How to Become a Successful eBay Affiliate
October 1, 2007
Guide Summary and Timeline to Success
Today begins your journey into becoming a successful, Super-Star, eBay affiliate member!
Repeat that to yourself once or twice and begin envisioning how you will spend your money each month, indefinitely! This step by step eBay affiliate guide will assume you know absolutely nothing about website design, website hosting, domain registration, search optimization, affiliate programs, code, graphics, basically… Nothing! For some of you, portions of this guide will likely bore you… for others, it will be like the first time you had chocolate ice cream… and you will be starving for more!
Will you earn $50 a month, or will YOU become a TOP PERFORMING SUPERSTAR, earning THOUSANDS of dollars every month?
The choice is truly yours to make. The different sections of this guide will show you all the tools to be a Top Performer, the extent that you choose to use those tools… will ultimately determine your success! I won’t lead you to believe this is a “get rich quick” or simple process, but at the same time, I can tell you that ANYONE with the motiviation to be a success and achieve simple goals, CAN be successful by spending only 1 hour a day, 5 days a week!
Following this guide will NOT deliver instant results!
I know, why in the world would I write that in BOLD letters? Simple, I do not want to lead anyone astray of the fact that EVERY successful website or business needs to have a solid foundation. If you simply toss up a website and leave it the most raw form available, your site is no different than thousands of others. Why would search engines or visitors reward YOU with their business, when you are no different than anyone else? This guide will however, provide clear, measurable results within the first 30-45 days, that will continue to grow for as long as you keep the niche site active!
If you are searching for a LONG TERM way to EASILY develop high amounts of residual income, this guide is for you!
Really, just 1 hour a day you ask? Yes and No… During the discovery and development stages of your Niche website, you will likely complete 2-3 (or more) sections of this guide and apply many of the techniques in one day. You will be excited and want to spend more than just one hour, so you can present your Niche Site to the public and search engines in a shorter time frame! Once you have opened your niche site for business, you will then continue to spend 1 hour every day, 5 days a week, on this site for the next 30 days. After the first 30 days have passed, you will spend 30 minutes - 1 hour a week, on the site for as long as you own it!
For Example:
- Days 1-5: Building phase, 1+ hour each day.
No earnings at this time, you are in the early stages - Days 6-10: Customization Phase, 1+ hour each day
No earnings at this time, almost ready to go live! - Days 11-15: Creating content around your Niche, 1+ hour each day
Little to no earnings at this time, we are just post-launch and search engines have just started indexing! - Days 15-45: Promoting and adjusting your targets, 1+ hour each day
Earnings are begin to show promise, 3-5 affiliate sales per week leading to day 45. - Day 45 and beyond: Up to 1 Hour every week
Earnings are now steadily increasing and the site is becoming more popular. 5-10 affiliate sales per week. - 3 Months after launch: Up to 1 hour every week
Earning $100 or more every month from this point forward! By now you have also launched several other Niche sites, each repeating this same process with each new site. You will have learned shortcuts and more efficient ways of accomplishing tasks and be well on your way to financial independence! - 6 Months to 1 Year after launch: Up to 1 hour every week
At this point in time, your original Niche site is earning several hundred dollars each month. You have also become very efficient at deploying new niche sites and have 10-15 websites actively working for you! You can fully develop and launch a new site in less than 2-3 days, fully optimized, niche specific, and ready to deliver results in a short amount of time. - Beyond 1 Year: Up to 1 hour every week
By now, you have a pool of resources for continued development of Niche sites. You may have the ability to begin selling your domains to others who may be interested in the traffic you have generated through organic niche marketing!
How much is this going to cost?
I could not expect to complete this page without providing some guidance of how much you will need to invest in order to be successful! This guide is going to focus on the tools listed below and while there are other tools available, some of which may be free, I am not going to go into the depth or detail on how to use them. I do not use them myself and therefore cannot present them effectively. If you choose to use the freely available tools, you will only need to apply the same practices to them as you would with the ones I suggest.
If you are starting with no money - at minimum, you need to spend $117.00 (BANS Script, Hosting, Domain name)
If you want to do this right - you should spend $416.00 (BANS Script, WordTracker Annual, Hosting, Domain name)
Build a Niche Store eBay Affiliate Script $97.00 (Must)
The BANS script is the affiliate engine behind this guide. You MUST have it in order to proceed… It is a “One-Time” $97.00 purchase and you can develop an unlimited number of websites with the single license.
Google Adsense Account (FREE)
Google adsense is a contextual advertising program for site publishers. It will deliver small text or image based ads on your website, which pay you a small amount each time someone clicks on the ad.
WordTracker Keyword Research and Discovery Tool Free or Paid (Up to $299/year)
Wordtracker is the best known and highly respected, keyword discovery tool! It will allow you to drill deep into a niche and find the exact terms that people are ALREADY USING as they browse the internet for products or information. Wordtracker offers plans starting at a free trial, $30 for one week, $59 for one full month, or $299 for a full year. They also offer a full money back guarantee if you are not happy. I personally use the $299 one year plan… and find myself in and out of wordtracker several times a week for research and modification of new and existing sites.
GoDaddy Domain Registrar (Only pay for Domain Name Registrations)
GoDaddy is the registrar you will use to search and register your domain name(s) (www. yourdomainname .com) The only fees you will pay are the domain registration fees ($9.15 per year, per domain)
HostGator Website Hosting ($10/Month for unlimited sites - Must have)
Hostgator is a very fast and reliable website hosting company. At $10/month, you can host as many niche sites, or ANY kind of site as you want! A host is the place that you will house your website files and point your domain name to display it to visitors. There are other hosting companies out there as well, some are even free! I am not a fan of free webhosting as most of them will place your site onto an already overloaded machine, (too many websites) or require you to display their advertisements on your pages. Nothing screams “UnProfessional” more than a free webhost!
Commission Junction (FREE)
AFTER you have registered your website domain, you will go over to commission junction and sign up for the affiliate program! CJ manages the eBay and hundreds of other affiliate programs from one central location.
THIS Build a Niche Affiliate Guide (FREE)
Like I stated in my preliminary post yesterday, this guide and instruction comes free of charge! I only ask that if you find it useful and want to promote it, please do so by linking back to these pages versus copying the contents onto your own site and presenting them as your own.
WebCEO Webmaster Tools (FREE and Subscription based)
WebCEO is a suite of 12 Webmaster tools. Some are GREAT, some are useless! There, I said it! :-) A couple of the best features of WebCEO however are the SERP’s (Search engine result pages) rankings checker, and the new ability to find link partners based on popularity! There are a few limitations on the free version, but for the most part you will be fine for the short term!
Throughout this guide, I will likely discuss a few other applications I like to use on occassion. There will be full details about the applications added at the time they are discussed.
To summarize - If you are ready to begin earning a residual income that will grow into several thousands of dollars each month within a modest time period, you want to subscribe to this feed today! I will be posting a new section every day until it is completed…
I look forward to helping ALL OF US grow together!
Mark Hansen
Next: Discovering your Niche Market
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10 Responses to “How to Become a Successful eBay Affiliate”
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[…] Million Dollar Wiki - Have You Got Yours Yet? How to Become a Successful eBay Affiliate […]
READY, SET, GO !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Hi Mark,
The link at the bottom of this page to take viewers to your next post (”Discovering your Niche Market”) is a bad link. That being said, I’m excited to learn all I can about BANS. Thank you for putting this together for us.
Rochelle
[…] Million Dollar Wiki - Have You Got Yours Yet? How to Become a Successful eBay Affiliate […]
Thanks so much for these blog entries. They are pretty helpful.
My fiancee and I have just started with BANS. How long have you been building these sites? I know that some items are typically larger ticket than others, but do you happen to know how much one of these sites tends to bring in?
Once again, we’ll be following you as we all build these and succeed!
@ Loyalis -
The next week or so will get very deep into ways you can optimize your BANS site for the visitors you want to attract!
Earnings are really all over the place and dictated by demand and average selling price of your niche favorites!
I have a Webkinz related site that has 3-4 sales each day, but commissions are less than $50 each.
Alternatively, there is a HVAC related niche that has only 3-4 sales per week, but the commissions are in the $20-$40 range each.
There are several factors I will discuss during the optimization sections of the guide that help convert.
Mark
Great work Mark! And thanks for taking the time to put all this info together for us. It’s so helpful AND encouraging to see other people being really successful at this.
I’m up to about $200/month right now with 2 sites, and a little starting to trickle in from several others. These site DO WORK. You just have to stick with it, and do the normal grunt work writing an article here and there and optimizing everything.
Can’t wait to read your next posts.
Thanks again!
Will
[…] How to Become a Successful eBay Affiliate […]
Hi Mark, it’s me Noor from WA. I find the info you are providing here very inspiring. I feel I should just invest on BANS and slog on, with your help, of course. (It’s going to be worth the part-time job ;-D ).
When you mentioned the commission from Webkinz, I chuckled. Guess what? I even got a 28 cents commission. But the lens had laid a good foundation for my learning. It’s bringing in sales every week, and keep me motivated to move on to a higher platform.
Yes. Tell me where should I go from here, Sifu.