Posted by schang in
Internet Business on Aug 7th, 2007 |
17 responses
Okay, the words are out. I made a post (get your website indexed by Google in 24 hours) about how I use Wordpress blogs to secretly leverage eBay sellers’ auction listings to gain free search engine traffic which allows me to automatically seek out long tail keywords.
Here is the step-by-step process of how you can start earning passive affiliate commission:
First of all, let’s talk about how commission is made and what you will be doing:
- eBay has an affiliate program (administered by CJ.com) that currently pays $25 (as of June 1st, 2007) per new active user registration + 50% of auction listing fee
- Surprise! Not everyone has an eBay account.
- You will be building blogs that automatically pull in eBay auction listings
- When visitor go to your website and clicks through one of the eBay auction listings, you will get credit for new eBay user referred and/or auctions won by your referral.
- Each blog you build will pull in FREE search engine traffic
- Blogs will get indexed by major search engines automatically
- You can use these eBay blogs to help index you other websites (by linking from your blogs to websites you would like indexed)
- Content is provided and refreshed automatically
- Top ranking for keywords in the search engines automatically
- Not many people know how to do this because of the technical difficulties of getting a WordPress plug-in to work with eBay RSS Feed
- Each blog you build becomes an ATM machine with very little maintenance cost (hosting & domain registration, which is standard cost for running any website business)
- Blogs can run on sub-domains or sub-directories to reduce cost
- Tip: Register a general-topic domain name
- Takes about 5 to 10 minutes to set up each blog
Action Steps:
- Sign up as a publisher with CJ.com (if you don’t have one already)
- If you do not have website, just make up a newsletter name and leave the website URL empty.
- Decide on a market/product line/trend/”niche”
First go to ebay.com. Do you have a particular interest in any products or category of product on ebay? Such as collectibles, games, DVD’s, etc? If not, have a look at eBay Pulse for some of the hottest selling items. Make sure the category of product is a healthy market (meaning that there are always those products being sold and bought on eBay, that way your blog will always be refreshed with new auction items!)
- Generate eBay RSS Feed
Get your Commission Junction account PID by logging into your CJ.com account and click on “Account” tab and then “Web Site Settings” sub-tab and get the PID number from there:
Click on “Advanced Search” from eBay’s webpage:
Enter your search criteria:
Enter your CJ account PID number and click Search!
Now, from the search results page, scroll all the way down of the page and find an orange button with RSS label on it:
Copy & Paste the URL of the RSS feed from your web browser into a notepad for later use.
- Register domain name & host the website (if you don’t have one already)
I personally use WholesalerDomain.com for domain registration ($7.15 per year) and HostMonster.com for Wordpress Hosting ($5.95 per month).
- Install WordPress blog script
Login to your Cpanel from your hosting account and use Fantastico to install a Wordpress blog in 2 clicks!
- Install Feed-o-Matic plug-in
Get the free plugin here:http://www.infinityscript.com/wordpress-plugin/
To install:
1) Unzip feedomatic.zip
2) Upload the entire feedomatic folder into /wp-content/plugin
folder of your Wordpress directory
3) Login to your Wordpress admin and go under “Plugins” tab
4) Activate Feed-o-Matic
5) Now add in your eBay RSS feed (from step 3) by going to “Options” tab
- Rinse & Repeat
Remember, your passive commission from eBay affiliate program is scalable. It’s up to you how much you want to make. I would recommend that you install at least one eBay blog onto each of your domain that you own, and also to through up a quick eBay blog to new domains or domains that are just sitting there collecting dust!
Talk is cheap and you have everything you need to implement the system, so get to work!
Hey there, welcome to my blog! If you haven't already, please subscribe to my announcement list to keep yourself up-to-date with the latest internet business and passive income tips.
Thanks for the interesting and yet informative post.
By the way, will you be interested to exchange link with me so that we could all benefit from it?
Patrick
http://income-internet-business.com/blog/
Thanks for an interesting post. Does this just make one post and do you optiimize it for keywords by using a long tail phrase? Do you then make other posts w/o ebay rss to add content?
This is an interesting idea. How often do you update your blogs or do you just make one post after researching a niche?
If you have a lot then it would be hard to post to each regularly.
Also you said using a general phrase . Would you do something very competive like xbox 360 or make it more of a niche like madden 2007 xbox game ?
Thanks.
For the life of me, I can’t get this to work. I get an erros stating “problem accessing RSS feed. Please check the feed url and try again.” I’ve tersted with non-ebay rss feeds and it works just fine… Anty thoughts/advice?
Thanks for the great work you do on this site.
[...] « « Passive eBay Affiliate Commission [...]
Patrick:
we already did, buddy =). thru comments/trackbacks.
Deb:
The ebay blogs I built were just pulling items from ebay listings. I only have one RSS feed per blog, but I suppose you can add in your mix of content by pulling from other RSS feeds. Updating is automatically done by the plugin so it’s set-and-forget.
Cr:
Yes, I have encounter that problem before also. It probably means that your RSS feed returned too many ebay listings. What I do sometimes is use the advanced search function, and specify a minimum number of bid or minimum price to reduce the number of listings that way.
—
Thanks,
Steve
Hi Steven,
I thought you might be interested in a new Passive income opportunity. It is called Giblink.com
My initial $150.00 Pro membership has already turned into over $600.00.
Giblink has gone live on October 15th and already has well over 25k members.
Regards,
Jed B. Zimmerman
I stumbled upon this post while doing a Google search on an ebay affiliate topic.
I had already set up an ebay affiliate type blog but adding in the rss component was something I did after reading your post. While it is kinda cool that I have automatic posting through the rss feeds, 99% of the posts do not get indexed by google.
I done google searches on my post topics and noticed that even after ten pages of google results my blog isnt listed anywhere. I have had the site set up already for several weeks so I know from blogging experience that google does index posts in just a few days. If they havent been indexed yet then chances are they wont be.
Also, my shortstat plugin shows that I have only one hit via Google search results and that was before I added in the RSS feeds. I have had absolutely no hits from google as a result of this tool.
While its nice to have automatic feeds into my blog this tool brings me absolutely no traffic from Google. I’m guessing its a duplicate content filter thing. Google sees that the post is identical to ebay as well as other sites and as a result drops your site.
I also find it frustrating when people talk about these great ways to make money online either knowing or not knowing that it doesnt work.
Sorry if I sound annoyed but I am. Are you having success with this tool? I doubt it.
Hey Eric,
Thanks for your feedback. Have you looked at your traffic log (Awstats)? It will tell you the last time Google bot came to visit your blog, and how many times so far for the month. More importantly Awstats (or Webalizer) will also show you what keywords were searched in the search engines to arrive at your blog.
Duplicate content is rather over-hyped. Yes, if Google finds that your blog pages are exactly the same (in terms of looking at the HTML code) as another blog/site, then yes, Google will only choose between one of the two sites in the index. You can very easily make your blog “unique” by changing the number of posts to display on a page, or by adding your own opening statement/closing statement around your blog posts.
To see if Google even have your site in its index, do a search for “site:” and see if any pages come up. If the search came up with no results, then yeah, you have a problem. 
I have shortstat which does the same thing. I checked if the site is indexed by google and it is. But often even if a site is indexed by google the indexed items rarely show up in a normal google search against many of the other sites with similar items.
Also only about 5% of the items on my blog are indexed. I have 211 posts via rss feeds and only 11 are indexed by google. Out of the the 11 only three come up in a google search when I type in the complete post name in quotations which is something that most people dont do.
As for Google’s duplicate content filter, I spent months researching and proving that the filter does indeed exist and filters out alot of duplicates. I did this when I purchased one of the adsense ready products that contained tons of articles taken from article submission sites. Google simply refused to index the articles. Believe me, I tested it.
Now I will try to make the posts somewhat more unique but I doubt that it will make any difference. Tell me, are you really making money from this operation? I’m not talking about money that you made through bringing people via ads you purchased. I am talking about through this method you described above i.e. google search traffic via automatic rss feeds.
Hey Eric,
Yes, see here: CJ stats This is from 3 sites.
Try displaying 15 - 25 posts per page, and have an opening and closing remarks in your index.php theme file.
Steve
I dont get it. There’s $19 posted on that page for two months of data. Is that the right image?
Yes, that is correct. You are not going to get super rich with this (on the flip side, you are not going to need to do a whole lot of work after the initial installation/configuration). if you are going to be building blogs, you may as well start your own blog and put real/valuable content on it, and once you get one going and making good money from it, start a 2nd blog, and start expanding your website network.
As of April eBay has ennounced that it is dropping CJ. You no longer require to have a CJ ID, you can go register with eBay directly.
I just read about it on Friday two weeks ago. I\’m sure it will make things easier. Also we\’ll probably get better reporting.
I found this thread by doing Google for passive ebay affiliate income. This is surely a great post. Thanks for the nice tips, Steven. However, the income potential is not that great for people who would like to make steady income from eBay affiliate program. No intention to spam my site link but my site can definitely help you guys to makes lots of money from eBay affiliate program. Please check it out http://www.auctionfreedom.com
Hey there! Your post really helped me in my internet marketing knowledge. My girlfriend and I started doing a little internet marketing for a boutique’s site.