eBay listings in your blog using PHPBay and affiliates
January 14, 2008
Every since getting involved in blogging I’ve been intriqued with how the search engines seem to eat up new posts and get blogs indexed quickly. It’s truly amazing. I’ve read time and time again from eBooks and marketing websites that blogs are one of the best ways to get traffic to your site.
Once of the other amazing sources for traffic is eBay. When I first gotted started with eBay I quickly realized that the secret to making money online was using eBay as a traffic generator. If you have popular listings you can gain some additional traffic by driving those shoppers to your eBay ME page and then to your off eBay website.
Those are great tactics if you have several products you’re selling on eBay. How can you make money using eBay and a blog if you have nothing to sell? Well, if you haven’t heard of the eBay affiliate program you need to. Using Commission Junction, eBay has created an affiliate program that allows you to display eBay listings on your personal website. Additionally, you can post eBay signup links and drive traffic to eBay. Each method allows you to collect money for driving traffic to eBay. See the complete eBay commission schedule and signup for the affiliate program.
Once you are an eBay affiliate you can now begin your campaign and drive traffic to eBay and get commissions. How you ask?. Blogging. Find a niche you’re interested in on eBay. Whether that is knitting or gaming. If it is something you enjoy, have an interested in, and is not over saturated, you have chance. You can start a blog on Wordpress.com for free and begin posting articles about your niche. Include links using some of eBay’s affiliate tools like the Flexible destination tool or the Editor’s Toolkit. You can also use the eBay editors kit to post actual auction listings on your site. Each time someone clicks on one of the auctions and wins that auction, you get a commission. Those are all nice options.
Then I stumbled on PHPBay. PHPBay allows you to integrate eBay listings into your Wordpress blog by simply adding a few tags in a post. What’s amazing is how easy it is and how well formatted the results look. Unlike the typical eBay editors kit, PHPBay produces results that fit into your blog and look like an extension of your post. You can further narrow down the results by filtering by number of items to show, keywords, categories, seller names and prices.
To put it all together and really drive traffic to your site and eBay you can try the following. Create a short article/posting in your blog with about 250-350 words. Inside the article, add a small PHPBay section that includes 2 items related to your article. At the end of your article include another PHPBay section that display 10-20 items related to the article contain. The combination of the article and eBay listings should help shoot your article posts up the rankings.
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.
