For a while now, my focus has been on the eBay affiliate program and I have been trying to build a steady income from it. Despite having growing traffic to my most established site, my earnings are not following the trend. In fact, my earnings have dropped significantly.

It seems that over the past week or so, the eBay Partner Network has changed its reporting setup. Clicks and earnings are treated as separate data streams and both seem to be significantly delayed. Coincidentally, my earnings have almost hit rock bottom since the change.

Confused

My first ever eBay affiliate site is still my busiest and biggest earner. This is reasonable since it has been around for a while and it is a familiar face to the popular search engines. Traffic to this site has been building steadily as a result of the many thousands of pages that are indexed. Yet my earnings are getting worse.

So Long, eBay!

I am going to continue maintaining my existing eBay sites but I am not going to create any new ones. It has become painfully apparent that building a decent income, at my current earning level, would take more sites than I am willing to create. I am not afraid of hard work, but I am afraid of breaking my back just to earn pennies.

My Options

Since creating my first ever website, I have always been a content publisher. Whether I made money from AdSense or an affiliate network, I have always created websites that drive traffic to advertisers.

I never set out to be a content publisher, but it was the easiest route into making money online and still is the quickest way to make a little extra cash. That said, I want to build a serious online income, not just loose change.

As mentioned in my last post, I have a couple of ideas that could lead me in a new direction. After some consideration, I hope that I will find a viable way out of content publishing.