From Aug 1 you will no longer be able to put eBay auctions on free blogs such as Blogger, on Hubpages, Squiddo, Infobarrel etc!
A related question was: “Can we use affiliate links on third party sites like Blogger, Twitter, Wordpress, Tumblr, Squidoo or article sites where we “own” the IP of the content but not the actual site?”
For blogging platforms like Wordpress, we’re requiring that publishers use the download-and-install versions of the products so that they have full ownership of their sites. For other promotional methods such as Twitter, etc, it is ok for your links to lead to your own websites that have links to eBay, but not to lead to eBay directly.
So eBay changes things yet again and pisses off even more affiliates! You will know that I no longer can use eBay as I was dumped last year for spurious reasons. eBay seems to be using whatever means they can to cut down the number of affiliates, perhaps in an effort to keep more money themselves? Maybe they think they are so well known that they don’t need anyone else to drive traffic to them but blocking free traffic seems a bit of a strange business plan to me.
if you have a load of blogger blogs or other free blogs that are getting decent traffic and you have been doing well with eBay try using adsense instead. I have found it to be successful, although not quite as profitable as eBay. My top earners for adsense are sites that still have eBay auctions on them as they won’t easily convert to affiliate sales. Sites selling used products for instance. eBay ads are good for bringing in long tail traffic and you can leave the ads there if you take out your affiliate ID.
If you are still using eBay on self hosted sites I suggest it may be time to diversify a bit. eBay is not a reliable source of income and who know what they will do next!
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