat vague. The download file provided on that post didn’t work for me. Instead, when I used the default geo.php that came with phpBay, it worked. So use the downloaded file for country.php but use geo.php that comes with phpBay. Also, they should be placed inside “includes” folder. I don’t think that was mentioned in the post. If you have problems getting it to work, just let me know. I will help you setup correctly.

BANS (Build a Niche Store) comes with a giant search box right below the header image. I never use the default search box on my BANS sites. As you can see from the screen shot below, most of the BANS owners use the default search box. This screen shot was taken from the customer stores listed at BANS website. All of the stores listed there are using the default search box except a few.

Don’t get me wrong. I know they don’t look that bad if you dress them up with some css coding. That’s not my point. I don’t like the default search box because it is distracting the visitors. Some BANS owners say that it is the most important section of the store, but I strongly disagree.

My goal is to have my visitors click on one of my eBay listings and have them search what they want at eBay. They have better search engine there.

Here is another reason why I don’t like the default search box. Unfortunately the search feature needs more work. If a product isn’t listed on your site, the search returns “no products in this store” message. What are the chances that visitors leave your site once they see this annoying message? I think very likely.

Instead, I always use a simple search box that does the same job and looks neat. Take a look at my search boxes.

I place my search box on the right side column like shown on the following screen shot.

Replacing the search box is very easy. Open header.php from a theme folder and remove the following code.

<?=$front->search();?>

Then replace it with..

<?=$front->searchbasic();?>

That’s it! Move the code to where you want the search box to be shown. I hope you found this tip useful because it does improve your earning.

Reading ePN (eBay Partner Network)’s transaction report through either a text or CSV file is not fun. Dave over at the Niche Builders Network released a free desktop software that actually makes it fun to read the data. The software is called “Desktop ePN Report Analyzer Basic” and it’s a free download. It’s simple and clean. I really like it.

One key benefit of using it is that it automatically transforms text URLs to clickable URLs. It saves time. I mean a lot. Another benefit is easy-sorting. Sorting can be done with CSV files just fine but I found it much easier to do the task with this software. One click sorting is what I want and the Desktop ePN Report Analyzer lets me do that.

Head over to the Niche Builders Network and download the ePN report reader.

Another update for BANS users. eBay implemented major changes to their product categories. This means that if you are using BANS with default categories, you might be in trouble. For those of you who manually add all products shouldn’t have any problem. Kelvin and Adam, the creators of BANS was quick to fix this problem. Great job. Here is a part of the email from Kelvin and Adam. Please head over to the forum or read your email for full instruction.

Thanks for your patience while we have been working through the
issues we had described in the forum.

The databases for v3.0, v2.0 and v1.3.1 have now been updated to
contain the latest eBay category structure.

For all “new builds” with v3.0 please log in to the appropriate
download area to download the latest complete version of v3.0:

Great news from EPN (eBay Partner Network). EPN is extending the migration deadline until May 31st, 2008. The original deadline was April 30th. About one third of affiliates haven’t switched-over to EPN from CJ yet. I think that was the main reason behind the extension. I really think it was a good move from EPN. It showed that they actually listen to affiliates.

Migration deadline extended until May 31st
April 25th, 2008

We wanted to thank all our affiliates for your effort in switching your links to the eBay Partner Network. We’re off to a great start and we are happy to report that in the three weeks since launch, more than two thirds of our affiliates’ traffic has already moved over to the new system.

Several of you have asked for a bit more time in migrating your links. Because we know there are some special circumstances that may require this, we have arranged to extend the migration deadline until May 31st. This will apply to Half.com and all eBay countries migrating EXCEPT Belgium, Netherlands, Hong Kong, and Singapore, which will still expire on April 30th).

Read the rest of the news

If you are a BANS (Build a Niche Store) user, make sure to update your BANS 3.0 script immediately. As you know, eBay affiliate program is leaving CJ and going inhouse as of April 1st, 2008. I think the major bugs have been addressed and it’s pretty safe to move-in now. I just finished updating all of my BANS sites. It was easy.

Adam and Kelvin did an excellent job providing the update files within the days of EPN launch. That’s why I have high hopes for BANS. It takes less than 5 minutes to update your BANS to BANS EPN.

One important thing. After updating your script, log-in to your admin panel and update the “campaign id” You can create a new campaign in EPN’s control panel. Copy the EPN campaign id and replace your old CJ id with it. That’s the only thing required to make BANS work with EPN.

Create a New Campaign

Find the Campaign ID

If you need help with updating your BANS sites, let me know. I will be able to help.