Make Money From eBay Affiliate Sites

[Andy]

I have been making some good money over the last couple of years from the eBay Partner Network. Basically, I set up some static niche sites and used the BANs script to add relevant eBay listings to the sites. The listings re-direct via my affiliate link and generate a 50% revenue share if somebody wins the auction. Also you get paid a chunk of change if the visitor is new to eBay and signs up.

Now I am coding my own solution to include eBay products in WordPress Blog Posts. Like many other marketers, I am using WordPress as the "engine" to power my affiliate sites since they get traffic and cut out most of the technical stuff regarding building websites.

The products will be highly relevant to anything that you blog about. Normally you have to buy software to do this but I am prepared to give away my code and help you get your site up in exchange for testimonials about how cool the software is.

My solution will be as good as if you manually surfed eBay and hand picked products that best matched the topic of your blog post and then inserted a table of thumbnails, affiliate links and prices etc into your blog post. But my software will do this automatically and regularly update the products as time moves on.

Not only that, it will mask the monster-sized eBay links and replace them with keyword links that blend seamlessly into your site's navigation so visitors don't freak out when they hover their mouse over the links.

Also, I may include click stats, but since the products will be regularly updated, stats per product may not make sense.

And, unlike other solutions, my one does not scrape content (grey hat method) but uses the official RSS affiliate feed link that you get from your eBay Partner Network admin area.

For this to work for You, you will need to build a niche blog site about a product line that interests you such as Skate Boards, Exercise Equipment, Alloy wheels etc. So you can have a site that is capable of generating income from related product sales AND will be accepted by the eBay affiliate staff when they check out your site AFTER it is up and has several good, unique articles on it. Or you can apply it to your existing non-spam site.

So are you ready to make some money?

Any questions? Post away ...

[Andy]

Progress report:

I got the WordPress plugin coded so it activates in the WP Admin area.

Also I got the code working to pull in latest product listings related to post keywords and store them in the database (cached so as not to request the feed too often).

Why go out on a Saturday night when you have a project this exciting to code?

The next step is to write the code that produces the HTML to display the products in a grid below a post.

Then code to redirect the SEO friendly links to the images and affiliate links will be written.

p.s. make sure you "subscribe" to this site in FireFox or an RSS reader so you don't miss out on the regular updates!

[Andy]

Great News!

The script has been completed and it is ready to go live on sites to add live eBay product listings and start generating affiliate commissions on autopilot.

Standby to hear reports about how much actual income the script generates. Maybe an announcement of the first winning bid and how much income it produced? This is what you need to know right? How much pure automatic robotic income is this script capable of channeling into your bank account every month?

But give me a chance to actually remove the old Ad junk from my test site (weight loss related), revamp the template and turbo-charge it with this powerful script  

Wow!!! I can't wait to get this baby going ....

[Queen Bee]

Sounds great, man! I'll see about installing this on my dad's blog once I get it up and running. I'll be glad to post my review on it. (By the way, the only reason I haven't designed his blog yet is because he decided maybe he didn't want one. Just two days ago he told me he was ready for me to start designing.)

[Andy]

I uploaded the script to my own Blog today and there is an issue in that it doesn't find the keywords from tags. But I think this is a minor problem that I can easily overcome. Since WP is open source, complicated and regularly updated, it can take time to understand now to interact with all the features from code.

Maybe it is an issue with the post I experimented with being kind of old and cached?

But I sense how awesome you feel it would be to insert live eBay products on your Dad's site and ideally linked to via your affiliate link!

Your dad will likely be skeptical and dare I say it, one of the majority losers out there, so I wouldn't try and convince him of the merits of building a web site but rather leverage this dude into producing content. For example: photos. If you feature their face then you need permission to publish but photos of the dinner plate, truck etc. are fair game.

You could also think about recording them on a mic or video about a particular topic so you can construct a YouTube video.

[Andy]

I got the code running on my weight loss blog and it is very cool adding the latest related products to the posts.

Here is a specific example: http://www.weight-loss-tips.ws/velocity-weight-loss-diet/

My next move will be to add the code to my classified ads site to spice that up.

It will be say 1 month or so until I can reliably tell how well it performs in terms of generating income.

For updates to the cached (saved) feed, eBay is very fast so there is minimal delay which is good too.

I am hoping to use Menard as a lab rat to test out the script on his new site.

[Manu]

mmmmmmmmm...... Would not really like to spoil the party but I guess its already available here - www.ebaypartnernetwork.com/files/hub/en-US/editorKit.html if I'm correct.

[Andy]

My code uses an affiliate tool: the rss feed. Also, it comprises a Wordpress plugin to extract the post tags and modify the feed URL according to keywords. And it masks the eBay URLs.

The editor kit requires you to log in with your eBay ID which I only have for the UK site. So I am not sure if I can generate listings for the dot com site with this tool. Anyway, code would still be required to dynamically alter the feed according to post keywords. Thats why many people purchase phpBay for around $79

Also, there is an API for developers to use.

I guess it boils down to how customized you want to go. If you are happy to cut and paste code with fixed search terms then the editor kit may be all you need.

But if you want to have different products related to niche keywords show up on each post of a blog then a PHP solution is better IMO.

If you want to data mine eBay to extract products based on complex criteria such as most people watching and cheap relative to previously sold similar items, then the API would be the way to go.

[Manu]

As far as I know they provide a simple javascript code that can be inserted into the template or even in the posts itself to make it work easily on wordpress or any other blog platform.

I'm not sure but I suppose it automatically generates listings for the right geographical area. Or one can select a single geographical area to control the display of listings.

Of course, no doubt phpbay is the best of them all.

[Andy]

As far as I know they provide a simple javascript code that can be inserted into the template or even in the posts itself to make it work easily on wordpress or any other blog platform.

I'm not sure but I suppose it automatically generates listings for the right geographical area. Or one can select a single geographical area to control the display of listings.

The affiliate links must go to a geographical site that you are approved of as an affiliate otherwise you will not get paid.

Tip: I think you should actually sign up as an affiliate and use the tools yourself, then you would understand how they work. I have personally used the eBay editor tool and am a long-term affiliate and got my bank account credited by them on many occasions.

Of course, no doubt phpbay is the best of them all.

How did you arrive at that conclusion? Have you purchased and used this tool? I bought and profited from the BANs script which is quite good IMO, maybe better than PHP Bay and I profited from it. I haven't personally used PHPBay so can't say how good or bad it is in my personal experience.

[Queen Bee]

Congrats on getting the script up and running smoothly. I checked your blog-- the featured products all seem quite relevant and useful.

Your dad will likely be skeptical and dare I say it, one of the majority losers out there, so I wouldn't try and convince him of the merits of building a web site but rather leverage this dude into producing content. For example: photos. If you feature their face then you need permission to publish but photos of the dinner plate, truck etc. are fair game.

True. He has so much to say, it's just a matter of directing it productively. Photos are a great too, and he's got thousands of them.

[Manu]

Infact I did used both editor tool and PHPBay but never got more than a few cents.

[Andy]

There seems to be a lot of people recommending PHPBay at the moment. But when lot's of people build thin content affiliate sites they can get slapped when G recognizes the fingerprint. This is what happened with the BANs script. I think PHPBay inserts a tell-tale powerd-by link in the listings?

[jaman017]

hi all my new friends  you can get all new important post here, a large member blog did a survey of 300 eBay affiliates last year. By far, most of the affiliates reported making less than $300 a month, but about 9% were making over $2500 a month and the top 1% were making over $10,000 a month. I met a couple of these super affiliates at eBay Live last year.  What it all come down to was how much they work at it.  One guy I spoke with has 5 blogs and two websites.  He faithfully spends three hours a day adding content to his blogs and another three or four hours a week on his two websites.  He told me he averages around $7-8,000 a month from the program and his blogs generate another $2000 + from the Google Ad Sense program. That's not too bad for effectively a 20-hour week.
while I met with the eBay folks who run the partner arrangement at eBay Live in Chicago, they told me there were 14 super affiliates who make over $500,000 a year with the eBay partner program. I honestly don't know how they do that and what their secrets are but I guess it proves that you really can make good money with the eBay join curriculum, bye friends now.