It’s totally unrelated to the subjects of this site, but anyway: at EdeseJaap, politiek in Ede you’ll find a lot of things I’m doing in and around my Dutch home town.

The economy being in a state of malaise, it’s not surprising that several sorts of crime are on the increase. Identity theft ranks high on the list. In prosperous times identity thieves tend to use high tech methods, coming up with telephone scams, internet website scams, email scams and other ingenious plans like taking photos of your card with a cell phone camera. When times are hard, these same thieves could resort to less sophisticated ways of stealing.

To a certain extend consumers have become fairly educated when it comes to outsmarting identity thieves. After all, you read articles and booklets on how to protect yourself from these criminals – like by shredding mail, being careful when shopping/paying online, and getting an annual credit report. Using reputable identity protection programs also helps you stay safe from the prying eyes of others.

But you’re far from in the clear now! When people are faced with losing their homes and the ability to provide for their families, it isn’t just the chic criminal anymore you need to watch out for, but the desperate identity thief as well. They could be anyone: your next door neighbor, a relative down on his or her luck, a coworker or someone you wouldn’t even suspect like a professional doctor or lawyer. The regular purse snatcher or carjacker falls into this category as well. How sad it may sound, you really should trust no one.

In order to help you protect yourself against identity theft, we’ve dedicated a special part of our Buyers Guide to the subject: Protecting yourself against identity theft. It’s not a bad place at all to pick up some good ideas, or the odd protective piece of software.

By David J Fletcher

The Build A Niche Store program is a highly successful program which was developed to take advantage of the eBay RSS feed. With the program it was made super simple to build a web site and fill it with eBay auction listings and if a visitor clicked on a listing they would be transported to the relevant page, the great thing about this was that when they bought something you would receive a commission.

The rates of commission would vary, country to country but in the US it was 50% of eBays fees and in the UK about 30%. Believe me this was very generous and without doubt it was simple to make good money. A bonus was that for every person that registered with eBay you would receive a sign up fee so by sending loads of visitors to eBay you were almost guaranteed to rake in the cash. It couldn’t last.

eBay began to make changes. In the early days it was as simple as filing out a form to become an eBay affiliate, once you had your number you started sending visitors and away you went. Nowadays it is much more difficult and there are even companies offering to get you into the affiliate program for a fee. The acceptance rate is fairly small.

The biggest change was yet to come, from paying a commission on the value of sales, eBay has now adopted the QCP or Quality Click Pricing method. QPC is somewhat of a mystery payment plan and works by taking the amount of sales you generate, dividing it by the number of visitors, deciding which day of the week it is and what you had for breakfast, they will then pay you an amount that they decide your visitors are worth. All clear?

A change that has just happened is that once again eBay have changed category numbers and altered the feed. How does this affect Build A Niche Store users? The answer is two fold:

1) By changing the category numbers eBay have effectively shut down many BANS sites as these numbers are used to pull in the relevant listings, so if golf changed from 1513 to 1614, but baby cots changed from 7134 to 1513 your golf site, which you worked hard to build is now talking about golf and advertising baby cots. In reality it means that a lot of BANS sites are now showing no listings at all.

2) By changing the RSS feed many sites which used the cloaking feature, which gives pretty URLs to the listings, a feature that many BANS sites use, are now showing errors and page not found signs. The cloaking feature will not play with the new RSS and so site owners are having to apply fixes to their BANS sites. OK, fixing one or two sites is easy but many owners have tens or even hundreds of sites. Lots of work to do guys.

OK, so that is the background, how does this affect BANS?

1) Acceptance into the eBay affiliate program is by no means guaranteed. In any case you will need a functioning website to apply and if you are buying BANS it is probable you do not have one or the knowledge to build one.

2) The affiliate program which is run by EPN, is no longer a worthwhile scheme. You have no idea how much money you will make and no way of finding out. There is a forum on EPN but they do not appear to wish to answer any questions which cast doubt on the program.

3) The recent changes to the RSS feed were not addressed by the vendors of BANS, in fact they seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth. Instead a fix was developed by a BANS user who was kind enough to share it with everybody who wanted it. It still says on the sales page that you can join a lively forum, well sorry you won’t. The forum is still frequented by some great people but the days of hundreds of BANS users taking part has long gone.

4) The unique selling feature of BANS was that it was easy for anyone to build a site and make money. Once upon a time this was true but with the explosion of BANS sites came the Google slap, thin content and large numbers of eBay listing meant the big G was going to do something, it did, it de-indexed thousands of sites. Nowadays, if you do not know how to build a website, optimise it, produce good content and market it, you will not make money.

If you want to earn a living as an affilate marketer you will need somewhere to start and there is an alternative which is just as powerful as BANS used to be but it is designed for today. Read about the best affiliate program and why you should buy it.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=David_J_Fletcher

http://EzineArticles.com/?Build-a-Niche-Store—Newbies-Beware&id=3754167

Sometimes I think. It hurts, so I don’t do it often, but every now and then I can’t really get around it anymore. Like now. Would it be a good idea to create a directory here of online shops and/or vendors that are trustworthy? The immediate answer of course is: “Yes!” because, after all, helping our visitors to find the good guys is part of what we do here. But then come the second and third thoughts. Who will decide who’s trustworthy or not? What are the criteria? Will the listed stores/individuals be checked regularly to see if they’re still alright? Is it worth all the trouble? I’m not sure yet. But I’ll keep thinking, and eventually the little light over my head will flash on, followed by the joyful exclamation: “Eureka”!

If you happen to have any thoughts on the subject, don’t be shy: please comment on this post and let us know what you think – or not.