The folks over at Unique Blog Designs are having a contest to celebrate their 1 year anniversary! These guys have worked with over 200 clients including John Chow, Shoemoney, Zac Johnson, Uber Affiliate, and even Yahoo.

Here’s some more information directly fron UBD:

Enter the UBD 1-Year Anniversary Contest

In celebration of our one-year birthday, we will be running a contest for the remainder of August (until Sunday, August 31st). The contest is open to everyone on Earth! If you are not from Earth, you are responsible for the cost of shipping. So, what are the prizes?

• 1 grand prize winner will win a brand new 8GB Ipod Touch and the soon to be released UBD Citrus Theme for wordpress.
• 3 runner up winners will get the UBD citrus theme.

Entering the contest is extremely easy. Right now, there are two ways to:

1. You simply have to reply to this post with a comment. Only one comment per person will be counted. Commenting on the post gives you 1 contest entry.
2. The second way to gain 5 entry points is to write a blog post about the contest

Altogether, you can get up to 6 entries for your chance to win. So if you’re feeling lucky, enter the UBD 1-Year Anniversary Contest for your chance to win an Ipod and a great wordpress theme.

Other

I recently attended my first ever Affiliate Summit conference. I have been wanting to attend this conference for a while and I’m glad that I was finally able to do so. I was in Boston from Saturday, August 9 to Tuesday, August 12.

Saturday
White in Boston, I stayed at the Westin Boston Waterfront hotel, which is just a few minutes away from where the conference was taking place. Ideally, I would’ve loved to stay at the hotel where the conference was taking place, but due to my normal nature of doing things late, all rooms were booked when I finally decided to book my room. As a matter of fact, I almost ended up not even getting a room at the Westin.

After checking on Saturday, I went over to the Boston Seaport hotel’s lobby bar for a drink and to meet some people. Ian Fernando along with Charles Ngo came down and we all chit chatted over a few drinks. Ian and Charles are the first people that I really interacted with at the summit and they’re both great people.

Sunday, Day 1
Day one was pretty laid back. I thought that the check-in process was going to be a breeze, but it wasn’t for me. There were some printing problems so I ended waiting for 20+ minutes before getting my pass. It would’ve been nice if an announcement about the printing problems was made a little sooner.

After registering, I immediately went to John Hasson’s presentation, Which PPC Engines Work and How?. John’s session was packed with people and full of great information. Thanks for all the great information, John.

On Sunday night, Share a Sale hosted a party on the Odyssey ship. I almost wasn’t able to attend since I didn’t get a ticket. Lucky for me, Eric Nagle was nice enough to provide me with two tickets since he wasn’t going to be attending anymore. I had a great time at the share-a-sale party. Thanks again, Eric.

Monday, Day 2

Mayor Corey Booker’s speech was great. It was moving and very motivational. but it didn’t relate one bit to affiliate marketing. I still don’t know why he was invited to speak to a bunch of online marketers. Don’t get me wrong, his speech was moving, humorous, and motivational, but I think it would’ve been better if we had someone from the industry speak to us.

The first session that I attended was Wil Reynold’s “My 5 Favorite SEO Strategies Exposed” . Wil’s session was very informative. He talked about the different tools and strategies that he uses to gain back links. He also talked a lot about Google’s new service, Knol, In case you haven’t heard, Google Knol is Google’s answer to Wikipedia. Although the service is new, pages created in Knol are ranking high, and very quickly.

Me, listening to Wil Reynolds speak (flickr)

The second session I attended, The Anatomy of a Great Affiliate Program , was moderated by Heather Paulson and included the opinions of Ian Fernando , Janet Attard , and Daniel Gray . Although the session was geared towards companies who ran affiliate programs, it was good to hear Ian’s perspective, from an affiliate’s point of view

The third session that I attended, and probably my favorite of the day/possibly the entire conference, was Tim Ash’s “Landing Page Testing to Attract Super Affiliates” . The session was geared towards companies with affiliate programs but the information was useful for everyone. The main point that was drilled into everyone’s head is testing; one small change can increase your conversion rate and increase your profits. Tim is also the author of Landing Page Optimization . At the end of the show, one lucky audience member won a signed copy of his book.

Tim Ash’s session was very informative. (flickr)

The last session that I attended was Amit Mehta’s PPC Super Affiliate Strategies You Must Know . Amit seems like a great guy, but I after sitting in on the session, I wish I would’ve attended another session. The information that he provided was nothing new. As a matter of fact, most of it was already available on his blog.

Tuesday, Day 3
On Tuesday I went to the Ask The Experts Roundtable Discussions. It kind of sucked because a lot of the so called “experts” who were supposed to answer questions simply didn’t show up.

I attended Zac Johnson’s How to Grow a Blog table. Zac pretty much answered everyone’s questions starting and growing a blog. There were lots of people at the table who wanted to know how he got his blog become an authority in such a short period of time. The information that he provided was very useful.

Overall, my first affiliate summit was a success! I learned a lot and met a lot of great people and I look forward to attending the next conference in Las Vegas.

Affiliate Marketing affiliate summit, affsum, ase, ase08, boston

eBay today announced that they will be implementing a new pricing structured for Active Confirmed Registered User (ACRU) compensation. This new payment structure for ACRUs will take effect today for new publishers. For publishers who’ve signed up with the ebay partner program prior to today, the changes won’t take place for you until November 1.

In a nutshell, you won’t get the normal $25-35 you were used to getting for new users who signed up for an ebay account via you. You will still get paid for new users, but that amount won’t be set in stone anymore. It will vary from month to month depending on the quality of your new registered users. According to ebay:

Here’s how it will work. Each publisher will be placed in a quality tier at the end of each month based on that month’s and historical traffic. The tiers will range from $1 to $50, and the higher the expected lifetime value of the customers a publisher sends, the higher the tier the publisher will receive. We expect that most affiliates with a history of driving good, consistent traffic won’t see a lot of variability from month to month.

So you can expect to earn anywhere from $1.50 to $50 per new user now. $50 per user, that sounds sweet. I’m curious to know exactly how they calculate the quality of a new user. It’s probably going to be based on a user’s purchase history, visits, rating activity, and more.

I had a feeling that this was going to happen sooner or later. The previous tier system was great for affiliates, but simply dangerous for ebay. The possibility of fraud and abuse is high. I’m pretty sure that a lot of people pay others to sign up in order to get the ACRU credit. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a service out there that promised you x amount of new registered users for a low price.

Hopefully this new change in payment structure will allow me and others to pass that $28 per ACRU tier we’ve been stuck at ever since joining the program.

Here’s a copy of the letter I received in, its entirety.

Dear Jonathan Radande,

As part of our ongoing effort to reward our best marketing partners and promote trusted commerce on eBay, we are implementing a new pricing structure for Active Confirmed Registered User (ACRU) compensation. The new pricing scheme is based on quality, instead of just volume, and will reward top publishers with up to $50 per ACRU driven to eBay.

Starting today, August 1st, new publishers that join the eBay Partner Network will be placed in this new quality-based pricing structure for the US program.

All publishers that joined eBay Partner Network before August 1st will remain in the existing pricing tiers for a few more months so you can have time to look at the data and see how the change will affect you. As of November 1st, all publishers will be placed in the value based pricing structure for ACRUs.

Here’s how it will work. Each publisher will be placed in a quality tier at the end of each month based on that month’s and historical traffic. The tiers will range from $1 to $50, and the higher the expected lifetime value of the customers a publisher sends, the higher the tier the publisher will receive. We expect that most affiliates with a history of driving good, consistent traffic won’t see a lot of variability from month to month.

Publishers that join after August 1st will be able to see what tier they fall in by going to the programs tab and selecting payments structure for the US program. This tier will be updated on the 9th of each month and will reflect the score for the previous month. The tier will be 0 for the first month while we calculate your first score. Note that your ACRU earnings in your reports will reflect this tier.

If you joined before August 1st, you will continue to only see the same volume-based tiers for now. In September we will release a new separate report that will allow all publishers to break down, by campaign, the quality of the ACRUs you are driving to eBay. We will send more details about this report in a few weeks.

Please note that this change only affects compensation for new user registrations (ACRUs). Payouts for revenue share will continue on the same volume-based tiers for both new and old users. While the current change only affects the US eBay program on eBay Partner Network, we are evaluating this system on a country by country basis and will provide additional updates as they become available.

For more details on how the new pricing structure will work in the US please log into eBay Partner Network and visit the eBay US terms and conditions in the "Programs" tab on eBay Partner Network. There are also FAQs in the Help section of eBay Partner Network https://www.ebaypartnernetwork.com/files/hub/en-US/help.html and in the user guide in the advertisers and programs tab under "value-based pricing".

We want to continue to reward quality publishers and seek to continuously improve your experience in the program. This change will allow us to match payouts to the value of users and ensure we pay out our best affiliates the highest amounts. Thank you for your service and continued commitment to our relationship.
eBay Partner Network

Ebay acru, affiliate program, Ebay, partnet network