Is EPN Still Worth Your Time?

Every day I see more and more posts, tweets, etc. about how being an ePN affiliate is not worth the time to earn a substantial income. People, this is absolutely NOT true! Yes, there are more profitable programs out there, like Amazon, there is still room for promoting ePN on your site.

What is true is that the program is not what it used to be. Gone are the days of earning $25 per new user and earning $10, $20, $50 or $100 plus in commissions on items. Just like everyone else, I truly miss the old program.

I know many of you are already asking this question - If there are more profitable programs, why would I want to include eBay? Especially with their new affiliate model?

And I will fire back with a question of my own - How many of you have made for Adsense sites?

Because honestly, when we get right down to it, that is pretty much what the eBay affiliate model has become. The only difference is that our visitor has to take action and buy what we are recommending. If we have done our job in pre-selling the item or attracting the customer who is ready to buy, then this really is not an issue.

Am I saying go out and build a site strictly for eBay? No, not unless eBay is pretty much the only place buyers can purchase the products. What I am saying is, don't completely set it to the side and potentially leave money on the table. You can still see some good success with the program if you place the products on your pages built to attract those who are ready to buy. I can't stress this enough, if you do it right, ebay will pay you on average anywhere from $.14-$.64 per click and some days I have hit as high as over $1.00 or more.

Here is what I am doing to see those numbers:
I now only build my sites using WordPress. The reason is ease of use and flexibility. I run them all as blogs and not just product sites. I use phpBay and phpZon to post products. I only list products on the pages or posts where I have targeted the buyer who is ready to make a purchase. Products do not appear in any other content, but if I reference a product in one of my articles then I usually make a link to the product page for internal linking purposes. When I do list products, I list both Amazon and eBay on the same page - and no more than 3 or 4 items from each. This gives the visitor a comparison and then they make the decision on where to go.

In a nutshell, that's it. The real key to it is only putting the products on the posts/pages where your visitor is likely to have their credit card in hand. These are the pages/posts that convert and ultimately give eBay what they want - in their terms "engaging the visitor" or "visitor value".

I will also say this, there is nothing wrong with adding products from Amazon or another program in your other posts/pages or articles. Since you're not getting paid per click, it just makes sense to do so if there is even a remote possibility of a sale. But when it comes to ePN, only put it on your highly targeted pages/posts. This helps your conversions and in turn, increases the amount you are paid per click.

Sure, it might be possible to earn a little more from Amazon, but if your product is cheaper on eBay, where are your visitors going to go? Let me give you a quick true story before I close. I have a site that I've had since the first days of BANS. It's went through all of the growing pains and is one of the ones that has been de-indexed by Google. It was a great earner (still is) and has always gotten a ton of traffic from Yahoo and MSN, which is why I kept it. Several months back I reworked it into a blog and did just what I described above. The site averages around 110 clicks per day. EPC for this campaign is $.24. I don't know about you, but I will not turn away an extra $26.40 per day. And this with traffic from Yahoo and MSN only. Just think what the possibilities could be if it were still in Google. Of course that figure is no where close to what the site used to earn, but it's still earning something and I'll take it.

All I am saying is don't throw it out the window just because the way we earn money money has changed. While it is substantially less than what we earned before, it is still possible to earn quite a bit of extra cash by integrating it on your site.