Rants and raves from a Paxton man…

As I discussed in a previous post about my experience with the Mini Site Formula, there is a critical step you must take when you join the eBay Partner Network (EPN). I’ll get to that in a moment.

First I wanted to talk about what an excellent product the Mini Site Formula turned out to be. It takes you step-by-step from start to finish to build your first site. After that you simply repeat the process.

I did it with 6 sites. Joel recommends using .com domains, but I went the cheap route to get a feel for the system and used .info domains which I found for a buck a piece. My total outlay for putting the system into action was only $36.

One of the sites made $43 in a few days. The others didn’t fare so well. At this point, though, I was happy. It was cheap, easy and, best of all, generating cash.

Unfortunately, that particular road to riches hit a dead end thanks to my oversight. The step I mentioned earlier that you need to do is this: read eBay’s terms and conditions. I had assumed it was just the usual “don’t spam, don’t pretend you’re eBay” type of stuff so I skipped over it.

But lo and behold in all that legalese was a clause about what domain name you can’t use. They don’t allow trademarked terms before the third slash. So if you were building a site about ipods, you couldn’t use ipodsyoursite.com or ipods.yoursite.com. Guess what I did. Yep, broke that rule. To their credit, eBay sent me a warning email and gave me three days to comply or have my account terminated.

This brings me to my second mistake… registering with EPN using an email account that I don’t check regularly. When I did get around to it, I spotted the alert from eBay long after the deadline had expired.

Result?

Account closed. Crap.

I could go back and rework those using different affiliate products (non-eBay) that Joel mentions in the course. But those take more work and more money.

To wrap it up, I believe the Mini Site Formula is a great info product. Joel presents the information in a pleasant and easy-to-understand manner. I made money with it. Ultimately, my lack of success was my own fault. Hopefully, now that you’ve read this, you can avoid those pitfalls if you try out the product yourself.

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