Can’t Get Rich

It seems like everybody on the Internet has made eBay affiliate stores, so I figured I might as well join the party. Here’s what I plan on doing, and what I’ve done so far:

Sign up for an eBay affiliate account

I signed up with my primary email they day they switched to their new system. I never heard back from them, so today I signed up with one of my other emails. If you’re not familiar with it, the eBay affiliate system pays it’s affiliates 50%-75% of the revenue that eBay makes from auctions referred to them by the affiliate. You may be wondering why I bolded those four words. Well, put simply, a lot of people out there seem to think that they make 50%-75% of the item’s final price. This shows you that they’ve never made a single sale from their site. You only get a percentage of what eBay makes (that’s the listing fee, a very small percentage of the final item price, and any additional fees charged for special listing options). Still, that can add up.

Picking a plugin

Ah, the eternal struggle. PHPBay Pro or BANS? I say screw them both. I’m using PHPBay Lite. There’s no sense in paying for something if I’m not making any money yet.

If I do happen to start making money with this, I’ll just upgrade to PHPBay Pro. Nothing against BANS, but PHPBay Pro integrates directly with Wordpress, and Wordpress is great for SEO.

Pick a niche

There are literally thousands of niches. You can pick a product that’s in the news, popular on eBay, one that you saw at a pawn shop, whatever. It’s really not that hard. Just don’t pick something like XBox 360s or expensive cars, because everybody else is already doing that. Microniches are best, so instead of using a very broad category (Pokemon) pick something fairly specific (Mudkips).

Buy a domain

Nicheauctions.com. Replace ‘niche’ with whatever you’re promoting. If the .com is taken, see if it’s actually being used or if it’s just parked.

Get traffic

Like I said a few days ago, I’m getting out of PPC for awhile, which pretty much limits me to organic search and social traffic. Since I’m relying on organic search, I had to do a little extra research into keywords that are easy to rank for. Again, that’s pretty easy to do. If whatever ranks #1 for your primary keyword looks like this:

http://www.site.com/product/category/subcategory/niche.html

You’re in business.

I also plan on submitting my sites to free directories (myself, not hiring anybody). A few months ago I paid someone to do that for me, and now I have a list of 500 free directories. Time consuming? Sure, but I’m not doing anything else at work.

Keep building

Don’t just sit there and wait for the one site to work. Keep finding new niches and building more sites. Before you know it, you’ll have 100 auction sites each making you $50 a month. From there, you can sell the whole lot of them for $50,000-$75,000 and buy a whole lot of Jones Soda.

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