Tag Archives: ebay partner network

The Paralysis of Analysis

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There are many pitfalls that one must overcome when trying to make a living as a self-employed affiliate.  One of the toughest is conquering the little voice in your head.  You know, the one that says, “What’s the point of designing that new website, it’s just going to fail anyway.”  It is very good at talking you out of each and every good idea that you come up with before you even get started.  To be successful in business, not just Affiliate Marketing but any business, you must conquer the paralysis of analysis.

I can’t tell you how many times I have sat and stared at my LCD screen just waiting for something to magically happen.  It’s not that I think I can’t pull off the idea that I have cranking in my head, it’s that I worry that it won’t work and the time I spent will be wasted.  This is only reinforced each time an idea doesn’t pan out.  We’ve all heard the story about how it took Edison over 1,000 different tries to invent the light bulb, but Edison I’m not.  One failure can set me back days or even weeks.

One of the main reasons that this is fresh in my mind is because it happened to me just recently.  I had put a bunch of work into a website that I thought had a lot of viral potential, and I was using eBay Partner Network to monetize it.  It was fully designed, and I was just beginning to promote it and start doing the SEO work of link building and all that when I realized my mistake.  Like an idiot, I had forgotten to read the Terms & Conditions for EPN to see if they were ok with an affiliate using a website with “ebay” in the domain.  Little surprise, they are NOT ok with it…

Not a big deal right?  Wrong.  Mentally, it is a big deal because now I can’t get rid of that nagging feeling that it’s all pointless and that I’ll never recreate the success I have had with other similar sites.  This is where I kill myself every time.  I try to think about every possible way that it could fail, instead of thinking about every possible way that it could succeed.  I visualize Cease & Desist letters instead of Commission Checks.  It is almost impossible to turn everything around once you have dragged yourself through the mud like that.

However, one day you will wake up and lo and behold, there it is!  The burn.  The spark.  The hunger.  The idea.  When that happens, don’t fold your arms and start picking it apart, fire up your favorite web design program (or good ‘ol Notepad) and get cracking!  You’ll be glad you did.

SiteSnatcher Has Landed

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If there’s one thing that Internet and Affiliate Marketers can’t get enough of, it is tools & shortcuts.  Every process that can be automated gives us more time to focus on being creative and the next big idea.  A good friend of mine launched his own set of tools this week, and it is called SiteSnatcher.  I immediately signed up and gave it a test run, so I thought I would share my first impressions.

The first tool I tried was the Blog Commentor.  When you are trying to get a new site indexed and get some link juice to it, one of the easiest ways to do that is to comment on related blogs using your URL to link back to your site.  The Blog Commentor will take any keyword that you choose, such as “golf”, and come up with a bunch of direct links to the posts that you can comment on.  It also has a built in iFrame so that you can just load the blog inside of SiteSnatcher, submit your comment, then hit “Next” and it loads the next blog into the window.  This makes the blog commenting process a breeze, you can knock out 100 comments in short order.

Next I tried out the Site Targeting Tool.  This is designed for PPC guys that are looking for specific sites to target for the Content Network in their niche.  One of the best ways to make the Content Network profitable is to site target instead of just letting Google do it for you.  This can be a tedious process of searching for sites in your niche that are running AdSense so that you can target them.  This tool does it all for you.  Simply put in your keyword, hit go, and it will grab anywhere from several hundred to 1,000 sites in your niche that AdSense on the page.  This can also work as a URL scraper for finding sites to target with PPV.

One thing I will mention is that you need to wait a little bit for the results to come in.  These tools are doing real-time scrapes of lots of data, so when you hit go it can take anywhere from 10-15 minutes to see the full results.  It is all designed to run in the background, so you can set a couple different tools to run, or just work on something else and come back later.

The pricing is based on how much you want to use it.  On the basic package, you get 50 “credits” per day.  As you see in the screenshot above, the Site Targeting Tool take 25 credits to run.  You can run it (or any other tool for 25 credits) twice per day on the basic package.  I think it’s a cool way to test it out without spending a ton of cash.  If you start using it a bunch on a daily basis, then you can get a bigger package with more credits.

All in all I think that this is definitely going to turn some heads.  I don’t recommend products or services very often on this blog, so take it from me, this is a solid service that is only going to get better.   If you do PPC on the Content Network, or PPV, or if you do any type of SEO including the EPN / McJiffy / BANS method, then SiteSnatcher is a tool you will want to check out.

P.S. If you click one of the SiteSnatcher links above, you will go through my affiliate link.  If you don’t want to use my affiliate link, just go to http://sitesnatcher.com.

Disclosure: http://cmp.ly/5

Easy Money with eBay Partner Network – Part 2

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By now hopefully you have had a chance to get your website up and running, and if you are lucky your EPN account might have even been approved.  Now there is only one step left to do: get out there and market your new niche website!  You are going to be marketing this website through Search Engine Optimization (SEO), not PPC.  It is the best way to get free traffic to your website and keep it going for months and years to come.

It’s really not too tough, because the search engines are going to do all of the heavy lifting, you just need to make sure that your site is in the best position to get indexed.  The first thing that you want to do is make sure that you have a keyword list that you are targeting.  You probably came up with a decent list when you were researching what niche you wanted to create your website in, but if not, now is the time to create it.  You just need 20-30 keywords that are centered on your main keyword and slight variations of it.  For example, if you were selling Nike Running Shoes, your list could include Nike Basketball Shoes,  Buy Nike Shoes,  Best Nike Cross Trainers, Nike Air Jordans, Nike Socks, Nike Sports Shoes, etc.

Once you have your keyword list, you are going to put those keywords in your Meta tags.  You also want to make sure you write a good two to three sentence Description of your site to go in the Meta tags.  This will be the text that appears in the search engines under the link to your website.  You want to write something that gets people to click on it, such as “Get the cheapest prices on Nike Running Shoes on the planet.  Our list is updated daily, check it out today!”

The next step is to get some inbound links going to your website.  The easiest method is going to be to submit your website to free directories and social bookmarking websites.  The higher the Page Rank of the site, the more juice it passes on to your website.  Adding these links can be a little time consuming, but we are going to stretch it out.  You do not want to go out there and submit 100 social bookmarking links the day after you create your website, this will almost certainly get you penalized or “sandboxed” by Google.  I prefer to let the domain sit for a week or two and then start adding the social bookmarking links in groups of 3-5 per day, just like a site would grow through word-of-mouth or natural backlinks.  If you don’t want to do this grunt work yourself, you can hire someone to do it for a fair price.  This is definitely the way to go if you are cranking these sites out.

The next step is possibly the hardest one: wait.  It takes some time to get these sites indexed and ranking, but if you’ve done your research properly it should not take very long at all to get on to the first or second page of Google for your main keyword term.  Once that happens, the clicks will start coming in to your EPN account and with those, come commissions.  You are not going to become a millionaire with this method, but I have personally followed these exact same steps and made anywhere from $50 to $300 per month from a single one of these sites.  Once you have the first one done, crank out another one!  The key is volume.  $300 x 10 websites = $3,000 for month, and you are 100% profitable because there are no PPC costs.

Now go make some money.

Easy Money with eBay Partner Network

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There is no free lunch.  However, there is something I like to call, “A little bit of effort for a lot of return.”  eBay Partner Network is one of those opportunities.  You might have heard about the glory days of getting $25-$50 for free account signups back when eBay had their affiliate program on Commission Junction.  Make no mistake, those days are gone.  However, this does not mean that there is no money to be made with EPN.  On the contrary, it can be quite a nice little extra stream of income.  Let’s look at how it’s done.

Before we go any further, if you don’t have an EPN account, go here and sign up for one right now.  It takes them a little while to get around to approving you.  You can do the setup without your account and API key, you just need to have it before you go live with your site.

First of all, you are going to pick a niche.  There are many eBooks and blogs written just about picking a niche, but let’s not overcomplicate things.  All you are looking for is a small niche, something that gets around 20,000+ searches on Google every month, and it has less than 500,000 resulting pages when you search for it on Google.  To get yourself kick-started, I like to check out eBay Pulse.  The various Top 10 lists they have there for different categories are a great place to start.  If you can’t find anything small enough, then laser target even more.  Too much competition for baseball bats?  Zero in on one specific brand of baseball bats, a smaller brand even.  The more targeted the better, as long as there are searches for it every month.

Once you have picked your niche, the next step will be choosing the platform for building your website.  The most popular options here are phpBay and BANS, but these both come at a cost.  They are worth the money, but if you are looking to just start out with your first EPN niche site, I would recommend McJiffy.  It is a completely free open-source script, and I’ve used it for profitable sites myself.  The rest of this guide will assume that you are using McJiffy.  Once you have got your platform squared away, it’s time to set up your website.

You will want to buy a domain name with your relevant niche keywords in the domain itself.  You also want to have some type of value-based keyword in your domain.  Examples: CheapHuffyBikes.com, PaylessNintendoGames.com, etc.  I would recommend sticking with a .COM or .NET, stay away from .BIZ or .INFO, they look cheap and spammy.  We are going to be promoting our EPN site through SEO, so it needs to be relevant and easy to remember.

Finally, the last piece of the puzzle will be hosting.  It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, I’ve used Hostgator shared hosting for this, just make sure you get the Baby package with unlimited addon domains.  This way you can use the one hosting account to host all your niche sites.  Quantity is the name of the game with this tactic.

Now that you’ve got all the components, it’s time to put them together and build your first EPN site!  Unzip your McJiffy script, and upload it to your hosting account on the root of the domain that you purchased.  There’s just a couple of modifications that need to be made to the McJiffy site to maximize profit.  First of all, use Google Images to find a relevant header image for your website.  You can just leave the green default header in there if you want, but the image will make it look much better.  Second, you will want to write a description of your product and/or website.  Something like, “About Huffy Bikes”.  This doesn’t have to be 100% original, you can grab content from Wikipedia or even the company’s official website and bio, just make sure you re-write it in your own words so that Google won’t penalize you for duplicate content.  Try to keep this description/bio to around 300-500 words.  If you suck at writing, you can hire an article writer to do this for you for very cheap.  Just check around on the various forums.

All of these steps should take you several hours if you are quick, and a few days if you are taking it easy.  We’re going to take a break at this point to let you get started on your website, and pick up next week on Part 2: Marketing Your EPN Site.

Now go get to work!