Make Money Using eBay Without Selling A Thing
There is not a doubt in my mind that you have heard of eBay. Unless you’ve been on another planet, you know that eBay allows you to bid on items and purchase items at often deeply discounted prices. The eBay network spans many countries and languages and that system has created a cottage industry of support businesses. There are companies that allow you to drop off things you want to sell to them and they then handle taking the pictures, putting the items on eBay, selling the items and giving you your money. There are companies that focus solely on helping you take pictures of your items for eBay. There are companies that help you create stores on eBay and so on.
EBay recognizes the power they have and they have done something that gives them the ability to push that power even further all while benefiting people like you and I. What am I talking about? I’m talking about the eBay affiliate system. By using the eBay affiliate system, you can sell products without maintaining any inventory and without actually selling a thing. I’m going to use a real world example that I’ve created to show you how it works.
- First, you decide on a good niche and you decide what you want to market. If you play golf, you can start a golf site. You usually don’t play golf alone so you have an instant group of people to market your site to. You can create cards and place them in the places where you play or you can market the site directly to members if you belong to a club. You may also be able to advertise your site in a club newsletter. Anyway, my suggestion is that you thoroughly research the niche you want to target.
- Second, come up with an actual plan to promote the niche site you are going to create. I suggest coming up with this plan before you actually purchase a domain. Here is why I suggest that. You may decide that selling purple slippers is a great idea. You research it and decide that it’s the niche for you. Then you start trying to create a marketing plan and begin to realize that you may not be able to actually market your site to enough people to actually make money. Don’t let your heart guide this process. Make sure that you investigate it’s long term viability and make sure that you come up with actual ways to promote your niche site. Ask yourself who would be interested in purple slippers. How can you reach those people with the minimal amount of effort? What are the long term prospects for selling purple slippers? Are they a seasonal item? How can I reach people with information about purple slippers without spending any money? How can I reach people if I spend a nominal amount of money? Do you get the idea? Look through the web and search for marketing plans to give yourself an idea of all the questions you should be asking yourself.
- Third, purchase a domain name and hosting. I host all of my sites on hostgator.com. I get reliable service, great prices, free hosting, the ability to add programs like Joomla, WordPress, OpenAds, Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics to my sites automatically AND the ability to host a lot of sites on one account. If you purchase a Deluxe account with The Domain Connection, you can add as many sites as you want to the account. This is significant because this means that you can host multiple sites for just $9 bucks per month! If you reach a point where you exceed your bandwidth allotment (which is really generous), you can just purchase more bandwidth, trade up to a premium account or trade up to a dedicated server or virtual dedicated server very easily. When you sign up and go to your hosting account, you can open the hosting manager and then click on Value Applications to see the various applications they offer. There’s WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Community Server, DotNetNuke, Moodle, OSCommerce, Zen Cart, Open Ads, Coppermine Gallery, Yet Another Forum, Vanilla Forum, phpCollab, phpFreeChat, dotProject, phpMyVisites, WWWPaintboard, MediaWiki, Twiki and so many other applications that can be added to the sites you host with just a few clicks! You get multiple Sql Server or MySql databases with every account. You can have a different database for every website you host on your account and different applications for each one. This means that for $9 you can host multiple Wordpress blogs, forum sites, eCommerce sites and any other site you want all with different applications running on the same Deluxe or Premium plan!They also offer free hosting and email with every domain you register, however, there is a catch with the free hosting. It’s ad supported. They place a nice Google ad bar across the top of the page. I would use the free hosting while you are developing the site. You can use their website builder tools (Website tonight) to create a website in minutes, however, you don’t have to. You also get free email accounts when you purchase a domain and when you set up hosting. Excellent, excellent, excellent company!
- Next, you create a website. I found a site called ShopWiiWii.com. I know it’s a silly name, but the name is memorable and it is highly unlikely that you will forget it. You can view http://www.shopwiiwii.com/ here. If you are using IE6, it may look a little different. I haven’t updated the files to account for the IE6 png issue yet. Anyway, you can see that the site sells the Wii and all items for the Wii (hence the name ShopWiiWii.com ).
- Now you are going to sign up for the eBay affiliate program. This program is called the eBay Partner Network. I know that some of you may be with Commission Junction and you may be using eBay affiliate links through that site. From my understanding, eBay is going to stop working with Commission Junction in favor of using their own eBay Partner Network. There is a deadline by which all Commission Junction affiliates need to have their accounts moved over to the eBay Partner Network or they won’t get paid.Here is the link to sign up for the eBay Partner Network.
- The next step is to use the eBay system to place links to the products you want to market like the links on ShopWiiWii.com. If you have no programming skill, this may be a little difficult, however, it’s not that hard and you can do it. You can place links to individual items on your site or place links to entire categories on your site. The links page on the eBay Partner Network offers information on how to do this. You can also pay a third party (like my company International Media Works
) to handle the integration for you. - Now it’s time to market your website using the techniques you outlined earlier!
This was just a brief and dirty overview of how you can make money using eBay without selling a thing. In future articles we will dive into specific elements of the program and how you can make the eBay affiliate system work for you!
