Wow… you really don’t know how screwed up things are until they start breaking! With my increase in traffic and earnings lately has come a new set of problems. the biggest being hitting the eBay API 5,000 call per IP address daily limit. I sat back and thought you know I can’t be making over 5,00 API calls in one day. Could I?
Well I think I was. What is wierd about it is that I am using 2 API calls mainly from the Shopping API and the Finding API. The one I use in the shopping API is to get related keywords. This is the only one that said it was hitting the limit. The other call just kept on responding.
Needless to say I decided to house clean. I removed 70+ domains that are no longer indexed in google. I put the DNS back to namecheap.com and posted them for sale for $20 each through name cheap. I plan to let them expire if no one purchases them. This eased up the API calls a little.
I also applied for more API calls with the API developer program. This process is free but can be a bit technical. I have not received a response back from them yet.
I am now left with about 50 sites that are driving my traffic to eBay. This month has been good to me so far. The last couple of days my clicks have remained steady but my earnings have dropped from $95+ per day to $60+ per day. Not sure what that is all about but I am hoping to get back and break $100 per day.
I am convinced that all I need is targetted traffic and I can make money with EPN. Getting the traffic is the hardest part. I have been buying a few expired domain names and they have been working out great for the most part. Many of them are bringing in 25+ clicks per day. This amount could cover my total expense for the expired domain in one months time. Then every month after that is profit. The key is finding the proper expiring domains at a good price.
Keep in mind that my only cost with new domains was about $10.00 a year per domain. With buying expired domains my cost goes up to $70 – $100+ for the first year and then $10.00 a year after per domain. I am getting my money back pretty quick, but I wanted to let you know my earnings that I am posting are not showing these expenses deducted.
I have decided to start changing my WordPress them on every 10 to 20 sites I make. Just to try and keep the sites looking a little different. Many people have stated that big ticket items are no longer profitable under QCP. I think they are probably right. I read a post over at the EPN forum where a guy said should start selling bubble gum. Obviously he was joking around… or was he? I decided to take my recent expired domain purchase and target terms like rare, stuff, bizarre, wierd and strange. I have no idea what type of results I will get but it should be fun to play with. Here my latest site, Bid to Get.
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Looking good, like the new site and enjoy watching the progress. I am actually going to try and check amazon vs. ebay affiliate programs. I have used amazon in the past and I chose ebay due to the niches I was working with (vehicles and so forth) but now that those don’t really pay off I want to test amazon again and compare the earnings.
Before it was ebays cookies that I liked over amazons short tracked cookies BUT if I am getting tagged for each click a person makes from my sites BEFORE they finally buy all that does is diminish my return.
Have you used amazon recently or previously AND if not it might be a worthwhile test to see if earnings are better.
The Bid to Get site looks cool, small and fast selling items really do work. Trying to locate items that people only click once and BUY THEN makes the most sense.
I thought a great niche would be shipping supplies or other b2b items that businesses buy on ebay constantly and know what they want.
Bummed about the higher ticket items as well. Ebay really is messing up a solid program. I MISS my acru’s!!!!!!
So funny you brought up Amazon. Another person that visits my blog asked me the same question today and I started working on an Amazon site.
I think what I will do is setup a site that alternates showing Amazon and eBay results. I will have to work out the details and get this up later in the week. So then we can see on one single site which will work best.
I used Amazon many moons ago but never had much luck. I am going to give it a try just to gets some eggs in another basket. Since over in the EPN forum it appears that many folks are getting quality reviews and losing their accounts. If that would ever happen to me I want to have some sort of backup plan.
I’m just not seeing the downturn in high price items. Each time I get one, the last 3 days in a row, it has translated into .50 per click payouts for that day for all my campaigns, not just the one that hit. For the month so far I am at .25 for all campaigns. My biggest fear is what is happening to some affiliates not getting their payouts b/c they are unable to furnish server raw access logs. Are you kidding me? So, like the both of you (I’m the other guy mentioned above) I’m moving to integrate Amazon. I have never made a dime using the program but haven’t really tried that hard either.
Pretty promising plugin I see already is Amazon Autoposter. With a little work I don’t think it will be too difficult to customize and get this thing cron’d up.
Agreed
I am actually going to be building a ebay/clickbank/amazon/something else and so on style of sites and start split testing which program actually pays out and if anything getting something from many is better than getting next to nothing from just one.
I will be setting up sites that have more purchases versus browsing items like vehicles mainly are. I think getting a ton of active buyers on the low end items will help make up for the many clicks that are brought from vehicle searches and generally end with only a few winning bids.
If there was a way to filter browsing visitors from the big ticket items I think my epc will bump up no problem.
All trial and error.
Keep up the great work!
Have you had a response back from eBay about increasing the 5,000 calls limit?
How long did they take and how difficult was it?
I hit the 5,000 calls limit today, I think it’s due to Googlebot crawling one of my bigger sites.
Hey Jeff. I did get an answer back within I would say 1 week. They requested some more stuff from me and I let it go over a week and they closed my ticket. They said that if I wanted to pursue it again to reference my old call number. I tell you what. I will make a new post and list what their response was. I will try and do that tonight yet.