Can’t Get Rich

I just haven’t had much luck with digital goods lately. While other affiliate marketers have made their fortunes from ebooks, dating services, and ringtones, it’s just not working out for me. That’s why I’ve decided to try a different approach, one mainly focusing on eBay.

As I mentioned the other day, I’m going to try to get into the affiliate niche store business. I’m testing one right now, and if I can find a good method of driving traffic, I’ll probably build 10-25 stores a month (and many more if I really start making money).

While affiliate stores are all well and good, I’m thinking of taking it a step further and actually starting an eBay store. I’ve been thinking if over for awhile, and I’ve decided to do a few trial auctions for imported items from Japan. If things work out well, I’ll start doing lots and lots of them. I have a friend over in Japan who is going to sea-mail me a big box of stuff, stuff that our research shows we can get a 300% ROI. Isn’t legitimate business fun?

Ebay has always been fascinating to me. You can sell the most mundane crap on there. Just as an example, I have an uncle who lives by a pier in New York. He used to go out to that pier at low tide, pick up snails, and sell them on eBay. Now he makes a pretty decent living selling aquarium stuff. I find it amazing that you can just pick up crap you’ve found lying around and sell it on eBay.

How can you apply this to your situation? What if you don’t live near an ocean? Well, for starters, pay attention to what’s on sale in your area. If you find a store that’s overstocked and having a 90% off sale, buy up whatever it is they’re selling and resell it. A long time ago, a store in my hometown was overstocked on Gameboy Advance games and was selling them for $5 a piece. I bought 20 of them and resold them for an average for $30 each.  Huge profit.

Of course, managing an eBay store takes a lot of work when you factor in order tracking and shipping, so it’s not for everyone. Still, if you think you can find a niche and crack it, you stand to make a lot of money.

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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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When practicing online marketing, I find it best to throw your morals and ethics out the window. Chances are, if the offer you’re running pays well, there’s something shady about it. Maybe it’s a website that promises a free sample, but actually signs the poor sap up for a monthly subscription if they don’t cancel with 7 seconds of ordering (next time read the fine print). Maybe it’s some new diet fad that is too implausible to actually work. Whatever it is, you have to temporarily suspend guilt to market it effectively.

My technique for this is simple: Just find a group of people that annoys/infuriates/pisses you off. For me, that’s everybody on Earth except for children, redheads, and kittens. Of course, that’s still a very broad demographic, so I’ll break it down into more easily identifiable groups.

Middle/High Schoolers

I got my first email address in 6th grade. I quickly discovered that the amount of spam I received was directly proportional to the number of “OMG FREE N64″ sites I signed up at. Today, when I run email submits, I like to think that I’m teaching a valuable lesson to the younger generation. Specifically, don’t give our your personal information online.

The same thing applies to cell phone offers. I didn’t even get my own cell phone until I was 18, and by then I knew it was stupid to (a) put my phone number into some random site and (b) not read the fine print. These days, we’ve got 12 year olds* running around with iPhones and clueless parents not teaching their kids about online privacy. If you’re marketing a ringtone offer, consider it a public service.

*Tricking 12 year olds into signing up for a ringtone service is still a scummy thing to do. Wait til they’re in high school. They should know better by then.

Soccer moms

I’m not talking about the stay-at-home moms who keep the house clean and raise their kids. I’m talking about those horrible abominations that dress like they’re 10 years younger, max out their husband’s credit cards, and suck down frappacinos like they’re dying of thirst. In short, consumer whores. Go ahead and target them with whatever you want, because they have no common sense and they’re not going to change any time soon.

Dirty old men

Those 45 year old guys hitting on the 21 year old girls at the bar? Yeah, them. While I haven’t tried it, I’ve heard that posing as a girl of said age group on Myspace/craigslist and tricking those guys into signing up for online dating services works wonders.

Douchebags

“Hey brah, wanna play some Halo brah? Have you seen my can of axe brah? Wanna hit the kegga’ brah?”

College humor has this one covered.

Abandon your ethics

Just find one or two groups and exploit the hell out of them.  Maybe they’ll learn something from the whole experience.

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Man, I had a terrible day.

I sat down and tallied up last month’s PPC revenue vs costs, and the results weren’t pretty. I pretty much wiped out a lot of the success I had been enjoying, thanks to a couple of campaigns that went wrong. Pretty depressing stuff.

You know what though? It’s not all that bad. I decided to lay off on PPC for awhile and find other methods to try. Thanks to that decision, I came up with two methods that I’m going to be trying over the next week or two, and best of all they won’t cost me anything but my time.

The first method I won’t be sharing with you. Gotta keep some secrets.

The second method is publicly available. I found it here. It’s a pretty solid technique, and it’s one that I wish I’d thought of sooner. I’m pretty sure that only one person who reads my blog goes to the same University I do, so I’m going to go ahead and summarize what I’m going to be doing and how it can work for you.

If you’re too lazy to read the article I linked to, here are the basics:

1. College students like free stuff.
2. There are lots of college students.
3. Print up a bunch of flyers with tear-off sections that advertise something with your URL on it.

That’s the quick and dirty. Basically, what I’m going to do is take an affiliate offer (this one, for example), find a good domain name and setup a redirect, print that domain name on 100 tear-off flyers (example), and put them up all over campus. Best part: I’m going to be printing the flyers on university printers, which makes it absolutely free for me.

I’ll pick a new offer every other week or so and see what works. If you live near a university, consider giving this method a try. If you don’t, you still might be able to try this method on community bulletin boards (coffee shops, for example), although I doubt your flyer will receive the same amount of exposure (my school has 36,000ish students).

Moral: If one method fails, try another one.

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Ever sleep in til 2 PM and then play Starcraft for four hours (MY LIFE FOR AUIR)?

Yeah…oops. I have Wednesday’s off from work, and I typically take it easy, but not that easy. That’s not to say I completely wasted the day though.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: Network with your peers. Send them the occasional email. Talk to them on AIM. You stand a chance to learn way more than you ever would have just reading their blog or forum messages. Two examples:

1. Matt and I talk on AIM almost daily. We had lunch last week. Through these conversations, Matt has increased my knowledge about incentivized marketing 1000%, and also let me in on a few of his more ingenious ideas (ideas that I will not be sharing with you guys =P).
2. Mr. Shady has spoken with me on AIM a few times, and recently revealed to me an approach to marketing that I hadn’t thought of. He told me that it’s a fairly easy market to get into, and that if I started now, I could easily make the $2,500 I need to take my trip overseas this August. I spent a few hours today doing research and setting up campaigns according to his advice, and if it comes through for me, I’ll definitely be bringing him about a thousand boxes of Pocky when I come back.

So yeah. Since I really didn’t do much today, I’d like to challenge you to do what I’ve done: Join online communities (Wickedfire, in my case), ask questions, be active, and keep asking questions. Eventually, you’ll get answers that work for you.

Oh yeah, and go do it now.  No sense in waiting.

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