That brings me to my latest niche site, Vintage Lunch Boxes.

This is a neat niche and if I am not careful I could find myself on eBay bidding on old lunch boxes.  Not through my own cookie of course because that is against the rules. At least it was prior to QPC and I would assume that it still is.

This is all hypothetical of course. Many things could happen to prevent this from happening. Like problems with the big G or bad bots going rogue on my sites.

Lets hope for the best!

Research the niche by checking eBay completed listings in the show only preferences. This way you can see if this niche is getting items sold and for what price range.

Then take that idea on over to the Adwords Keywords Tool and find out what keywords drive traffic for that niche.

Then register a domain name with those keywords and setup your niche site.

This is how my latest niche site, Vintage Masonic Rings, was created.

Also I updated my earnings today through the 2oth. I still look to be on pace for my 1k goal. Although today my earnings were pretty low. I only got paid on 1 campaign and all the rest I got nothing for. I am assuming this is the result of my bot problem. My EPC was down to 2 cents up until today when they decided to give me no cents!

I am hoping that I will work my way out of this. I am monitoring the clicks going to eBay now and they are back in line as of yesterday. I added up the days of bad bot clicks and it was 9 days. That was longer than I thought and previously mentioned in an earlier post.

I did report it to eBay and they said they forwarded it to the appropriate person. What that means I don’t know but I figured if I want the bots to stop I am going to have to stop them. So to do this I wrote a redirect 301 script that logs all referrers and IP addresses going to eBay. This way I can easily spot the bad referrer or IP address and quickly block it in the script. I also am not sending any traffic if it is not referred from my domain. This way a bot cannot cache the page somewhere and hit the links directly later.

EPN filters many bots for us, but not all. These bad bots are bad news and all people using EPN should have some plan of action in place to prevent what happened with me. I was sitting pretty with an EPC of about .10 and in 5 or 6 days because of these bots I am sitting at about .02.  Overall my earnings did not tank completely since my other campaigns carried me. This only hit 3 of my campaigns/sites hard. I started changing all my old sites over to use my redirect script. Maybe when I have more time I will share the script if anyone would like to see it.