How To Make More Money With Ebays Affiliate Program.

September 1st, 2010 - 

If youve been on the web for a while, the chances are that at some time or other you will have taken part in an affiliate program. They generally work by giving you a URL to send people to their site that contains your affiliate number, and then giving you a small amount for each person who comes in using your link and signs up or buys something.

eBay’s affiliate program follows this basic formula, but with a few twists.

It pays a lot. Each user who follows your link to eBay, signs up and then bids on anything within 30 days will earn you $20. Most affiliate programs will only give you something like 10% of the users first purchase. Whats more, for each existing eBay user who clicks through from your site and then places a bid or buys something, youll get 10c.

You can be your own affiliate. If you just link to your own auctions with your affiliate link number from your own website, then youre getting money without sending buyers to anyone except yourself. There arent many affiliate programs that can say that.

So Where Do I Sign Up?

You can visit eBays affiliate program at http://affiliates.ebay.com/. Once youre there, just click Join the Program. You will then be required to sign up for Commission Junction, which is free.

How Can I Get People to Click the Links?

eBay suggest a number of business models for their affiliates. Before people can click your affiliate links, they need to be at your website. There are two ways to get them there using a search engine, which eBay refer to as natural and paid search.

Natural search: This is when someone finds your website in a search engines normal results, either because something you wrote is relevant to them or you used SEO (search engine optimisation) techniques. Be careful not to use any dodgy methods to get a high search engine ranking, though, or eBay might come after you and keep your affiliate money.

Paid search: This strategy involves paying for traffic to your website or directly to eBay, by buying ads on search engines. If you go for this option, its actually worth placing ads on the less popular search engines instead of the big ones: theyll have similar click-through rates as a percentage, but the cost typically wont be anywhere near as high.

Content: What you can do is just have a normal website, with articles on a variety of subjects and perhaps a community forum. Run the website for pleasure, but place the occasional eBay affiliate link there.

Newsletters: Dont ignore the potential of putting your affiliate ID in each time you send out a newsletter. You can get 10c for every bid it generates with no extra work, which could be enough for the email to pay for itself, whether it leads to any sales or not.

Sadly, our time together is nearly at an end, but there is one thing that I have left to show you. Its called the featured gallery, and it could help your sales. Look out for the next email!

How Alan’s Website Could Easily Make More Money

November 24th, 2009 - 

My Australian friend, Alan, recently got in touch for advice on how to make more money from his recently set up website. Alan is into natural health treatments, so his simplehealthmaintenance.com website is one that offers natural solutions to health problems.

Alan asked for my advice as to how to monetize this new site, knowing that I have had success with Google Adsense.

First off, Alan needs to consider whether sales are his primary objective. If so, the addition of Adsense to the site, whilst bringing in extra income, might reduce potential sales.

Adding Adsense to his site would be a quick & easy way to make money. I suggested a horizontal Adsense link, just below the main navigation bar which runs across his index or home page. This would look natural and looks like part of the website navigation.

Also, the addition of a Google skyscraper unit on the right of his page would add value to the site, and also increase his income, but without detracting from his primary objective of sales.

Now, Alan is an expert on health, but not so good at search engine optimization. His heading for the page of Simple health treatments by non-invasive electronic acupuncture may explain what the page is about, but it isn’t going to get him hordes of traffic from the search engines – no-one is looking for either simple health treatments or non-invasive electronic acupuncture! Zoom along to Overture and check out their keyword selector tool in the resource centre if you want to see just what it is that people are searching for.

I suggested to Alan that he look at which words which people were searching for. Although he is happy to buy traffic for the site, using the pay per click engines (e.g. Adwords & Overture). This makes it easy to get a top search engine ranking for particular words or phrases (known as keywords) but can prove an expensive way of getting traffic.

Improving his natural search engine rankings, so that people found his site when typing in the keywords, would reduce Alan’s costs and increase his profit margins considerably.

This is relatively easy to do, and in fact I ran this for Alan myself using Wordtracker. This is a handy piece of software which allows you to look at the supply and demand of particular keywords and spot gaps in the market, also known as niches.

In this case, just one of the keywords which came up as in high demand but low supply was pain management with acupuncture. Alan would do well to either use these keywords as part of his homepage or to create a new page with this title and heading, together with suitable webcopy.

By putting these keywords at the beginning and end of a new page of copy, very soon this will start to get ranked well by the search engines and receive visitors who arrive for free!

One other easy suggestion for Alan to implement, since he is also a writer, is to write a couple of articles on the subject of natural healing and acupuncture and to submit them to a few of the Article Directories, such as Ezine Articles and iSnare. This is a effective and natural way to get traffic to your site with minimum effort.

Watch out for your profit margins Alan – they’ll be going way up – just as you implement these few simple changes!

For our free course on making money with your own home based internet business,
visit How to set up your own online business.

This article was submitted by Jen Carter, the creator of the How to Earn a Million Dollars website.