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?

I was looking at one of my lenses this morning and saw the following:

Lens 1:

Lens 2:

These are pre-populated ads for eBay and Shopzilla items in the sidebar of the Squidoo Lenses.

Why I’m a Pissed off Pirate:

There has been no indication from Squid HQ that they have set these ads up to be attributable directly to the lensmaster who owns the page.

The items and the content in the ads are in direct competition with a TON (over 300) lenses of mine that use the ebay module.

How can I click fraud an ebay item, Seth?

I’m not pissed off that Squidoo wants to monetize their lenses more effectively, far from it. In fact, I would love to split the revenue from those eBay and Shopzilla ads with Squidoo. I already do just that on many, many lenses. I would NOT like to split revenue on those ads with everyone on the site.

Why not? Because it is EASY to set those ads up to be directly attributable to the lens owner and not to the general ‘pool’.

Anything else is simply lazy. And laziness is the first sign of the end of the road.

The way that the system is currently set up takes a huge swipe at the most effective lensmasters on Squidoo (especially ones that make exceptional product review lenses, etc.) by taking revenue that can be attributed directly to them and distributing it to the entire site.

That’s not capitalism, that’s socialistic crap of the highest order.

The pathetic part is, Squidoo won’t make significantly more money because they will just be cannibalizing their own ebay sales most of the time. The only people it hurts are those that do a good job reviewing/promoting/talking about products that are sold on ebay, shopzilla ,etc (so, Everything).

Hurt the best lensmasters to reward the monkey-heads that can put 3 modules on a page, leave the defaults, and hit publish.

Way to go.

I didn’t quite reach the $4,000 level this month but I was well over $3,000 which is a first for me.

Note: I count the paypal payment received during the month and affiliate commissions generated during that month (but usually paid out later) when I calculate my squidoo earnings for you guys. I realize this is terrible accounting and I do it different for my internal bookkeeping, but it allows me to give you guys a quick and dirty number of what I made.

My Top Programs in approximate order:

Pepperjam
eBay
Squidoo Revenue Share
CJ

The Payouts from Squidoo for June hit this week as well, and I got crushed. I was out of town getting married and didn’t have the time to pay to lenses for about the last half of the month. No big deal, it was well worth paying that price . I expect my numbers from adsense to jump back up next month.

I’ve updated the adsense payout tiers for squidoo as well … I really need to make a graph to show the payout changes over time… maybe I’ll do that today along with the other bajillion things that I have to do… hrmmm….

Anyway, I hope your month was excellent also and August is even better for you!

As my earnings numbers get bigger, I’m going to necessarily have to get slightly more vague as to the exact dollar amount I made but I can say that in June I was well into the $2,000s with my total earnings.

The programs I made the most money from (in order of earnings) are:

Pepperjam ($10 Sign up Bonus right now, btw)
Ebay
Squidoo
Commission Junction

The Squidoo earnings tiers went up this month after dropping slightly last month. This was the first month that the ‘Glam’ ads where supposed to be a part of the payout. Since each of the top 2 payout tiers did go up by 10% or more this month in what is usually a slower time of year, I’m not complaining.

All and all, it was definitely another successful month, now to try and beat it again this month!

How were your Squidoo earnings this month?

I finished up my final submission for the Squidoo – Ebay Challenge contest. For the last lens I wanted to show how you could create an informative, educational, or ‘how-to’ lens and still promote eBay products.

Once again cruising Ebay Pulse, I went to the board game section and found that Monopoly of course dominates. As a kid I loved Monopoly so it was an easy sell to make a Monopoly lens. But what topic to cover? It’s not exactly easy to find something controversial about Monopoly… or is there? I ended up building the final lens on Monopoly House Rules.

Everyone who has ever played Monopoly knows that the rules can seem to change from person to person depending on what their ‘House Rules’ are. How to use this?

Create a Plexo - I put together a plexo with a pile of famous ‘House Rules’ in it and encouraged people to vote on their favorite rules as well as add their own. This really encourages interaction on the lens and it really is a topic that everyone has an opinion on.

Feature Unique Items - Since this lens is probably going to be found by people who either are Monopoly die-hards or friends and family of Monopoly die-hards I try to include rare, unique, or vintage items. Displaying things that you don’t really see anywhere else and you wouldn’t think of searching for if you just visited eBay works very well.

So now that I have all the lenses for the challenge I shot off an e-mail to ebayaward- at -squidoo.com to let them know I’m all set!

What’s next? I’ll add a little more content here and there to some of the lenses before the final judging and I may tweak my tags a bit more, but the lenses are basically done and ready to go.

Unfortunately the niche got a little carried away with me and here I am… 36 hours and 7 lenses later.

Yep, 7.

Here’s How:

I noticed that Star Wars Legos are big on eBay… really big. It seems like darn near every auction has a ton of bids on it.  ‘ Sweet!’ I thought to myself, let me narrow this down and I’ll just do a lens on selling the little lego figures that were custom made for Star Wars. Oops.

It turns out that each movie has a HUGE list of custom made Lego Characters. So, I had to make a lens highlighting all the custom characters for each movie (6 lenses) as well as an over-arching lens about all the custom lego figures ever made for Star Wars.

How did I tie the 6 lenses on each individual movie into each other as well as a lens that acts as an ‘umbrella’ or guide to the topic?

1) Use the ‘Featured Lens’ Module to highlight ALL the lenses in the series on the lens. Find it by doing a search for ‘Featured’ in the Module Directory.  As each Featured Lens Module can only hold 5 lenses, I broke it up into Lego characters from Star Wars Episode 1-3 and Episode 4-6.

2) Plexify! - Create one link list plexo (voting list) on the main lens and then simply copy/publish it to all the other lenses in the series. It shows up on the bottom of a lens giving visitors some great suggestion of where they can look next for more information.

With 5 days to go, we now have 9 lenses done for the challenge!

Bonus Ideas: After the contest is over I’ll probably go back and link all of the sets listed in each ebay module to search pages for that set on eBay using my eBay Affiliate ID (Since Squidoo doesn’t provide this functionality).

Make sure and stop by the Challenge Lens and check out that plexo for  some of your favorites and vote for them.

How is your guys and gals Challenge building going?

For my second lens in the contest I chose to do a product based lens, specifically Rubik’s Cubes and Variants.

Good tips from this lens:

• Less can be more - Notice how I use fewer than the standard 3 listings in the ebay modules. This cuts down on choice but really cleans the look up. In situations like this where I’m featuring different kinds of similar products I’ve found I get better CTRs with this method.
• Use the Description Area of Ebay Modules – Since google will not index the actual auctions pulled in the module any information you can give to the spiders to tell them more about what’s going on helps a ton. Plus, it looks better.
• Picture Poll – I don’t use these very often but this was a perfect situation for it. Instead of a guestbook module I chose to use a poll with images. How did I do it? some simple HTML code with the <image> tag. I have a lens on HTML for Images, and I’m sure there’s a bunch more that describe the process even better (if you know one, post it in the comments!).
• Have fun – Since I am a huge nerd at heart, I love topics like this. It makes it easier to make the lens when you like the topic.
• Don’t be afraid of competition – I didn’t even look to see if there were other Rubik’s Cube lenses on squidoo when I made the lens. After I hit publish, it appears there are a few other lenses on it. That’s fine, more places for my link to hang out in discovery tools .  The more coverage there is on topics like Rubik’s cubes, the more that squidoo can build its reputation as a reliable place to go to find good information. And that’s better for everyone.

Comments or thoughts?

The Rubik’s Cube Lens can be found here.

If you are feeling really excitable you can even go to the main contest page and vote for the Captain in the plexo!

The first lens by the good ole Captain for the Ebay – Squidoo 10 Day Challenge is live and ready for action.

The first topic I chose to cover was eBay shipping and postage scales.  I chose it for several reasons:

1. I know the topic – I’ve got an eBay feedback rating in the 300 range and so I’ve shipped my fair share of items. Getting a shipping scale helped so much I can’t even begin to describe it. Therefore, it was an easy write.
2. It’s got a built in audience – People in the competition are ebay sellers. By providing valuable information to them it creates a win win for everyone.

Key design points:

1. Use keyword rich and descriptive module titles – no default module titles…ever. NO, not even the guestbook. And taking the time to fill out the subtitles can really help.
2. Relevant Products – Instead of a long list of products, use multiple product modules with only a few listings in each that are more targeted.
3. Images in text areas – on the text/write modules I used images I uploaded myself, NOT through the upload utility. this allows me to add in relevant ALT text in the HTML which helps with indexing and ranking.
4. Multiple Interactive Modules – The Guestbook and Poll get users used to clicking on your lens and makes them less afraid to check out a listing.
5. Thoughtful tagging - every tag used is used on at least 10 other lenses giving me maximum discovery tool exposure.

Please feel free to check out the eBay shipping tips lens and let me know what you think or ask any questions.

Are you not an eBay powerseller? Don’t be discouraged! If you’ve ever bought or sold anything on eBay you are eligible to attempt the Challenge. Not an eBay member yet? Sign Up, look around and start creating lenses based on your first eBay experiences!

This is a fantastic opportunity to show users how to build high quality lenses reasonably quickly. I’ve decided that I’m going to participate in the challenge as well. Not only am I going to make the 10 lenses, I’m going to break down each lens every day and talk about the little things I do to help lenses get more traffic and succeed.

Hopefully this way I can give you folks some good tips to use with other eBay lenses or with your own affiliate programs.

You aren’t going to want to miss a single one of these so make sure and subscribe to my RSS feed (e-mail is available as well) here or by clicking the huge orange button at the top of the blog.

The Captain has decided that he is going to make a special offer to everyone that participates and completes the 10 day challenge.

Are you working on becoming a Giant Squid? Would you like to? Want some help getting there?

1. Follow along in the ten day challenge by building your own lenses each day.
2. Leave a comment here to say you are following along (and on each post each day with a link to your new lens if you wish).
3. I will personally mentor each lensmaster who completes the 10 day challenge for the next ten days, helping them to build 10 more ultra high quality lenses (that can make piles of $$ as well!).

Prediction

I bet there are less than 10 people that will take me up on this offer and be able to complete the initial 10 ebay lenses. However, for those that make it and what to learn exactly what it is I do, I’ll show you some extra sneaky tricks I’ve used to go from $300 a month from Squidoo to $2,000 a month since January .

Oh yea, and each person that makes it through building all 20 lenses over the next 20 days, I will write a personal letter of recommendation on your behalf to HQ to get you Giant Squid status.

Who’s in?

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.