1 Month Commission Junction Earnings Report

Hey man, good job! You seem to have the BANS luck. Put up about 20 more stores and report back in a month or so.

wOW! Very Impressive! I started one immediately after reading your article and have yet to see one single click though I see some hits to the site.

Did you do anything else to promote the site other than adwords?

Thanks for this article, as im planing to try out CJ. Its really motivate me.

Hi Guy,

Thanks for the great advise. Will get right down to it. I’m getting another one up. This time selling stones, like lucky stones, crystals and stuffs. Will let you know when it is running.

The URL sucks though. It’s an old URL that I had and it has been lying there doing nothing, so I guess I might as well put it to some good use. Has a PR 2, so that might offset the kind of inappropriate name.

Thanks for the advise again.

Hi Guy: I found you through DP and have implemented the ebay rss but don’t understand how to pinpoint the exact category I want from ebay. When I go to ebay home to start my search, enter my keywords, add my PID, I end up with a too general category. When I try to narrow it down, I lose the rss feed option. Is there an easier way to generate the rss feed with my PID? Also did you try using the auto delete posts plugin and does it work for you? HTD

Guy: In ebay motors is there a way to take a specific category and get the rss with a PID. This is the Dump Truck Category. Thanks for your help. HTD

Wow, so you’ve been a busy little bee on this site. =D

Where should I start? So, for that gaming BANS site I was putting together. There is no more I can do it. I haven’t even been to the site itself in over a week now. I only ever go to the admin panel anymore.

Good ol’ G has currently about 260 indexed entries from the site. This fluctuates constantly as just yesterday it was close to 400.

I have a few plugins working together on this site:

All in One SEO - For formatting the indexed pages to look better on search engines

Related Posts - Mainly for 404 pages to help redirect users but also shows up on post pages

Auto Delete Posts - For deleting a post after 7 days, no need to keep them after that much time

Syndication - The heart of why this WP BANS works

XML-Sitemap - When new posts are made, this will update the sitemap and notify top search engines

*WP-Cache - For heavy traffic, if any

*WP-Cace: I’m not 100% sure about this plugin for the BANS idea. I have this odd feeling it is messing with the links and/or screwing with impression counts. Anyone on here use WP-Cache with their BANS site and see no issues? If not, it’ll make me feel a little bit more easy and I’ll enable it again.

Now for the good stuff, the results. While I had WP-Cache enabled I noticed I would get on average 90-100 cached pages throughout the day. I don’t know if this is from bots or people. My AdSense page impressions would be no where close to the cached count which is why I’m suspecting something up. I just hope it was bots. I currently have a total click count of 40 from CJ with no actual money brought in just yet. To me, this is to be expected. So, I’m not worried. This does show me that people are finding it and using it. I have gained on average 20 - 40 cents a day for AdSense so I am making something here.

Overall, I feel that since I have no more work to be done to this site I can just ignore it and once a week check AdSense and CJ to see what has been going on. That’s if I can contain myself, I have an impulse to check every few hours. =/

If you would like to check the site out, it can be found at: http://auctions.scyanidegaming.com It does seem to run a little slow in the mornings for some reason but just bare with it. I find that later on in the day the site runs really smooth.

The XML-Sitemap works with MSN, Yahoo, Google, and Ask. I’m not finding the same results with the other search engines but having so many indexed pages in Google. I’m sure I’ll be fine.

As for the stats, I got awstats up and going not too long ago. I forgot about that and had it enabled from my host.

Sounds like rollaparts.com is doing pretty decent. I’m sure as time goes by this will only increase.

I figured WP-Cache shouldn’t be messing up links just thought it was weird with the number of cached pages compared to the AdSense page impressions. I’ve enabled it again. This actually should help with the morning slowness.

Hi Guy, me again.

Checked the stats at CJ just now just to see if anyone is clicking. Saw 9 invalid clicks. Are those curiosity clicks that did not result in any sale or lead?

Oh Shit.

How did you overcome the problem eventually7 I certainly have zero valid clicks till today.

how can I track impressions thru CJ?

Small update on this BANS site. It seems everyday I keep coming up with an idea to tweak it just a little more.

First of all, I decide to ditch the WP-Cache for my auction site. I deactivated this plugin and enabled Gzip compression when browsers ask for it. This seemed to actually decrease my site’s loading times. I can’t say this works for everyone but it seemed the best for my situation. Also, I realized that with cached pages, sure we’re saving in bandwith and database queries but we’re providing old data to the visitors.

Having that in mind, I thought about to make these actions a bit more in real time on our own site. I looked into eBay’s RSS feeds and realized that they are only updated every 30 minutes and they DO NOT include auctions that have 15 minutes or less left. This explains why a lot of my auctions were not showing up. So, I lowered the syndication time from 1 hour to 30 minutes. I actually started getting far more accurate results AND the page loading seemed to be a bit smoother. I couldn’t figure this out but for some reason it was for me. All in all, for better results I found that 30 minutes is perfect.

This still didn’t do much for the posts that had an end time of a day or so but were staying on the site for 7 days. Remember, I had the auto delete plugin deleting posts after 7 days of their post time. This was doing nothing but populating my database with 17K+ posts of data that no longer existed at times. So, over the weekend I sat down and modified the auto delete plugin myself.

First, I created a column in the database under the table wp_posts called end_date. This column is going to be used for the auctions actual end time. Can you see where I’m going with this? I then took the auto delete plugin and added my own function. This function is hooked to the post action hook which basically means whenever a post is made my function will get called. The auto delete plugin already did this with it’s function, I just planced mine above that one. My function will find every post within the database that does not have an end_date set and actually set the end_date. It does this by taking the post’s content from the database and uses 2 regular expressions to filter out the date and time of the end date. As the post only contains 1 date and time entry my first and only hit with the regular expression will be the auction’s end date and time. With these 2 pieces of information, I format it all into a single string that will be accepted by MySQL as a proper date field and write to the current post’s end_date column.

With that set, I modified the auto delete’s delete function to not check post_date but end_date with just MySQL’s NOW() function. This will basically return all posts that have an end_date that is already past the current time and date of when a new post is made.

So, all in all this new auto delete removes all auctions that have gone past their end date. This was a little scary at first for me when I ran this because 1) The script took a long time for it’s first run. This is understandable as it had to parse and populate 17K+ end_date columns. 2) Just watching my post count go from 17K+ down to 400-1000 post range was a little odd and I’m still getting used to it. I have yet to find any issues with my modified auto delete plugin but I know if other’s use this there *might* be issues. For instance, eBay’s times were in PST and my servers are all in PST timezones. I got lucky with that but if someone’s servers are EST then the plugin will need to be modified to take this into account.

Well, I just thought I’d share this with you and what I have been up to with the BANS site. I’ve got a small tweak to do to the site now ( I want it to always list every category even if there are no posts )but for the most part I’m having fun tweaking and getting it to run as close to real time as possible.

Well, I’ve been spending so much time optimizing that I haven’t gotten around to promoting. I did put in a stats plugin just a few details and to my surprise people are finding the site and going through it. I just need to stop messing with it. =D

I barely know PHP to be honest. I was learning PHP as I was writing this and from the little experience I have with similiar scripting languages. That on top of just looking at what the author of auto-delete-posts did, I was able to figure out the language pretty easily. I’ve been like that for far back as I can remember. I’ve learned that all programming languages are the same, it’s just a matter of learning the syntax of the language. By looking at other people’s code, I can always seem to figure out how the language works. Just remember, Google is your best friend when trying to figure out how to do something. =D

As for earnings, I believe since the site was at a real slow down with 17K+ posts and most of them being dead auctions. I have not received any revenue from CJ yet, I do have about 57 clicks for the past week though. AdSense has been working out for me somewhat, a few bucks here and there.

I’m not going to fully push this site until I’m 100% happy with it. I have a minor text tweak on the front page as well as hopes of creating a front page that doesn’t just list all the auctions. I was wondering, do you have any suggestions for themes that might work better the BANS site? I like how your car sites are layed out with the front page. I’m looking for something similiar.

As for the loss of indexed pages, yeah, that has happened to me daily. I remember seeing at one time 1200 pages indexed and next day down to 30. I thought it was weird and I looked into it but all I could find was a few forum posts about people thinking that Google doesn’t like sites that have a lot of indexed pages so many will get dropped. It kind of sucks for the purpose of these types of sites but I believe that as long as people can find it then word will get out sooner or later.

As one small update, I did find a database optimizer/backup plugin for wordpress. I looked into these because I noticed that despite having so few posts compared to what I had a few days ago. My database has not shrunk one bit. This optimizer is currently running and I’ll let you know how this turns out. I figured it would be good since this site has posts created/deleted daily.

Yes, I might be able to come up and visit sometime. I know my aunt my cousin (Nita) would be happy. I don’t know when this will happen but I’ll let her know so she can tell you when this happens.

I just started a 2nd PMB (poor man’s BANS) last night and thought of a few questions if anyone can help:

1) When you put these eBay posts on your site, do you have the permalinks go to your site or back to ebay? I would think to your site, that way you get the insert into Google for possible search traffic.

2) Does anyone have any problems getting indexed in Google? Since Thursday night, I’ve had over 800 items post, so that’s over 800 blog posts in Google’s eyes, spam filter maybe?

Any help is apprecaited!