Making money as an ebay affiliate

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It's no different than if you were building any other website with SEO in mind, I'm no expert by any means and wordpress makes it pretty easy to make a search engine friendly website. Just make sure to have good titles tags that are relevant to the auctions being listed, and a good domain with a popular keyword in it.

Also make sure that you've got decent visitor tracking software installed so that once you're indexed you can pay attention to what keywords are bringing you traffic and improve on them. I found that I was getting visits for a lot of keywords that I didn't even target, so I may add those to the sites content in strategic places and watch the SERPs to see if it gives me a little boost or not.

One thing that I wasn't sure about was if the the search engines will pull keywords from the eBay listings themselves, I found out that they actually do, and long tail keywords have been a pretty big source of traffic for 2 of my sites because of the search engines getting extremely relevant keywords straight from the listings.
 


Mal E Mal said:
It's no different than if you were building any other website with SEO in mind, I'm no expert by any means and wordpress makes it pretty easy to make a search engine friendly website. Just make sure to have good titles tags that are relevant to the auctions being listed, and a good domain with a popular keyword in it.

Also make sure that you've got decent visitor tracking software installed so that once you're indexed you can pay attention to what keywords are bringing you traffic and improve on them. I found that I was getting visits for a lot of keywords that I didn't even target, so I may add those to the sites content in strategic places and watch the SERPs to see if it gives me a little boost or not.

One thing that I wasn't sure about was if the the search engines will pull keywords from the eBay listings themselves, I found out that they actually do, and long tail keywords have been a pretty big source of traffic for 2 of my sites because of the search engines getting extremely relevant keywords straight from the listings.
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If you don't mind answering, how much content do you have on your site? Only reason I haven't been working on these sites as much is since I'm not good at writing and I would have to pay somebody to write content for every site for SEO reasons.


Thanks
 
I have hardly any content on most of my sites which isn't a short description of the page & header. One or two times I had to go and do research for a certain enthusiast product so that my site would @ least be believable. I wouldn't stress too much about content writing, worst case go to wikipedia and pick some decent paragraphs about your content, rephrase the sentences & mix them up a bit, and there you go, unique content. ;-)
 
slacker,

Do you happen to have the URL for Easy Autoresponder? I found it the other day, but now that I google it, there are other autoresponders with that name that are not showing the delayed autoresponse. Sorry for the hassle. Thanks for such a great thread.

Marceia
 
Mal E Mal said:
I'm new here and read this thread a few weeks ago. Decided to give it a try and built some basic SEO friendly sites, and since December 14th I've made just over $200 using the free phpBay pro script and wordpress. :D

The only problem I've come across is getting these sites indexed quickly and ranking well. It can be tricky getting backlinks on a site with nothing but eBay links on it...
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I didnt buy phpbay pro though I am fucking around with the lite version now. Lite kinda sucks, it does what its supposed to do, but the source is encrypted. There is no way of adding classes, ids and whatever else to the output elements. Or lets say your a person that dislikes tables, well your kind of fucked.

Do you get encrypted source with the pro version? Any control over the output?
 
jerxs said:
I didnt buy phpbay pro though I am fucking around with the lite version now. Lite kinda sucks, it does what its supposed to do, but the source is encrypted. There is no way of adding classes, ids and whatever else to the output elements. Or lets say your a person that dislikes tables, well your kind of fucked.

Do you get encrypted source with the pro version? Any control over the output?
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I believe you can get the phpBay Pro API instead of just the WP plugin. That gives you more customization (I think) than just the plugin for WP. You'd have to email the Wired Studios guy who wrote it to be sure.
 
Im really not a programmer... I know the plugin runs off of Ebays application program interface "API," but that really does me no good. But comparing the output source of a php file to the file itself makes it pretty easy to modify the script and style as needed.

The problem is that the complete part of the source that processes and spits out the output in phpbay-lite.php is encrypted via iocube or some shit. Making it impossible for dumb ass code hackers like myself, that don't know how to program do simple shit like add classes and id's to certain elements, ditch tables for <div>'s and so on.

BTW, ebays affiliate program kicks ass! I have making a decent amount from their program in the last 8 months to a year by utilizing their "stock tools" Everyone that has a computer Ebays, well at least 80% of all casual web users Ebay " from personal research and recon", so....
 
This may be a stupid question, but do you put a new ad for the same auction on daily for the same location? In other words, if I'm selling DVDs in Los Angeles, would you put a new ad on every day or every other day to keep people seeing it on CL? I haven't used CL that much, so aside from the regular pain in the ass of trying not to get ghosted/flagged, I'm not sure how often you want to put the ad up again.

Also, if you ARE going to repost frequently, are you using a new account for that as well? I would think you should, but just clarifying.

Thanks.
 
jennstall said:
Hell yes! The length of the cookie alone makes Ebay a more viable option. I think it is 7 days for surfers already registered on Ebay and 30 days for newbies. I get several new sign-ups per week, plus the commissions for auctions won. The commission is 50% of Ebay's fees from the seller, but with the right niches those commissions can easily get you $50-$100 per auction. That won't happen as often as the dollar here and .50 cents there, but I usually get at least a few big dollar commissions a week and 10 to 30 commissions per day at even a dollar or so each add up. Enough to make it well worth my time to pump out more sites.

Oh, and new users don't need to win an auction to get you the $25 ACRU. They just have to become an active user. So the minute they bid, you get the sign-up commission. Even if they lose the auction.
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You get the $25 sign up commission if the person both registers and places a bid. As jennstall said the bidder does not have to win the auction. There is a 30 day cookie for this so if someone signs up today and then 27 days later they place a bid you get $25. In the cj report a signup will be listed as a lead. About 30% of my signups actually place a bid within 30 days.
 
I have a question for the people using phpBay. Is there a way to track the words that are making the sales?
 
slackerguy said:
Not that I know of.

Kevin ?
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Thanks. After my post I saw the phpbay sales page that there is SID tracking ONLY through a third party which I think is a huge pain in the neck.

I am using another plugin which is lesser known which is called BayRSS. It can install both ebay and amazon feeds. The neat thing for the ebay rss feed is you can set the SID in the code and then it will show whenever you make an ebay sale in the ebay reports.

The actual sales page looks a little dated because the parameters are slightly different now. It is very simple, you first setup the plugin on options and put in your ebay PID and set the global settings. I never tried the Amazon feed btw. After that you are all set and just insert a little code with 5 parameters in your post and the feed will be inserted. You can have as many feeds as you want on your blog.

A feed is setup this way:

[nms:ebay search term,specify amount of items in the rss feed,minimum amount of bids,minimum price,SID which will show in commission junction]

so a real feed on a post or page would look like this:


[nms:stupid product,10,1,75,stupidproductwillshowincjreport]


Here is a link to BayRSS. It is an affiliate link but I really do use BayRSS all the time so don't jump all over me. :Yahoo_29:
 
So there's no way to track sales with phpbay? I'm using phpbay, and I want to setup different stores on different pages on the same blog but, I'm trying to figure out how I can track sales.
 
Nevermind you can use SID's with phpbay pro. I went to options and scrolled down and it expains how to set it up.
 
About posting on craigslist, how do you get around the IP problem? If I make 4 posts an hour is that too much? Do you use u.s. proxies? I'm having trouble finding u.s. proxies, if somebody could advice I'd appreciate it.


Thanks
 
Man, we're talking less than $50 to try it. I bit the bullet and this month made $200 with 2 websites. Quit fartin' around and just do it!

gordon gekko said:
For a n00b such as myself, would these methods be advisable for me to try? I've read that becoming an eBay affiliate is with Commission Junction is not recommended for n00bs.

GG
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