This has caused some big time ripples as it is the latest in a string of moves by eBay that increasingly makes their affiliate program more and more hostile towards its own affiliates.

Along this line, HQ announced their new eBay policy today for lensmasters.

In a nutshell, no more adding your personal ebay links to squidoo lenses.

What does this mean for your options? I see a few:

Use Squidoo’s ebay modules – Easy, fast, and they have proven to convert over time. However, Squidoo keeps half the income (which is pretty fair imho).

Stop using eBay – Over the past few months I’ve begun transferring a lot of my sites and content away from using eBay as a prime revenue generation source. For such a large company, their policies have been remarkably inconsistent and prone to change.  When compared with the other affiliate behemoth, Amazon, I’m constantly surprised at how well Amazon executes its program and eBay flubs theirs. If the products you are reviewing or reccomending on your lens can’t be found on Amazon, I would strongly encourage you to take a look at some of the other networks like Commission Junction, Pepperjam, Linkshare, and the like. Often you can find great programs that promote very cool specialty items and give you a better commission on top!

All in all, look at this change as an opportunity to diversify your income streams, not as a death knell on your online efforts.

What thoughts do you folks have?

Now, I’m going to use Pepperjam specifically, but a lot of these techniques can be used with any network. I could probably write an e-book on this or something but 1) I’ma nice pirate and 2) I don’t have the time,  so instead I’ll do a series of posts here on Captain Squid outlining how to build lenses that are high quality, useful, unique, rank well, and convert at much higher percentages than most affiliate ’sales pitch’ lenses do.

Step 1: Find an Affiliate Program on PepperJam

When you first log in, you will see a menu across the top, click on the menu item that says ‘Find Partners’

You are now at the list of all the available affiliates for PepperJam. Just so everyone can follow along, I’m going to pick a program that has ‘automatic’ acceptance on it meaning that approval or denial will be instant (and it’s usually approved).

I did a search for the affiliates in the ‘Art/Photo/Music’ category and immediately noticed the ‘Jimi Hendrix Clothing Store’. I like classic rock, so we’ll build this lens with that store in mind.

Click on ‘view terms’ to see what the payouts are like for a particular affiliate.

when you click ‘view terms’ a new window will pop open, showing you a bunch of information about the program:

I’ve highlighted a few key areas : The website for the program (make sure and check it out), the commissions (click ‘Sale’ to expand it and show all the terms), and the ‘Join Now’ Button.

It looks like our commissions start out at 8% and can go up to 10% with significant sales ($2500 a month) with a bunch of shirts in the $89 range, that works out to just about 1 sale a day, definitely doable.

Okay, go ahead and click ‘Join Now’ on your program and you should be ready to go!

Okay, now that we have our affiliate, tomorrow we will begin building our lens so stay tuned…

So many of you folks have signed up with Pepperjam and used your Awesome Lensmaster Profiles as your websites that Pepperjam Actually added Squidoo as a Promotional Method in their System!

I think that this level of responsiveness is pretty impressive in any company, and especially so here when a lot of affiliate networks have a reputation for catering to huge clients that drive tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue a month.

If you haven’t headed over to Pepperjam to sign up yet or if you were afraid that they weren’t ‘Squidoo Friendly’ you might want to rethink it before the $10 sign up bonus expires at the end of the month.

Oh, here’s a little teaser to show you guys How well Pepperjam is working for me:

If you aren’t a regular, make sure and snag my RSS feed, I’m planning on breaking out how to build a lens using PepperJam to make money in a series of posts in the next few weeks. Yep, it’s 100% free, as usual.

Hi Captain,

What exactly is “No-follow your affiliate links”? Can I do that with my Amazon links for instance? Thanks for your great posts. Really worth reading.

No-Follow Links:

Adding ‘no follow’ to a link effectively tells the search engine spiders to stay away from that link and don’t give any ‘credit’ to the destination of that link. Google has announced on separate occasions that their preference is to have links that could be considered paid endorsements as no-follow. With affiliate links it is painfully obvious that the links are an endorsement of some kind because they usually go to nonsense domains with lots of consonants strung together. There’s no since in giving that domain a bunch of link juice!

This is the main reason that the links in the ‘money making’ modules (ebay, amazon, cafepress, etc) are ‘nofollow’.

Does it really make a difference?

A few months ago, I replaced the vast majority of my affiliate links on lenses to include ‘nofollow’. Since then, I’ve noticed an increase in traffic. whether this has to do with tagging the links correctly or from other factors it’s difficult to say.

I’m pretty certain that at the very least it doesn’t HURT anything.

How to add Nofollow:

regular links will look something like this:

< a href=”http://squidtop.com”>Squidtop – Blogging for Lensmasters</a>

to add nofollow, simply add ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ after the quotes around the URL like this:

< a href=”http://squidtop.com” rel=”nofollow”>Squidtop – Blogging for Lensmasters</a>

Try it out and let me know if it helps your lenses!

This week Pepperjam announced that for July Only they are offering $10 to every new member that signs up under an existing member. (Disclaimer, there’s $7 in it for me too – yep, massive riches).

Anyway the deal works like this, you sign up for Pepperjam using the following Banner:

and once your account is activated, Pepperjam will drop $10 in your account, Presto!

A few things I’ve learned about PJN since the last review:

Their Reporting Rocks – Usually updating every 2 or 3 hours, it’s not instant, but it’s close enough as to not matter.

The interface warms the cockles of my heart – It’s fast, clean, and easy to find stuff.

They are generous about payout bumps and communicate well - Every time I’ve sent an e-mail asking questions or requesting information, the reply has been quick, courteous, personal, and informed. On every offer I’ve started earning significant commissions on, Pepperjam has been very willing to bump payouts proportionally.

I’ve broken 4 digits in commission with PJ the last several months and it just looks to keep increasing.

If you decide to give it a try and run into any problems or anything, give me a shout and I’ll help you out if I can.

So, go make your $10.

1) Ebay launched its own affiliate network to bring their affiliate program ‘in house’.

2) Many of the ebay affiliates have been complaining ever since then (April 1) that their conversion rate is lower. (Of course, I doubt that any affiliates that are making more money with EPN are talking much.. so it’s a one-sided conversation).

3) This weekend PepperJam announced that they are going to partner with eBay to help manage their affiliate program.

What this means:

The Pepperjam program has higher commisions which is exceptionally cool.  Unfortunately, I haven’t seen any mention of how or if the RSS or other API functionality of the listings will be able to be transferred over to the Pepperjam side or if that will remain in EPN’s court. I’m actually quite surprised that I haven’t seen this addressed anywhere as most people usually use ebay to promote specific items and there are currently only banners and text links with no deep links allowed.

Granted, it’s monday morning at 6am two days after the announcement, I might be getting ahead of myself a little bit here .

Pepperjam’s commissions on ebay fees starts at 52.5% of FVFs and $26.00 for new sign ups. I’ve also seen Kris Jones (the owner) mention in a few forums that if the volume you can drive is high enough you might even be able to squeeze just a bit more out of them (Think 5k a month plus at a bare minimum I would say)

The Verdict: I think this move is pretty painful for Commission Junction, a sign that eBay doesn’t know what it wants (what’s new?), and it really puts PepperJam in the driver seat on this deal.

Nice Job Kris, way to go on landing that whale.

If you want to take a look at the new program, head over to Pepperjam and sign up. If you have trouble getting accepted let me know and I’ll talk to my affiliate manager.

How does PepperJam stack up?

All of the graphics and interface on the entire program continually blow me away. It’s fast, easy to use, and well presented. The black background takes some people a while to get used to, but I actually enjoy a darker background color in many cases.

Grade: A

I notice that clicks and impressions are reported within 2-3 hours very consistently. This is faster than the likes of CJ, but not quite real time. However, I have not had any stats changed or revised either, meaning the reporting is pretty spot on. Real time reporting would be really cool, but this is hard to pull off with product based advertisers I think.

Grade: B+

Pepperjam opened with something around 100 offers (someone correct me if I’m way off here) and I think they’ve added something like 150 new advertisers since they opened. While not adding advertisers at a rate of 3-5 a day like CJ is, Pepperjam is coming close. There is a very high percentage of exclusive offers, with everything from the Star Wars store to Jelly Belly. They’ve got some very niche products which are cool.

One big drawback is that they have a ton of product based affiliates yet their product feeds leave a little to be desired (get to that in a second). Some affiliates do allow deep linking (where you link to any page on the advertiser’s site) which allows for some cool ideas when building lenses to promote things…

Grade: B

I’d say less than 20% of the product based affiliates (those that payout as a % of sale) have product feeds on PepperJam. The feed can only be downloaded as a gigantic CSV file instead of by individual advertiser. Many of the product feeds have broken image links. This is probably the weakest part of Pepperjam’s platform and I know it’s something they are planning on improving. Right now, however, it’s hard to use because the data is spotty at best and from limited affiliates.

Grade:C

PepperJam has a little talk bubble next to each advertiser that lights up whenever the affiliate manager for that program is online. I’ve used this several times to ask questions about payouts, ideas, and lots of other things. It’s absolutely fantastic! I’ve also had nearly all of my direct e-mails returned promptly with personal responses from people that can actually answer my question. This actually let me to come back to PepperJam a bit after not doing much with it the first month.

Grade: A

Every program I’ve seen migrate over from Commission Junction to PepperJam has increased their payout by close to 50% or more. In general, their payouts are pretty high, and if you talk to the affiliate managers and tell them about your marketing plans for the advertiser, you may be able to get a little bump. They’ve been very generous so far with increasing payouts on may account for advertisers I do well with.

I haven’t received a bank transfer from PepperJam yet so I can’t comment on that area of the payout cycle.

Grade: A-

Depending on a few different things, PepperJam could very well evolve to be a bigger part of my affiliate program strategy than Commission Junction currently is. If you haven’t signed up for them yet, they are worth giving a try.

Here is my super sneaky PepperJam sign-up link.

If you have already signed up, what have your experiences been so far? I’m interested to hear from others who have been using PepperJam the last few months.