Where have you been?

Well I guess I am not much of a blogger, so I think I will start calling this my, “place where I try to organize my thoughts”.

I have tried using twitter to do this, but I have found that most of the time I can’t clear my head of what I  am trying to get out in 140 character increments.

The Scene

Let me set the scene for you, my reader, for where I am at and what I am doing.  As you can probably recall from previous posts, I seem to spend some time every couple of months re-grouping.  Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, the problem is that typically I have a good run then something major happens and I never reached that critical mass.

The latest event that has really hurt is the change that ebay made to their payment scheme.  They have gone from a percentage model to a CPC model.  Basically they are going to pay you per click what they feel your clicks are worth. 

I have read a lot of talk of marketers getting hit hard by this, but they also mention that they were making the majority of their income from ACRUs.  I on the other hand had been making almost all of my income from sales.  The difference was that you get paid a set amount for every new member that you get to sign up to Ebay, the other is that you get a percentage of the fees that are generated when someone that you send to the site makes a purchase.  This was my bread and butter, and because of this I foolishly thought that I would get a decent EPC for the traffic that I was sending.

However that was not the case.  From about February till September my effective EPC was about $0.45, now it is $0.15 and lower if someone happens to come to my site, click an ad not like what they see, hit back and then click another.

Where Now?

Needless to say this was one in a line of huge hiccups in my trek. I haven’t given up however, I am flaying around a bit at the moment, but I am starting to dabble in some direct linking with some promising affiliate offers.  If any of them are a hit I will then build a site around it and get serious.  My plan is to go after a bunch, if I spend $50 and not get anywhere I move on, if I see promise I will tweak and let it go for another $100.  From there is when I make the decision whether or not to go for the site.

I will let you know how it goes.