The last time I posted the IM world was buzzing with eBay confirming that we would no longer be able to post eBay affiliate links on sites not owned by us. This news was announced in May, but I think many of us were taking a “wait and see” approach to see if Squidoo, Blogger, Hubpages, and other similar sites would be included. Unfortunately, this was confirmed and many of us were left scrambling to get our eBay RSS feeds and links changed on many Lenses, Hubs, and blogs.

I had been trying to work out a way to use Wordpress and some plugins to offer feeds from a site that I owned to use on my Squidoo lenses. I found a way that worked in theory, but I found myself editing the feed.php file as well as adding many other things to the core code of Wordpress. I don’t mind doing this, but remembering what I added manually to the code is always a project for me when it comes to upgrading and then things tend to break which isn’t good.

In the end, the idea is working and I am using some of these feeds from a site that I own to power the RSS feeds offered on Squidoo, but everytime I pull from eBay to my Wordpress site it is counting as a click which I’m sure eBay won’t be happy with. What I really need is to develop a plugin to do this or suck it up and buy PHPBay, but both of these are out of the question right now as my time and funds are limited. I will be adding something like this to my list of future projects though because it would be a great learning experience for me.

After I realized what was happening with the feeds I was using, I finally just went back to basics and started using the eBay Squidoo module that is offered for lenses. It’s not the best way to go as far as my affiliate revenue goes, but I’ll just have to build more similar lenses to make up for the difference. Besides, using my method will also cause more problems in the near future with a bloated database forming as well as a huge cache that I’ll have set up a cron job to empty automatically. My method would have also possibly caused some server overload if I had continued to use it for every lens that I had built.

In the end the best way for me to change all of my eBay links on Squidoo was to just get back to basics and use the Squidoo eBay module provided. Not that I worry a ton about lensrank, but my lenses will benefit from using the Squidoo eBay module because the clickouts and purchases will be registered through Squidoo and my lensrank on these lenses should get a boost over time. This is probably my way of putting a positive spin on something that could be a negative which my friends tell me is one of my best qualities.

Did you use a different method for your lenses and sites? If you feel comfortable enough, please share it here.

Originally posted 2009-08-05 11:28:16. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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Tags: affiliate marketing, eBay Partner Network, EPN RSS Feeds Squidoo, Squidoo eBay Partner Network

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 11:19 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.