What they don’t realize is that lots of people make money by earning commissions on the eBay sales of other people’s junk. (I use the term “junk” loosely here, because there are also tons of very good, high quality, brand new products being sold on eBay all the time too).

eBay’s Affiliate Program

To put it simply, eBay has an affiliate program, which enables us to make money off of anyone’s auctions. eBay now handles its own affilate program, called the eBay Partner Network. (It used to let cj.com handle its program). eBay has done a good job with this new program, giving affiliates lots of information, tutorials, tools, and widgets to promote the site effectively. Even without additional tools, you can jump into promoting eBay auctions within your niche pretty easily.

More Robust Tools

If you want to go beyond what eBay offers, there are, of course, tools to help with that as well. For a while, the most popular tool was BANS (Build A Niche Site) software to quickly and easily build lots of niche sites promoting eBay auctions. It’s still popular, really, but some of the excitement about it died down once it got so popular that duplicate content started rearing its ugly head. (One site about golf clubs started to look just like another site about golf clubs, which was just like another, which was just like…you get the point).

Content First

The better way to make affiliate sales, in my opinion, has always been to concentrate first on content, and second on sales, rather than the other way around. If you provide great content and have a trustworthy rapport with your users first, then making sales is much easier to do. In addition, all that great content and user trust eventually contributes to better rankings in the search engines; driving more traffic to your site, which eventually leads to more sales.

So, although the quick and easy path of BANS is still right for some (maybe even you), I like the more content-integrated approach, where you integrate affiliate links naturally into your valuable content. This might be in the way of specific product reviews, or it might be just niche-relevant, but either way, the content is the main focus, and the eBay links are secondary. One of the best tools on the market for this kind of approach is the phpBay WordPress plugin. This WP plugin makes it easy to pull relevant auction links into your blog posts. This keeps the focus where it belongs – on your content.

Whatever tool used – eBay’s own tools, BANS, phpBay, or any other tool you might run across – the end result is the same … you don’t have to sell your own junk on eBay to make money on eBay … you can more easily make money by referring users to ane of the hundreds of thousands of ongoing eBay auctions, and then getting paid commissions for sending high quality traffic that result in signups and sales.

Here’s a quick example of an eBay creative (be sure to hover your mouse over it – it’s really cool):

As you can see just from this one example, there’s some pretty interesting things that can be done with the eBay affiliate program, and there’s tons more available, so it’s definitely worth considering.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2010. | Permalink | 10 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: BANS, eBay, phpBay
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