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I noticed in the poll from Saturday that around 45% of my readers are earning less that $500 a month from Affiliate Marketing. I’ve been testing out a new method for the last 2 months that’s been working fairly well for me with the eBay Affiliate Program so I couldn’t think of a better time to share it. eBay has without a doubt been one of my most consistent earners over the years & now it just got even easier to make a kick ass site that’s earning you money in no time. The Theory The theory is simple, the eBay affiliate program pays out as follows:
An ARCU, is an “Active Confirmed Registered User.” This is someone that you refer via your site to eBay. They’re confirmed as active when they:
ARCU’s are easy money, there are also plenty of niches out there that you can really leverage this form of eBay income rather than the Revenue Share. The Revenue Share is the amount of money that you earn when someone buys an item. You earn a percentage of the total revenue eBay makes (not the sale price of the item). So naturally higher priced items will earn you more. I’m also pretty sure that Cars etc earn a flat fee, so don’t think there’s huge money in them. So if you refer a new customer to eBay & they purchase something then you get the ARCU & the Revenue generated. eBay’s cookies lasts for 7 days so you’ll also get revenue from any other items that the customer buys within that time period (Amazon only has a 24 hour cookie time, so this is a much better deal for Affiliates). I find that people quite often buy more than 1 item. So the theory is simple, we’re going to create a site that drives people to eBay via the various products we’re promoting. My Results It makes more sense for me to show you the site I used to generate the income, before going into the technique. It’ll allow me to come back & reference different aspects of the architecture. My Niche: Electronic Music Equipment As some of you know when I’m not working or engrossed in Affiliate Marketing I’m a very avid producer of Electronic Music. I also like to keep up to date with all the latest Gear & Equipment. So I decided to create a site that would allow people to compare the prices of various types of Hardware/Software & DJ Gear from eBay. I decided to brand the site instead of going for a keyword rich domain name (whichever you prefer). The domain used to be a blog, hence the pagerank so I had a bit of a head start as far as inbound links etc. I’m 100% certain that the domain is still sandboxed for certain keywords though.
This isn’t by far anywhere near the best niche I’ve come across, if anything it’s my poorest performer so far (there’s a lot of competition from big merchants in this space). However, one thing to note. This site doesn’t initially appear to be an affiliate site at all, instead it’s perceived as a comparison tool. Remember, there’s always going to be one particular niche that you know 10x better than anyone else. It could be Pianos, Golf Equipment or Trading Cards for a particular game. Use your knowledge in that realm to build a site so you can get a feel for the whole process.
You can see my results for last month with this site, almost no new ARCU’s which is a little disappointing. But then again there’s certain niches that perform better for signups (think impulse purchases, music equipment really isn’t an impulse purchase). What you need for this technique
It’s not vital that you have all of the above, but that’s exactly what I’m using. There are other free creative ways to come up with niches if you read some of my earlier posts. An expired domain isn’t necessary, however you will get quicker results. If you’re a bit on the lazier side & don’t want to worry about the whole Wordpress setup that i’m showing you then you can check out BANS (Build a Niche Store), it does something similar, quicker. But it’s less customisable (and costs $97). What advantage does my technique have over BANS? well for a start each product has it’s own unique page, whereas bans works more on categories. We’re also forking out $58 less (which you can use for hosting). Getting Started Firstly you’ll need to install Wordpress on the domain name you’ve picked. If you’ve chosen Hostican they’ll give you your first domain free, they also have Fantistico which allows for an easy 1 click install of Wordpress. If not, you’re on your own with the installation I’m afraid. Plugins you’ll need (these are all uploaded to the wp-content/plugins/ folder): PhpBay Pro (commercial): This plugin is the brains of the whole site, it pulls products from the eBay Category RSS feed & parses them onto your page within Wordpress. It’s updated constantly so the page content is always fresh. You can choose products by name, category & you can also set negative keywords to filter out. SEO Title Tag (free): This plugin allows us to set unique page titles for each post that we make. Top Level Categories (free): This awesome plugin removes the annoying /category/ part from the Wordpress permalinks. Sort Categories by Title (free): Wordpress normally sorts things in categories by Date, this allows you to sort everything alphabetically which works much better for a shop type layout. Different Posts per Page (free): You can set the number of posts to display per page with this plugin, I normally set it at around 25-50 on the homepage & set it at unlimited for categories (that way your products are never further than 2 levels from the homepage). Recent Posts (free): This plugin allows you to list your most recently added products. Choosing your Niche Analysing what’s selling well on eBay is a great way to find a niche. Check out the best selling artists & the pulse for awesome ideas.
The Beauty of this technique is that you’re all not going out & making the same website. Sure you could copy mine, but that’ll get you nowhere unless you know Electronic Music & want to try to compete with me. Instead, you’ll get the absolute BEST results if you try to find something unique that no-one else is doing. I have absolutely no tolerance for people that copy in this game, uniqueness is everything & will make you the biggest bucks. So put a bit of thought into it. Researching your Niche
Don’t forget you can list items in more than one category, so say for example you were doing a website about DVD’s. The Movie Transformers may appear in the Action category, the 2007 Movies category & the Megan Fox category. Try to use this feature to your advantage, it puts more weight behind that product if you have it listed in different categories (which will help rankings). Try to come up with a list of about 20-30 categories, I always research the categories that have the highest search volume. This will come in handy later when we’re setting the page titles (for SEO). Setting up Wordpress Once you’ve decided on a niche you need to set up wordpress. Template: You can choose any template you want. You can make it look anyway you want. The script parses into any template exactly the same so it doesn’t matter which you use, as long as you’re happy with how things look. I plan to release the template I use for my sites eventually. Check here for wordpress templates. Permalinks: .htaccess: This is pretty important, I’ve coded my htaccess file so that it forces a trailing slash on all URL’s (removes duplicate content problems), so that it stops virtual access to directories & also so that it redirects non-www requests to the www. Please replace the yourdomainname.com with your domain name
Categories: Create your categories under the manage tab. What I normally do is create a few master categories. So for example on the music equipment site, I have the equipment as one category then everything else as a child of it. Then I have the manufacturers as a main category & everything else as a child under it. I list all my categories on the sidebar, I also never have a product less than 2-3 levels away from the homepage. This really helps rankings. To list a child category in the sidebar I use the following piece of code:
Category Titles: Most people don’t know how to set titles for categories in Wordpress but it’s fairly easy with a few conditional statements. Here’s ho I do it:
Setting up PhpBayPro: To do this thing you need to grab your PID from Commission Junction (you’ll get this once you sign up for the eBay Affiliate Program). Set the country you want to target, set whether you want your items to appear highest priced, ending first etc (I normally choose ending first). Now you’re ready to add your first product. Simply create a new post. Let say for example we’re going to add the Transformers Movie. Title: Transformers DVD
Ignore the Z’s & other letters. We can see that it’s in category 617. Ok so now we put in the code to pull up the listings:
This will show 20 items labeled as transformers from category 617 & will ignore all the items with the word poster in it. Pretty easy eh? If that’s worked you should see the page generate something like this:
Now you just need to start adding products. I normally add about 100 to start off with, then start promoting the website. See my previous post about TNX if you want some free links to kick start your site. Results You can start to see results within a few days depending on how you promote the site. If you’re doing this full time you can probably pump out about 3-4 good sites per week. I estimate that this site took me about 15 hours in total to complete. Expenditure PhpBay Pro: $39 If this site generates the same income for the next 12 months, that’s $1,860 for 15 hours work & $45.95. If you build more sites then you can offset the cost of the software & factor it into that project. The guys that are earning less than $500 a month, you only need 4 sites like this to break that barrier. You’ll also find that you have more expenditure to spend on other areas like PPC, Promotion etc. Quick Promotion Tip: Spend the extra money & send out a really good quality Press Release when you’re launching your site. I’ve seen really really good results from this. Conclusion This is a very very solid way to not only kickstart your earnings but to all lay a solid foundation. This is something that I preach. The limits are endless with these types of sites, some of the weirder & wackier ones I’ve made have been the most successful so don’t be afraid to try out things like kids toys, hair products, playing cards, fps games & whatever else comes into your head. The most annoying part about this technique is Google’s Aging Filter (otherwise known as the Sandbox), it can sometimes be disheartening when you’re only getting < 30 visitors a day. But don’t despair, keep promoting & building more sites, don’t sit & worry about the non-performers. Because once you come out of the Aging Filter you’ll really start to see sales. Did I mention that these sites convert REALLY well? So even if you are only getting 30 visitors per day, you’ll still see sales |
Once you’ve decided which niche you want to target you need to decide which categories to choose, you can see the way I’ve split up the categories on the left hand menu in the image to the right.
