Antigua Web Solutions Blog

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!

It’s now been 4 months since I received the ‘banned for being associated with a banned account’ email and I have never received any reply to my emails. Steve from eBay says “ However, if you feel your account has been incorrectly terminated, you may contact us and we will work with you to resolve the issue. If you would like to discuss your specific account status, please contact us via our help section”. Despite this no one seems to have received any reply to their emails, not even a form letter.

I had a look at the eBay forum (I’m not going to give them a link here just google eBay partner network forum!) and there’s been another round of bannings from around the 17th of April. I find it extremely suspicious that they ban people, close their accounts and keep their money JUST before payday! Many, many people are saying they are completely innocent of any wrong doing and I believe them as I know I am too.

There has been some speculation on the forum that eBay is getting rid of affiliates who use BANS. I have no idea if this is true but the way eBay is treating affiliates is shameful and the frustrating part is that we can’t do anything about it. Months and months of work by people is just tossed aside and they keep our hard earned money as well.

I have moved on and I advise anyone who received this email not to wait for eBay to reinstate them. It isn’t going to happen! There are other ways to make money with your websites. I have added adsense to my sites. I tried just using affiliate ads via popshops but found the convertion rate was low so I also have adsense on them I know the popular thinking is not to have 2 types of ads on a site but I found that having affiliate ads doesn’t affect the adsense click through rate for adsense and vice versa.

So if you are banned it isn’t the end of your IM carrer. It’s going to take more work but you can move on and use all the other methods of making money online that are available to you. If you haven’t already found Griz’s Make Money With Adsense have a look at it and his other sites. You’ll learn all you need to know there!