Checked my mailbox today to pick up all my online holiday shopping items and was surprised by a big package from eBay. Not like something I bought off eBay, but something actually from eBay. I cracked it open to find an awesome holiday package from the thoughtful folks at eBay Partner Network. Inside I found some nice holiday candy, a leather bound domino set, and a nice soft throw blanket. You guys rock, thank you!
As you may or may not know I run a used car website called CarsForaGrand.com. I thought it would be a great idea to buy a car for under $1,000 from the site and drive it coast to coast in an attempt to get some news coverage and visitors to the site. We were successful in appearing on a dozen news broadcasts and driving almost half a million visitors to the site in three weeks – all for free.
Here is an example of the coverage we got, this one is from San Diego:
The basic hope was that we could drum up some news coverage and backlinks with the unique story, especially amid the current economic climate and automaker bailouts. The initial idea was to get on a few local TV stations, you know the classic filler on a slow news day ‘Two guys are driving across country in a $900 car…’ stuff like that. It also sounded like a bunch of fun, never having been across country before. I thought about hiring a PR firm, or getting a consultant, but then I remembered that stuff costs money. So I talked to a few friends in the industry like PR guru Chris Winfield, whipped up a press release, and got to work. Here is the first release:
COAST TO COAST IN AN $899 CAR
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
SAN DIEGO, CALIF (April 2009)- Who says you can’t afford a reliable, safe, working car in this recession– for under $1,000 bucks! Early this month, two young entrepreneurs will set out from San Diego, Calif. to show the country that they do not need a bailout to get a decent car. Chris Hedgecock and Jorge Gonzalez, founders of the website CarsForaGrand.com, have purchased a car from the website for $899 and will drive from San Diego to Miami to prove you can buy a reliable car without the hassle and burden of financing one.
These two young guys will be cruising through your town and would like to stop by your station as they make their way across the country. You will find their story to be inspiring, interesting and humorous as they honk through towns just like yours.
The car is a 1974 Pontiac LeMans, purchased for $899.89 on February 26, 2009. To make sure the the car was safe and road-worthy, $200 was invested in parts like belts, spark plugs, and a much needed oil change. The car was purchased from CarsForaGrand.com, a website that only features used cars under $1,000.
Chris and Jorge’s journey can be followed at (http://www.carsforagrand.com/road-trip/) where daily updates will be posted including pictures and video. The entire trip is expected to last 14 days barring a major incident (fingers crossed!) The route and city list will be updated with dates daily as schedules might change, always find the newest information at (http://www.carsforagrand.com/road-trip/the-route/).
AVAILABLE IN SAN DIEGO APRIL 2, 2009
To schedule an interview or a drive-by please contact
I had the good fortune of having my friend Drew Schulte to help out with the PR legwork. Drew is not a PR professional, actually he’s my real estate agent but in this market he has a lot of free time So I had Drew put together a spreadsheet with all the cities we were visiting, and all the TV news stations in each city. He then called all of them and got the email address of the ‘assignment editor’. We learned early on this term ‘assignment editor’ was really important as this person decided who did what on what days. The great thing about TV news stations is they are open 24/7 looking for newsworthy stuff to put on the air. So we would pull into a town as it was getting dark, and while we would be getting settled Drew would be calling the news stations, harassing the assignment editors, and emailing the release to their ‘breaking news’ address.
After a few cities we altered the release to include the specific city we were in, and links to the previous news coverage. This really helped because it showed them that other stations were covering us and the last thing a news station wants to do is miss covering a story other stations might be covering. So once we got the ball rolling it was pretty easy, pull into town, get a hotel, wake up early, do a news spot, and get back on the road.
After we hit New Orleans we noticed the coverage kind of snowballing. For example, the news story we shot in San Diego got picked up by their sister station in LA, the one we shot in El Paso aired in San Francisco, etc. By the time we were done in Miami, the story had gone national… on the largest day we did over 110,000 uniques – all for free.
Not to say it wasn’t a lot of work, but it was also a lot of fun. I got to see a lot of this great country and meet a bunch of cool people. I also learned a whole bunch, which is really my favorite thing. I really knew nothing about PR, and was usually pretty shy in front of the camera. Now my smiling mug and my ‘74 LeMans have been all over the national and local news across the country. I hadn’t touched a Mac since the Apple II GS, and now I am zipping all over iMovie on my new Macbook Pro.
The real driving force behind this trip was attitude. I had the idea for the site a few years ago, and had the idea for the road trip around December or January, but it really took going to Elite Retreat to motivate me to get off my ass and go. There are just so many smart capable people there and the attitude of “We Can Do It” was just so infectious, I started planning as soon as I got home.
So to recap, if you have an idea get off your ass and just go for it. The worst thing that can happen is you will learn something new, and you might just succeed beyond your wildest expectations in the process.
Total Story Count: 28
Total Nielsen Audience: 1,220,161
Total 30-Second Ad Equivalency: $13,164
Total Run Time: 49:50
Total Calculated Ad Equivalency: $30,885
Total Calculated Publicity Value: $92,652
Well I have been working on a few wordpress plugins for a few days and finally figured one was ready for public consumption. So basically all this thing does is implement ZinText on your wordpress blog with no coding. If you don’t know already, ZinText is in-text ads for eBay affiliates. Check out a demo here, or its on this blog on posts older than 10 days.
Oh yeah thats another cool feature you can say only display ads on posts older than X days so you have more control over where the ads appear. There’s also a whitelist if we aren’t linking the words you want, and a blacklist if we are linking things you don’t want linked. You still have to have a campaign ID from ePN, but if you are a good affiliate you have one already.
I harvest a lot of keyword data for my Zintext product, both from the eBay API and various other sources. One of the things I do is scrape the hot terms from buy.ebay.com. Here’s what they say about the terms listed there:
eBay Keywords is a list of highly popular terms that people search for on eBay. Each eBay Keyword has its very own page that allows you to view all the items eBay has for that keyword.
So in my post about eBay’s affiliates day I made a big deal about the crappiness of geo-targeting in javascript. I decided to be a little proactive and post some code for any eBay affiliates using PHP. This is an easy and free method to ensure your traffic is going to its highest-possible-converting destination.
Why do I want to geo-target?
Because it works better. For you and for the customer. Imagine if you were living in the US, you clicked on an eBay ad, and you went to eBay Canada? Well, that’s how your Canadian visitors feel when you send them to eBay US. Traffic sent to their home eBay converts much better, making you more money and making your visitors happier. This is a good thing.
What do I need to geo-target?
For this example you need some know how, a mysql database, and php 4 or newer. Also, instead of pointing your links to rover.ebay.com you would need to point them at this script you are going to make, for example click.php. This script will do the geo-targeting and then redirect the user to the appropriate eBay. For the purposes of this example we will be going to a specific auction ID but it the geo-targeting will work for any type of links.
Let’s get it on!
First, you need a Geoip database. Basically,what we are doing is looking at a visitor’s IP and comparing it to a range of IPs for each country. I used MaxMind’s Geo Lite Country product. They give it to you in a .csv which is kind of a pain to import into MySQL. If you know what you are doing, import a new version, because they update every month and it’s best to get it from them. I know I am going to regret this but you can download a mysql dump of the data here. No I am never going to update that file and by the time you read this it is probably going to be REALLY out of date. Aaaaanyways, somehow get that data into a MySQL table, in this example it’s called ‘geoip’ very original I know.
So to geotarget first we will connect to our DB (obviously put your own settings in here):
$link = mysql_connect('localhost', 'mysql_user', 'mysql_password');
if (!$link) {
die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());
}
// make foo the current db
$db_selected = mysql_select_db('foo', $link);
if (!$db_selected) {
die ('Can\'t use foo : ' . mysql_error());
}
Yeah that’s probably the sloppiest DB connect code I have ever seen, I personally use Justin Vincent’s ez SQL class.
At any rate, now you have a connection to your database. Now you need to see where your visitor is from.
$ipNum = ip2long($_SERVER[REMOTE_ADDR]);
$result = mysql_query("select countryCode from geoip where $ipNum >= beginningIPNum AND $ipNum < = endingIPNum");
$country = mysql_fetch_assoc($result);
$visitorsCountry = $country['countryCode'];
So now you know where they are from, now you need to map it to the correct eBay country. First we will make an array with all of eBay's country codes.
Now you can target to all or any of those countries if you want. I only target to english speaking countries because all my sites are English-only, but you can easily modify this code to target all of the above countries.
switch ($visitorsCountry) {
case 'GB':
$placeID = $placementIDs['GB'];
break;
case 'CA':
$placeID = $placementIDs['CA'];
break;
case 'AU':
$placeID = $placementIDs['AU'];
break;
default:
$placeID = $placementIDs['US'];
}
Then generate your URL you will be redirecting to, like I said in this example we will be going to a specific auction ID. In this example I am assuming you are passing it like click.php?AID=12345. Remember to put your own Campaign ID in!
This is intended as a guide for someone who is familiar with PHP, not as a copy and paste one size fits all solution. If you have questions ask in the comments I will try and help out.
Wow I haven’t been hungover like this in a while. Yesterday was eBay’s “Affiliates Day” at their annual developer’s conference in Chicago. Had a really full day starting at 8:30am, which if you know me you know is way before my workday usually starts, especially with the time change. But it was definitely worth it. ePN showed up in force, with around 10 account managers, VPs, basically everyone from their internet marketing team.
We as affiliates are often used and abused as marketing tools, but this was a really special experience to work closely with the folks involved in the program. They did a bunch of sessions:
Matt “everyone who uses the term eCPM on a regular basis is on my team” Ackley – gave a great talk on where eBay is today and where they are headed. Really interesting to see their internal thought process and he did a really good job of making us feel like part of the overall strategy.
Jarrod “internet celebrity” Schwartz – drilled down into the partner network some more and had some good insights. It was also good to make fun of him for having his picture in the sidebar on the affiliate forums for so long hahaha
Will “don’t you dare send me bad traffic” Martin-Gill – this may have been the most educational talk of the day, he went into the value of ACRUs (for u non epn addicts this is a new user registration), and how they can pretty accurately predict the lifetime value of a customer after just a few days on the site. Right now eBay pays flat rates for ACRUs, $25-35 depending on the volume you do. Will discussed this possibly changing to a value based model, so affiliates that drove ACRUs that didn’t generate much value to the company would make less per, and affiliates that drove better traffic would make more. Makes sense but change is always feared.
Cian “only funny because of my accent” Weeresinghe – the head of an intern at ebay.co.uk talked about geo targeting. When they launched ePN they made a big deal of how they were going to geo target for affiliates. Uh, yeah. I posted a while ago about this saying it doesn’t work. Apparently it does work, but it works via javascript (huh???). If you copy and paste the exact code (including the javascript) for every link you make, I guess it works. This is kind of retarded to me. Every click for every eBay program (canada, france, uk, au, everything) goes to rover.ebay.com. Is it really that hard to download the free maxmind db, do a live lookup on the click, and send the user to the correct ebay? I am sure they could even afford the $12/mo 99% accurate edition. Bottom line, eBay should do a better job than any of its affiliates at geo targeting, so why not? In the time Cian gave his talk I fixed my geotargeting for ZinText using the free one. Cian was on my side, and apparently its up to Jarrod to get it done.
Steve “don’t stuff my cookies” Hartman – did the mandatory network quality talk. nothing new here, just remember not to cheat! don’t even try to cheat, we are too good at catching cheaters, there is no more cheating now that we are here to catch all the cheaters. He did have some funny quotes pulled from some blackhat affiliate marketing site with guys getting their accounts closed.
Sunny “i am only here for the famous IM party” Li – I really should have paid more attention to this talk but this was like 6 hours in and my ADD had about all it could handle. Plus I found an open wifi network and was gettin it crackin on digg Anyways, Sunny was from the developers conference and gave a talk on the APIs and how they are changing and stuff. Really important to my business and I couldn’t tell you what was said
Then they gave me some cool Robert Marc sunglasses (everyone got sunglasses, a bunch of different brands) and some free drinks, then we all met up last night for dinner and a party all hosted by eBay.
I would just like to say thank you first of all to eBay and whoever’s idea it was to reach out to affiliates like this. I would also like to thank everyone from eBay involved in the event, especially Kim Thai. It was a great experience for me and I learned a lot. There was great energy in the room, and everyone was pretty jazzed about promoting ePN and making $$$
Side note, I also got a chance to meet Michael and Kris Jones from PepperJam. These guys are very cool and if you haven’t had a chance to explore their network definitely give it a look.
I just finished up a shopping site called forUnder, meaning find ____ for under $____. For example, I have been thinking about getting a Macbook Air, but I don’t want to spend a lot. Here’s a search for a Macbook Air for $1,000. Or if you are more into clothes, maybe a Ralph Lauren Polo Shirt for under twenty bucks or some Ferragamo shoes for under $100. You get the idea, whatever product you are looking for, for the price you want to pay.
Obviously this is kind of born of the cars for a grand concept. Right now we are just querying eBay (you know how I love eBay!!!), but I will add some more sources in the future. Feel free to suggest some in the comments and I will get them in there if I can.
I had really high hopes for eBay’s separation from Commission Junction. For one, it’s usually always better to communicate directly, without a middle man. And that’s all CJ was, a middle man in our way, preventing us from getting our reporting on time. Or so we thought.
In my mind, perhaps I built up the changeover too much. I imagined a sugar-coated fantasy land where we had real-time click stats, and could click right through on a day’s numbers to see the auction data behind it. Tell me, why wouldn’t eBay just let us run our reports, then click through to a detail to clearly see which transactions resulted in commissions for us? Why the hassle of downloading a CSV file and using third party websites like MyePNReport.com? I mean if that guy can build a tool that breaks up that report and links to auctions, shows you how much you made etc, how come eBay can’t do it? Maybe they don’t want to do it?
Couple this with all the people complaining their earnings are off and would we have to conclude that as of now, ~40 days into the changeover, maybe getting rid of CJ was a mistake? Not a mistake from eBay’s perspective, because I don’t know what % they were paying out to CJ and it must be nice to have that big () missing from the monthly report. But from the affiliate’s perspective? I guess you can only call a decision a mistake if it was your decision to make, and with this one we unfortunately have to suck it up.
A couple other affiliates have blogged about their lackluster earnings including my friend hanjicode. I am not going to post my earnings but April compared to March is off by more than 40%. Now I understand about cookie lag because I am still getting earnings in the account I stopped posting links for 40 days ago. I also understand that maybe a lot of people are implementing their links wrong. I have been writing code for a living for 10 years and I assure you I am not posting my links wrong. The click tracking is for the most part fine, numbers are not off there. Is there an issue? Was there an issue with CJ inflating numbers and therefore their % and this is the correction? I think we might never know about that one.
One thing that is definitely not working is geo targeting. When eBay was with CJ I had geo targeting written into ZinText. I just applied to all the eBay programs through CJ and used the MaxMind free geoip database to send the click to the correct ebay. I would say maybe 15% of my clicks went to ebay.ca, ebay.co.uk, and ebay.au. When ePN announced geo targeting as part of their program, I was happy, one less thing I have to worry about, right? Right? Right? Wrong. I have 0 clicks outside of eBay US. Yes, I have checked the geo targeting option. Yes, I am using type 2 or 3 links. No answers so far from eBay, I am waiting to ask them at the eBay Developer’s Conference they have graciously invited me to.
I understand that eBay has a HUGE affiliate program and changing over from CJ is no small task. I actually expected reporting issues! But the little things I imagined, the detailed reporting, it is a disappointment to me that those things aren’t there. This was an opportunity to reach out and really bring their affiliates into the fold, and it just doesn’t look like that’s happening. The boards have been more active than I’ve ever seen them, and 98% of those people are upset. I really hope eBay does whats right and listens to their affiliates. After all we are on the same team aren’t we? Aren’t we?
There are some options for Zintext that I don’t include on the get code page. Not that I don’t think people don’t want them, I just want to make it as simple as possible for publishers to get the code on their pages. Here is some average Zintext code:
<script language="javascript">
var EB_campid='00000000000';
</script>
<script src="http://www.zintext.com/showads.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
That’s all you really need to run Zintext on any page, just a campaign ID from eBay Partner Network. Now to the fun stuff.
To link ONLY some words on any of your pages, add this line under the “var EB_campid” line:
var EB_onlywhitelist = 'beige throw pillow,custom ipod,xbox games';
This can be as long as you want, just separate your keywords with a comma.
If you don’t want a double underline on your links and just want them to follow your normal CSS, add this line:
var EB_doublelink = 0;
There are a couple more, and I will add to this list as we go.
FYI – We are also now requiring email at signup, eBay wants us to be able to email you if there is any problem with your ads.
So I had Drew put together a spreadsheet with all the cities we were visiting, and all the TV news stations in each city. He then called all of them and got the email address of the ‘assignment editor’. We learned early on this term ‘assignment editor’ was really important as this person decided who did what on what days. The great thing about TV news stations is they are open 24/7 looking for newsworthy stuff to put on the air. So we would pull into a town as it was getting dark, and while we would be getting settled Drew would be calling the news stations, harassing the assignment editors, and emailing the release to their ‘breaking news’ address. 
Anyways, Sunny was from the developers conference and gave a talk on the APIs and how they are changing and stuff. Really important to my business and I couldn’t tell you what was said 
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