Why Ebay Affiliate Marketing Sucks...
Ok Ebay Affiliate Marketing, you are calling the shots.
I have been an active affiliate marketer of ebay partner network for the best part of 5 years. What started off as a hobby turned into a real passive income stream with substantial profits over 5 years. I have about 15 EBAY related website and I LOVE my passive income streams. At first it was slow going but as my skills improved I started making some good commissions topping 400 GBP in one month recently. I honed my skills to drive serious traffic to EBAY and yet my passive income became less and less the more traffic I sent to them. I'm not only talking about driving them traffic but that traffic also turning into real bids and winning bids for that matter.
I saw a few SEO associates climbing off the EBAY gravy train one by one. Most warned me " EBAY IS A WAST OF TIME", " EBAY IS ERRATIC AT BEST", BE CAREFUL IF EBAY PULLS THE PLUG ON YOU!", EBAY DOESN'T RESPOND TO COMPLAINTS", EBAY DOESN'T CARE ABOUT IT'S AFFILIATES", EBAY IS A LAW ONTO IT'S OWN" and so the list goes on.
More traffic Less results... Spot the difference...
Yesterday I received this email from EBAY threatening that they are going to close my account.
"During a recent review, we noticed that you are placing your affiliate links on twitter. As of August 1, 2009, the eBay Partner Network no longer allows publisher to place links on third party sites. You must own your own domain, and since you do not own twitter.com, you are violating our terms of service. We are sending you this message as a warning. Please remove all of your links from twitter.com or you risk the expiry of your account."
Now why in the name of sanity should it be illegal in the eyes of EBAY to prevent me from placing my EBAY affiliate links on open forums like TWITTER and FACEBOOK and many others. They even tell me that if I want to place links on TWITTER, that I should "own" TWITTER". What a load of crap... OK EBAY, go ahead and do what you want. I have now killed all my TWITTER accounts and references on Google Feedburner so you won't be receiving anymore traffic and I won't be making anymore deals and don't come with your sob-story sorry-arse excuse that EBAY is all about "quality traffic". I happen to know and see why people click on your links but all that is gone now. I'm a small fish so you won't bat an eyelid once I'm finally gone but rest assured that I will warn anyone with ears and two brain cells not to waste their time on EBAY i.e. "Why you should not waste your time on EBAY Affiliate Marketing" and "Alternatives to EBAY" etc.
