The Dyson Vacuum Era - Dyson’s are Hot
January 1, 2008
It’s apparent that the Dyson is one of the most sought after vacuums around. From what I can tell, the Dyson DC14 may be the most popular. I’m not a vacuum cleaner marketing genious by any stretch. However, the numbers don’t lie. When I started my niche website to help promote our sales of the iRobot Roomba at VacuumEmpire.com we were flooded with traffic for not only the Roomba’s, but Dyson’s as well.
When we started our blog we wanted to help inform other eBayer’s on how to find good deals and track our success. Some of if has come from being in the right place at the right time. The rest has been due to solid research.
The Dyson DC14
We use Google Analytics to track the success of pages within our site and we’ve found that the Dyson Vacuum Cleaner and the Dyson DC14 have been some of the most popular searches. As a result, we continue to have those items for sale on our website. The Dyson DC14 seems to blow away the competition in not only price savings, but overall sales and interest.
If you’re looking to pick a niche for eBay, you should definately consider honing in on a defined market like the Dyson’s. You can also really focus in on your niche by using keyword tools. These tools will help you find the popularity of what people are searching for online. Once you are armed with that information you will be set to find the products you need.
Driving traffic to your website and eBay auctions with Ads
December 10, 2007
Now that I have a few websites up and running, it’s time to make them work for me. Usually, anyone that works for you is going to cost you money and that’s not what we want with these sites. Our goal is to make money, right?
When I first started selling on eBay my goal was to just get the items to sell for a decent price, cover my costs, learn a few things and maybe make some extra cash. I soon learned that when you have more than a few auctions running, it’s all about getting traffic and getting those items to sell. You definately don’t want to continually relist those items and incur listing fees if you don’t have to.
After digging into eBay I learned that there are several ways to make money without having to sell anything on eBay at all. Yes, I’m talking about affiliate links. While the eBay affiliate program is a great way to make some extra money, you have to get people to your site and your auctions in order to find your links. That can be a job all by itself.
Search Engine Optimization, often referred to as SEO, is a requirement for getting traffic to your site and your auctions. Gone are the days of just putting up a web site, flood it with phrases and keywords and hope your site is picked up by a search engine. It now takes some work. Your website has to have fresh content, relavent content, inbound links, outbound links and keywords that people are searching for. All of that takes some work and time. Don’t be fooled by all of those auctions on eBay that guarantee traffic to your site by buying their eBook. Yes, some work as I mentioned in previous posts, but there is nothing that you can do overnight…. well, almost.
Everyone has seen ads on websites that seem to be relavent to the site, most served up by Google. Those ads can both make you money, and cost you money. Google Adwords is Google’s program for advertising that will allow you to place ads on other websites and in the Google search pages. The beauty of Adwords is that you set a budget per day or per month and there should be no surprises when you get the bill. That’s were people tend to make their mistake, that simply key in some phrases, keywords and let the ad go. They believe that the traffic will start flowing in… boy are they mistaken.
Google Adsense is Google’s ad serving program that serves up the ads you created in adwords. The ads are displayed on sites that are relavent to your ad content. The site owner makes money for each ad this is displayed on their site AND clicked. Hopefully that click will drive traffic to your site.
Sorry to digress, but it’s important to understand how it all works together. So how to do you drive traffic to your auction with Ads? First, I’ll assume you have a website, have some fresh content on the site and keep it updated fairly often.
eBay used to allow people to use Adwords to place ads and have those ads directly link to their eBay store or Auction. eBay now frowns on that and in fact, will not longer give you affiliate credit if you do that. Instead, you need to direct users from another site(your own) to your eBay store.
Using Adwords can be a very good way to get traffic to your site and also send traffic to your eBay auction. Our main website, Webposter.com, uses eBays store tools to display our current auctions on the right side of our website. When users visit our site, they are immediately able to click one of our auctions and bid. Through the affiliate toolkit, we also are able to get a commission on any other items the user may bid on and win. We drive traffic to our site using Adwords ads and those promote the items we are selling on eBay.
Placing an Adwords Ad is pretty straight forward. Once you get your account setup, you create a new ad compaign. You’ll need a catchy title, some brief ad copy, and a place to direct individuals. You’ll also need keywords that are relavent to what you are selling. This is where most people make their mistakes. They simply add as many keywords as possible, set their default bid amount and let ‘er rip. HUGE MISTAKE.
Tomorrow I’ll take you through how to pick your keywords and get the traffic rolling to your site and hopefully the sales
Affiliates do work… where we’ve been
November 14, 2007
It’s hard to believe that it’s been since July that I last posted. Time sure flys.
We’ve been busy with plenty of projects, some eBay related and some not. First off, I have to say that with our previous posts, I was pushing affiliate programs, adSense and all the other silent money makers. I still support that VERY much and here’s why.
In mid-July we began refocusing our efforts for our eBay store and trying to decide what we wanted still and pick as our niche. In doing so, the blog dropped off and I spent lots of my time researching products and sources. I COMPLETELY forgot about the websites I had put up, the ads I put on them, links for affiliates etc. Needless to say, when I finally got back to things, I had a nice little bonus waiting for me.
All along, while I was working on new endeavors, all of the hard work and effort I put in place earlier paid off. My niche websites, adsense, links etc were silently generating money for me. I logged back into my accounts and to my surprise, I had a bit of money sitting there. Now, I won’t be able to retire with it, but it was very nice seeing this sitting in my account.
So, don’t give up on the affiliate programs. I know, had I continued to work on the blog and drive traffic to my site, that amount would have been much, much higher.
So, where have I been? What new projects have I been working on? Well, to start off, we found our niche for eBay and off-eBay. The 2 go hand in hand. We’ve opened a new children’s boutique. Many of the items we have in the store are for sale on eBay. All have very nice profit margins. Some are very unique to our store and cannot be found anywhere else. All part of having a niche.
Take a look at our new baby boutique online: http://www.bblullaby.com
Affiliate Programs
July 18, 2007
There are plenty of ways to make money online. The obvious one is to sell items on eBay. Of course, if you have a great source for items then you have overcome one of the larger obstacles of doing business and making money on eBay. There are still plenty of others obstacles to overcome. Having a great source for merchandise isn’t enough. You need to have merchandise people want and those items must be priced competitively.
What of I told you that you can make money on eBay without selling a thing? Sounds too good to be true, but it’s not. eBay has an affiliate program that allows you to earn money from the items other people are selling on eBay.
An affiliate program is a program in which you promote, drive traffic and otherwise affiliate yourself with other peoples products or services. In doing so, you earn a commission on the sales of those items. There are some complexities to affiliate programs and it is definitely NOT a get rich quick concept. Some people have, but by and far you must dedicate time and effort into getting affiliate programs setup.
eBay’s program details are located at http://affiliates.ebay.com/. There you can get all the details and see how easy it is to sign up. If you already have a website that gets a good deal of traffic, you have a head start. The key to success in an affiliate program is being able to drive traffic to the locations were these products are being sold, and having that traffic click YOUR link to get there. Each time your link is click and the user follows through in a purchase or sign-up(depending on the program) you can earn money.
Clickbank.com is probably the largest affiliate site that provides plenty of merchandise that can be sold. The great thing about these sites is that you aren’t responsible for contacting customers, collecting money, emailing, shipping, fulfilling orders or anything that you traditionally need to do with typical selling. Your main object is getting traffic to your links to be click.
Driving traffic to your link can be done through pay-per-click advertising, search engine marketing, search engine optimization or combination of all them. I’d suggest looking at the AffiliateMillions.com website. Not only is the website a huge resource for information on affiliates, but the book is very well written and provides great information.
All in all, I personally think people can make money from affiliate marketing. I know people have, but I don’t think it is for everyone. You cannot do this overnight and it will require hard work, research and some dedication to get it going. If you want to make money online, I’d suggest a combination of selling and affiliates programs.
