That was the subject headline of an email I received from Pepperjam Network which eBay uses as one of it’s affiliate networks. All my other eBay niche stores are with eBay’s in-house affiliate program known as ePN (eBay Partner Network). I only had one store with Pepperjam which I was checking out but I was still a bit shocked by the email:

from no-reply@pepperjamnetwork.com
reply-to no-reply@pepperjamnetwork.com
to Removed
date Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 4:17 PM
subject Affiliate Relationship Revoked

Dear Alan Petersen,

You have been terminated from the eBay affiliate program. Please remove your links, as you will no longer be eligible to receive a payout for leads or sales generated. This decision was made based on a variety of reasons, and we wish you luck in your future affiliate marketing endeavors.

Thank you.

Affiliate Team

PJN never told me of any issues and they sent the above notice from a “no-reply” email account. Gotta love this level of service.

The email is so ambiguous that I don’t know what I did wrong. As I wrote above, I only have one eBay store with Pepperjam. All my other stores are with ePN. I just used this one site to check out Pepperjam. Since I didn’t feel they offered anything above and beyond ePN I didn’t use PJN for other stores. So that’s my only PJN eBay store so no big loss on my end.

I’m just a bit shocked by the complete lack of communication. That email above is the only communication ever. The only thing I can think that got me booted from PJN is that I didn’t promote that site since I was just checking out Pepperjam so maybe they don’t like that the store’s stats were flat.

Here is my PJN eBay niche store. I realize it’s a bit on the thin side but it was a work in progress. If you can find what’s wrong with it…let me know.

http://searchtelescopes.com/

The other reason I’m posting this is as a warning. Be careful using Pepperjam. I’m still an ePN affiliate so it’s just Pepperjam that booted me.

It’s been a crazy ride for eBay affiliates. Thousands have been booted but I never thought I would be kicked out of PJN.

I wrote about my eBay niche store strategy last month. My goal was to launch two robust eBay niche stores using WordPress and phpBay. Well this last month I’ve been busy with other projects so I failed in my weekly goals miserably.

The nice thing is my other stores continue to make money althoug it has dropped off which is why it is important to continue to launc sites. As one group hits the sandbox, you’ll have new group hit the search engines, and when that group hits the sandbox, the first group should start getting released from the sandbox. Thus creating a never ending cycle. Stores in and stores out.

I need to organize my time better so I can meet my two site per week goal. I have around 10 sites mapped out already. Domains bought and setup. WordPress theme ready to go. And about 25 posts/artciles for each site. So I just need to get cranking. Since I have those 10 in queue, I might just devote an entire day to get them all out there so I can move to the second stage: promotion.

Keep rocking. These eBay niche stores work!

I blogged about my fear of PPC at my Internet Marketing Nirvana blog. I just spent $100 bucks on Xtreme Conversions which is a highly regarded software for managing and tracking your PPC campaigns. I don’t spent that much on software unless I think it’s a wise investment. Although I just got it, I’m hoping it will help me make more money with PPC.

I haven’t done much with AdWords because it’s so easy to lose money with it and took a lot of time to keep track of campaigns problems which I hope XC will ease that burden.

Right now I’ll be running PPC campaigns for my own products (Niche Podcasting & IM How To Guides) and my review style affiliate sites.

I don’t think I’ll use it for my phpBay eBay niche stores because if I’m paying for the traffic I want to make at least $15+ on each sale. It’s a little tougher to generate $15 commissions at one pop as an eBay affiliate unless you’re getting new sign ups (ACRUs).

If I start doing real well with PPC and Xtreme Conversions, I might give it a try with an eBay niche store. Especially since i have a few stores where I’m also promoting ClickBank products. But that would be down the road.

I’ve been building my eBay niche stores in three stages.

Stage 1: Research Stage

Here is where I try to uncover profitable niches to enter.  It goes without saying that this is the most important stage.  Building eBay stores with BANS and phpBay is very easy.  I’m not kidding.  Setting up a basic out of the box store with BANS or adding eBay auctions to a WordPress theme is under 10 minutes (if that) easy.  But if you haven’t done your research and you don’t customize your stores your chances at making decent money are slim.

Stage 2: Building Stage

Here is where we put our store together.  I find a WordPress theme which I can customize so it fits the theme of the store.  Take a look at my most store: Search Telescopes.

What I do in this stage is just build.  I’ll fine tune it with content and other features during state 3.  Right now I want to get the store out there.

My goal is to have 100 stores up and running by the end of 2008 so I’ve setting up the stores in batches of 10 before moving to state three.  But this has been probalamatic since I haven’t been going back to those other stores to add the very important components of stage three.

I’m concerned that some of these stores will hit the Google sandbox before I can turn a profit during the pre-sandbox stage.

Side-note: There is always debate about the sandbox.  Some even question it’s existing.  I believe it’s out there.  But I don’t see it as this evil blackhole.  When we’re in full force promotion mode of stage three it might raise some red flags for Google and they’ll sandbox your site while they check on it.  If you’re building quality stores you don’t have to worry.  Eventually you will make it out of the sandbox.

But, while you have one store in the sandbox, you want to have others out of it.  So the cycle won’t hurt you since at one time or another you might have a few stores in the sandbox and a few outside of it making you money.

Anyway, back on topic…after reading a post in the phpBay customer only forums from the phpBay developer, Wade.  My new goal is to put up two sites per week.  This much more manageable in a week than ten sites.

It gives me time to research, build, and promote.  Plus it keeps the inside/outside the sandbox cycle to do it’s thing so at one point or another I should have sites outside the sandbox making me money.

Stage 3: Promote

Once the sties are up with a few quality pages of content (5-10 pages at least), I can now move into stage 3: promoting my eBay niche stores.  I have a check list I follow which begins to bring traffic and backlinks to my stores.

This is the stage most of us hate.  It’s tedious, repeticous work.  The more money I make at this the more I will outsource down the road.  But for now, I do most of the grunt work.

I’m starting to use tools like Social Bookmarking Demon and Directory Submitter to speed up the process but still this a very boring but crucial step.

Forget the old line from the move: “If you build it, they will come”.  That will not happen here.  You need traffic and you need to go get it.

Yes you will get some traffic from doing nothing but the financial gains will be minimal so you have to do this stage no matter what.

There you have it.  My three stages for building my stores which I’m now doing in sets of two per week.  Following this strategy you should be able to put up over 100 profitable eBay niche stores per week.  So even if you’re stores only make a few bucks per day, that adds up at year end.

About a month ago I submitted one of my blog posts about creating WordPress eBay Niche Stores with phpBay to 47 social bookmarking sites using a free service called SocialMarker.  It’s a great free social bookmarking site which allows you to bookmark your sites to 47 social bookmarking sites.

It’s a big gamut of social bookmarking sites from the biggies like Digg to ones I’ve never heard of.  I’ve been happy with the results.  You can watch the video for more details.

I’m impressed enough that I’ve purchased Social Bookmarking Demon to submit my niche stores.  Stay tuned for my Social Bookmarking review - coming soon (as soon as I kick the tires a bit).

Once of the added benefits of setting up eBay niche stores is using BANS or phpBay for your parked domain.

I’ve been using domain parking services like Sedo and Parked for years. The money I’ve made from those parked domains is minimal. Better than nothing but the money I make from the domain parking services do not even cover the cost of the domain registration.

Enter phpBay and BANS. If you have a domain that fits with items on eBay, the odds is you will make more money than using a domain parking service provider or God forbid–using nothing but the default GoDaddy parked page which means you get zilch, nada, zippo!

Here is a video showing why I’m moving my domains from the domain parking sites to phpBay. I will also be doing a case study for July. I will grab my best performing parked domain for June and I’ll setup an eBay niche store and see how it does vs. the domain parking service.

Here is the final video. Part 5 of 5. This video will show I build a niche store using WordPress with the help of the phpBay plugin.

I’ll walk you through as I create my campaign at ePN and maneuvering around the phpBay plugin. In the end you will see a functional eBay niche store.

In video #4 of the Build A Niche Store with WordPress video series, we get into the nitty gritty of starting to build our eBay niche store. The first step is to upload the phpBay Pro plugin, activating it, and setting up a few options so we can start building our niche store.

At the end of video 3, we had WordPress installed for our niche store. In part 3 of this video series, I will show you how to easily change your WordPress theme.

It is this flexibility that makes WordPress such a great tool for building affiliate websites like the eBay niche stores. You literally have access to thousands of WordPress themes for free.

That is one of the reasons I prefer WordPress over BANS to build my niche stores. The process of switching WP themes is very simple as you will see in this video.

I suggest using an FTP client to upload your new themes. I use two free FTP programs: FileZilla on the PC and Cyberduck on the Mac. Both are free.

In the first video I showed you how to setup your domain account using WHM. The second video will show you how to setup WordPress using cPanel which is the first stage of building your eBay niche stores using WordPress.

I suggest using a web host company like Host Gator which provides you with cPanel and Fantastico with your hosting account.  It makes setting up WordPress a snap.  Only three steps and you’re done.