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Following The 9 Step Guide When Starting Out As An eBay Affiliate Puts You In Line With The New Pricing Model

Keith James Lock — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 17:41:04 +0000

In the past a lot of eBay affiliates followed a simple model... get as many cookies on people's machines as possible. They weren't concerned with what the customer purchased or when they purchased it. That approach was short sighted as became evident with the new eBay pricing model.

If you sell someone on a particular product within your website, they click your link to go to eBay and bid on that exact product right away or use the BIN option if available, you deserve to be paid well and eBay will increase the quality of your clicks and pay you more per click. The review/guide style site, as taught in this 9 step guide, falls in line with the new pricing model on eBay. If you grasp what is being taught in the guide, and take action, you will be well on your way to making good money "per click" as an eBay affiliate.

The new way to make money online as an eBay affiliate... write a review on a particular product type/brand, explain to the potential customer why it is good to purchase it on eBay, present them with a few relevant auctions to click on (use phpBay for this), or even a link to search results (no plugin required), they click the link or auction listing, and are more likely going to place a bid or use the BIN feature right away. Think "targeted" customers and you will earn more per click without question.

Of course, you are now going to need traffic and lots of it. One customer just won't land you $50+ with this new pricing model as was a possibility in the past. Also, you will need quality content.

Using Long Tails And Outsourcing Content

My recommendation... Find long tail keywords to use for each and every review post (or page) and guide. Of course you want low/weak competition keywords with high searches. Use Market Samurai to make getting these long tails very easy.

If you don't want to write content, try CyberHubOnline.com for cheap content. Tell them your long tail and you can get 300-400 word articles for around $2.00 each when buying in bulk (about 25+ I think). Give them 3 or 4 specific questions to answer about each product as a guideline.

Build Deep Backlinks

Social bookmark and build backlinks to each review. Use a service like Article Marketing Automation (AMA). You can submit articles with links back to your site using your long tail keywords as the anchor text. Create a 550+ word article in the required format for AMA and you can end up with over 100 backlinks to 3 different pages to your site with just 1 submission! Do that until all of your review pages and guides have links back and traffic will flow as you climb the rankings in the search engines. I would submit several that link back to your main page or for any keyword that has higher competition.

Use the launch package as mentioned in this post. It's a great way to bring in traffic and garner extra backlinks.

Maybe try odesk.com to hire someone to do some blog commenting for you linking back to your site from related blogs. You might pay around $20 for 100 links. Use Comment Kahuna or Market Samurai to find a list of related blogs that offer do-follow links and give that list to the person you hire.

Recap

I feel that with the new pricing model at the eBay Partner Network that the process taught in the N1Way Guide could almost be considered required knowledge. It's almost as if they knew this change was coming. Follow along and build your sites and you will succeed as an eBay affiliate.

Review Site With eBay Auctions And Customer Reviews

Keith James Lock — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 19:44:44 +0000

I had several emails lately asking how I create my review sites after reading the N1Way guide. The answer to that question depends a lot on the niche or my goals with the site. There are a lot of things to consider in the creation of the site...

Do you use BANS or WordPress with phpBay? My answer... WordPress with phpBay 99% of the time.

Do you use posts or pages when using WordPress? My answer... Posts 100% of the time (think RSS)... plus there's way less manual work, use the archives page for what it is meant for.

Where do you get the content? For some of the sites that I want to test or just set on auto-pilot I will use free, unique, automated content. With the automated content, sometimes I check each article before publishing and integrate the appropriate auctions into the posts. For some, the real auto-pilots, I will just insert some generic phpBay code into the post template file.

For 100% unique content (without the backlinks that are in the free automated content), I either look to DigitalPoint forums, TextBroker.com or write it myself. Then I will integrate the auctions in as I publish them.

What about comments?

Sometimes I use comments, sometimes I don't. Depends on the niche and if it seems to go well with it. Plus, as you may know, monitoring comments can be a bit of a pain sometimes, so with the auto-pilot sites, I just turn them off. Also, if your post ranks for a certain keyword, then some say it may lose the ranking of that keyword if there ends up being several comments over time because the page becomes diluted. Even though that may be valid, on the sites that I consider the most important, the ones I pay the most attention to, I will leave comments on but with a twist...

The WordPress Review Plugin

There is this amazing plugin (I discussed it in the post: Create A Review Site Using WordPress) that can be integrated very well with the sites that you build following the N1Way guide. With this plugin, previous customers of the product that you are promoting, can leave a review and a rating. The plugin takes over the comments in your blog to gather this data. It will also calculate averages, etc. and show Amazon-style ratings on the product posts. It will even put in the necessary microtags that the search engines can read when trying to review data for certain queries! If you aren't sure what I mean, look up hReview, more search engines are looking at this data and showing preference to sites that implement it. With the WP Review plugin, the microtags are all automatically integrated.

You could probably get fancy with custom fields and some changes to your template file to include auctions below the comments as well. A bit advanced. If enough people ask I will post on how to do it.

phpBay Pro: The Extended Manual – Inserting phpBay Code Into Theme Files

Keith James Lock — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 05:05:16 +0000

It's been about a week since my last addition to the phpBay extended manual. My intention was to post a new piece of the manual each day until completion, but you know how things go. I've been quite busy. And, well, I'm going a bit out of order as well. I was going to write about phpBay keyword tracking, and I still will, just not today. I'll get to it soon enough.

This post covers inserting phpBay code into theme files. I came up with a cool idea for using it and thought I'd share it. I have a couple blogs that are 99% hands off, and have automated content, and I wanted a way to insert some auctions to the end of the posts without having to do it manually. Doing it this way you will end up with exactly the same auctions at the end of each post, which won't be as targeted, but it's still proven to work.

You could add some extra php code to show different auctions based on the current category, but I won't get into that here. If I get enough requests in the comments I'll edit this post.

This will be handy if you have an auto-blog on one main topic. I'm sure you can think of some other applications for it, this is just one purpose.

Look through the table of contents below if you want to jump to a different section first. Below the TOC are the quick steps to add phpBay code to your theme files.

Table Of Contents

Remember, phpBay has a sidebar widget you can use, but if you want more control, and want to add auction listings to the bottom of all posts, follow these steps...

In your WordPress admin panel, go to Appearance -> Editor.
On the right side you should see a file called Single Post (single.php), click it to open up the file in the editor on the left.
In this file there should be a command to show the post content. Look for the_content(). Just below that you can insert the phpBay code.
You can use any and all parameters here just like you would in a post or page, the example below shows just the keyword and the number of posts.

EDIT (June 9th, 2010): Use the code below if you want to show different auctions based on Category ID or Post/Page ID...

First.. you want to get the ID, to do that for the catgeory, under the 'Posts' menu click 'Categories', hover over the category name and in the status bar (bottom of browser) you will see a URL. The URL links to a page that allows you to edit the category. Don't click it, instead just look at the end of the URL... the catgeory ID is after the 'cat_ID=' part.

It's a similar process for posts/pages. Go to 'Edit' under 'Posts' or 'Pages'. Hover over the post or page name and in the status bar at the end of the URL you'll find the ID just after the 'post=' portion.

Now.. for most themes you can use the Category ID and/or Post ID values in single.php. For pages, use page.php.

The code for showing phpBay ads for a specific category... (replace {ID} with the actual Category ID that you found using the steps above)

NOTE: I just remembered... you can also use the category name rather than the ID if you prefer.

Text File With Code

For displaying ads for a specific post you usually just add proper phpBay code to the post add/edit screen. However if you want to show ads for a specific post but have more control of where it goes (instead of just the body of the post) then you can do that by editing the theme. Just use the code above but instead of the 'in_category' command use 'is_single'.

phpBay Pro: The Extended Manual – Installation and Activation

Keith James Lock — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 15:37:11 +0000

Continuing on from phpBay Pro: The Extended Manual - Introduction...

Table Of Contents

phpBay installs just about like any other plugin for WordPress, but there are a few extra files.

Firstly...

Download the plugin to your desktop
Unzip it (free unzipper: WinRAR)

After unzipping the package you will see...

An 'images' folder, a 'wp-content' folder, an 'auction.php' file, the instruction manual and a troubleshooting text file.

Upload/FTP Steps (free FTP'er: FileZilla)

Upload all the images from the 'images' folder to the 'images' folder in the root of your blog. If you don't have an 'images' folder in the root, just upload the entire folder.
Upload the 'auction.php' file to the root of your blog.
Upload the entire 'phpBay' folder that is inside of the 'wp-content/plugins/' folder, to the '/wp-content/plugins/' folder of your blog.

Now, login to your WordPress Control Panel, click 'Plugins' from the left menu, and Activate 'phpBay Pro Plugin for WordPress'.

Now, phpBay is installed and activated! Good job! Move on to: phpBay Pro Configuration

phpBay Pro: The Extended Manual – Introduction

Keith James Lock — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 03:58:09 +0000

Want to learn how to get the most out of phpBay Pro for WordPress? This manual will provide, in plain English, thorough instructions for installing, configuring and tweaking the phpBay Pro plugin. There are multiple posts in this guide, scheduled to publish at one a day, that way there isn't just one gigantic post to read. Also, I will add a Table of Contents in each post, which will be updated daily to reflect the links to the new posts as they go live.

Table Of Contents

Assumptions

This guide assumes that you know what phpBay is, that you have a license for it, that you have an account with eBay Partner Network and that you have the latest version of WordPress installed.

If not...

Learn about phpBay here.
Use this link to buy phpBay and when prompted for a discount code, use: DA9CD69F42 to get 20% off.
Sign up with eBay Partner Network here.
Use the WordPress auto-install on your host if available or try the 5-minute install instructions here.

You may also want to check out this 9 step guide if you would like to start from the ground up.

Next post: phpBay Pro Installation/Activation

phpBay Pro Example Site And phpBay Pro Coupon

Keith James Lock — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 06:02:14 +0000

Get phpBay -> Click Here
20% Off Coupon -> DA9CD69F42

phpBay Pro is a WordPress plugin that allows you to list eBay auctions directly into a post or page. It is extremely simple to use. I'm going to point you to a phpBay Pro example site as well as provide you with a phpBay pro coupon which will allow you to get 20% off the price. To jump to the coupon code just scroll to the bottom or top of this post.

Features of phpBay Pro

Even though phpBay Pro is very easy to setup and use it does have many powerful features. I won't get into all of them in this post but here are a few...phpBay offers SEO benefits, eBay category targeting, keyword targeting and with a few quick minor enhancements you can get keyword tracking and geo targeting.

phpBay Pro Example

You can specify several parameters for the auctions but all that is required is a keyword (or keywords).

If you want to fully customize the listing you can also specify the number of items to display, the category number as found on eBay, exclusion (or negative) keywords, a postal code to show local auctions, a seller ID for a particular seller, a min price, a max price, a min and max bid, whether the auction should have a BIN price, an alpha-ID for tracking purposes which can be hard coded globally or by post or set with a variable, how to sort the auctions, a specific country, the number of columns and whether to display only items with free shipping.

As stated, the above are optional parameters. Most can also be set globally.

Here's a quick example of eBay auctions inserted into a post. I specified the keyword "affiliate" for the auctions. A couple of other non-default options were set globally, like including only auctions with photos for example. EDIT: A new feature in the latest version is to turn off "paging" at the post level. I did that in this example as well, plus I set it to just one column.

Notice that when hovering over an auction link it appears as though it is a page on this blog that you will be brought to. That's the SEO benefits of phpBay at work. These pages can be indexed. Also, if you check the properties of the images, they also show as being local when in fact they aren't.

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phpBay Pro Extended Manual

If you want to learn how to do some upgrades/tweaks to phpBay, including setting up geo-targeting (which shows auction listings specific to the country of the visitor to your site), then check out the extended manual. Additionally, if you want to learn how to build a phpBay site from the ground up, check out this 9 step guide from the creators of Build A Niche Store (BANS), which covers everything from picking a market to building and managing your site. They cover both phpBay and BANS in the guide. An excellent read.

phpBay Pro Example Site

I created a Marvel comic books blog/site displaying Marvel comic related auctions using phpBay Pro that you can look to as an example.

phpBay Pro Coupon

To take advantage of the phpBay coupon, use the phpBay link below and enter the coupon code: DA9CD69F42 when prompted.

Click here to buy phpBay Pro now