There most definitely is money still to be made as an eBay affiliate. Last month was, by a long shot, my most profitable month as one.

photo credit: ethorson

That said, my future eBay efforts will likely not involve creating any more BANS sites. I’ll certainly keep my current BANS sites as they are as long as they continue to make a profit. For instance, I have one site that I literally have not touched since I set it up last November that has made me a couple thousand, and it is about to hit its peak season again. Why mess with it?

But I just do not much care for building sites the BANS way anymore. Nothing wrong with the software, but I have found ways I just like better.

Off On Tangents

I have gone off onto a couple different tangents as far as eBay affiliate stuff:

• For sites built to get search engine traffic, I’m using a great little product called phpBay. It lets me take a WordPress blog and quickly turn it into a store. With the billion or so themes available for WordPress, I can make it look however I want.
• Lately I’ve been focusing on using Adwords to drive traffic to eBay mini sites. I used the API version of phpBay to build mini sites specifically for PPC campaigns. If you happen to join Earn $1k A Day, I can’t recommend these three threads more highly to give you some truly astounding ideas along these lines:
  1. My First 1K day, now 2nd and 3rd
  2. Questions for Gary
  3. How I choose my keywords from ebay listing titles

  I’ve been following Gary’s system since midway through September, and am more than thrilled with the results I’ve gotten so far.

Tool Recommendations

Here are a few recommendations for tools I use I’ve found particularly useful as an eBay affiliate:

• Irregardless of the route you’re taking, finding a good niche is a given. I really like Hot Item Finder to find what is actually selling on eBay. I’ve hit on some truly oddball niches using it that have done very well for me so far.
• Some software to pull eBay listings and format ‘em with your affiliate links. Whether it’s BANS or phpBay or any of the other eBay affiliate scripts out there.

Those are really my only indispensables. Now that I’ve gotten into pay-per-click to get traffic to my mini sites, I’ll tack on two more, but if you’re not going into PPC right now, ignore ‘em:

• Keyword Transformer to let me easily set up keyword tracking.
• My membership at Campaign Blast. This site has really kicked me in the pants. I set up 44 mini money sites in around a week recently because of this membership. And will probably put up another 60 in the next.

End of the Day Job?

So, have I made enough to replace the day job yet?

Well, no. At least, not yet. But last month certainly reduced the multiples required to do so!

Seeing results really gets you motivated…

I spent some time today setting up a handful of PPC campaign blasts to my latest group of phpBay mini sites, and in the process realized that what used to be a luxury is rapidly becoming a requirement: multiple monitors.

Here at the work, I have a decent single 19″ LCD monitor, which is wonderful if I’m working in a window or two. But if I get much more complicated than that it gets to be a pain to manage. At home, I have dual 17″ LCDs, which allows me to get quite a bit more done. 4 or 5 windows open at once becomes manageable. But it looks like I’m getting close to the point that a big middle third might not be such a bad idea. Today, while blasting away, this is what I had going on:

• TextPad, my favorite text editor
• the Adwords Editor
• a wonderful little spreadsheet that automagically simplifies the whole Adwords campaign process in Excel (picked up from the ever helpful Campaign Blasts forum)
• Keyword Transformer, an insane time saver if you plan on doing any PPC and would like to actually track anything
• Firefox to randomly check on the keyword landing pages that Keyword Transformer is giving me
• an explorer window or two

Trying to do this at work on that single monitor, at least rapidly, was a bit chaotic. Time spent finding and switching to the app that I wanted definitely took away that flow state I want to get into when I’m batching my way through a process.

Might just be time to do a little shopping when this month’s EPN payment comes in…

Not getting much accomplished because of a little internal warfare, aka a heavy winter cold. It’s been ten days or so of this damn thing, but I think we’ve finally got the invaders in retreat.

I’ve decided to temporarily hold off on my grand plans until the fog encasing my mind lifts. After all, I hate to throw money at things that don’t make any sense when I’m thinking straight. But I’ve got quite a number of possibilities in my idea box, so I imagine shortly my domain stable is going to be expanding.

One thing I have been accomplishing is signing up for quite a few affiliate networks. It really is amazing how many different programs are out there. And the differences in payouts on the same programs from affiliate network to affiliate network is definitely something to look into if you are going to get into online marketing in any serious way.

The latest I’ve been messing around with is NetShops, which runs a network of online stores, all with pretty decent payouts (generally the 10-15% range). What I find really interesting is their datafeeds, and how simple they make accessing them. A little experimentation with these on the minisites (as well as the BANS sites) is definitely in order!

As an owner of a slowly increasing number of BANS stores, I don’t quite share the outrage of many eBay sellers upon hearing of the new fee structure.

I feel for the sellers, but considering I make a cut of eBay’s cut, any potential increase is just icing on my already tasty cake…

What the heck am I rambling about? Just my latest domains:

• Dreaming Vespa Dreams; after all, hasn’t everyone dreamt of wheeling around on a little European scooter, at least once? (In the immortal words of Eddie Izzard) ‘Ciao!’
• Not masculine enough for you? Well, just climb up into your Hunter Stand and get a little primal.
• But it sure can be cold out there this time of the year, so don’t forget to bring along a Cheap Generator to bring the heat (and the game) with you!

With each bit of success I’m adding another domain or two or three. I’ve recently decided that, at least for now, I will not take out any profit on any of the income my sites earn. Instead, I plan to just keep rolling everything beyond expenses into additional domains/niches. Each site seems to add another layer to this endeavor’s income snowball. So as long as I can get the individual sites even marginally profitable, adding more seems to be the smart route.

When I have that 1,000th domain earning it’s shiny quarter day in and day out, well, then I’ll decide what the next step is…

I’ve had a number of email/PM conversations since I started exposing myself my attempts at money making in public looking for my opinions on which route I think is the better to take: the full-fledged Build A Niche Store route or the quick minisite mashup route. My answer, every time, has been both.

THE NICHE STORE ROUTE

A well-executed, SEO’d niche store is a wonderful thing to behold. Steady $2, $3, $10, or even $50 commissions roll in with little or (better yet) no effort on your part. That is, AFTER the initial planning and customizing and SEOing has been done. A converting niche store requires a fair amount of effort up front if it is going to succeed, from keyword research to domain name selection to menu customization to look-and-feel to backlink building to… well, you get the picture. Putting up a straight-out-of-the-box BANS site on a broad, competitive niche and expecting the commissions to roll in is simply wishful thinking. It’s not that BANS development is back-breaking labor by any means, but there definitely is an initial effort investment.

THE MINISITE MASHUP ROUTE

On the other hand, the minisite mashups are great because they are so painless to set up. Do a little basic niche research (consisting primarily in determining if there exists enough products in the market for whatever topic you are looking at), paste a couple handfuls of decent keywords into a text file, upload, and a minisite is born. I do a few more tweaks, such as inserting some stat tracking code and setting up site-specific Adsense channels, because I want to see how much traffic — and from where — each gets. But even with those extra steps, I can still put up a mashup minisite in less time than it takes to steam a batch of rice. Overall, the performance on these mashup minisites is hit or miss. I have a few that paid for themselves – meaning, at least covered the domain registration fee – in less than a week. And I have a few that, if they continue performing the way they are now, I’ll be lucky to have them pay for themselves in a year (which earning just $0.63 a month will do). Most of their earnings come from Adsense, but I’ve also gotten a handful of eBay and Amazon sales as well, and it doesn’t take many of those to get that domain registration fee back!

SO WHY BOTH?

Like I said, I’ve had a surprising level of success with a couple of my mashups, whether from a random sale commission or eBay signup here and there. Nevertheless, the main drawback to the minisite over the fleshed out BANS site remains their earning potential. The award for consistency definitely goes to the BANS sites. I can count on an optimized BANS site converting regularly.

So why not just build niche stores? Because my time is finite. The true benefit of the mashups isn’t necessarily the trickle of money they bring in (though I won’t turn it down!); it’s the information I glean from their traffic. Once they are up and getting noticed by the search engines, noting those that perform gives me a decent indication of which ones will do well as a full blown sites versus those that may not be worth the effort involved. I simply have more ideas than time, so using something like the mashup to help decide where to focus is invaluable.

I’ve been planning to flesh out one of my niche sites since this weekend, but my real job keeps wearing me out! I get home after a long day, and the last thing I want to do is sit down and do the fairly mundane task of setting up BANS menu categories. By the time I’ve played with my son and spent some time with my wife and finally feel refreshed enough to hit the bricks, it’s getting to be the time where my more creative mind really gets going, and I find myself in wild idea land.

So, I come to the only conclusion remaining: I’ve got to quit my job.

Well, maybe not quite yet. A bit more real current-wage-level-replacing IM income would probably be a good idea first!

But I can dream a little, can’t I?

Oops, I spoke to soon in my last post — I totally overlooked a site I had picked up the day after Christmas: Tankless Bargains, focused on the tankless water heater shopper. So, needless to say, I didn’t make it through the holidays without a fix.

For that matter, I didn’t make it to the weekend either: Fireplace Finds just jumped out at me, and my mind went, ‘Ah, what the hell…‘

More mashing with these two, as I’m waiting until the upcoming release of Build A Niche Store v3.0 until I get back into BANS building. Plus, I’m just having a lot of fun researching niches and keywords and domains right now. As long as I can get them to average 63 cents a month ($7.50 per registration divided by 12) per domain, these sites become technically profitable.

If I can’t even pull that off, well, I’m really not trying…

I made it through the holidays without needing another fix. But what can I say? A new year arrives, the domain acquisition bug strikes again, and a new mashup site appears: Aromatherapy Deals.

Luckily, my New Years resolutions had nothing to say about avoiding picking up more domains. As a matter of fact, I haven’t made any New Years Resolutions at all. And I don’t think I’ll be resolving to do – or, more conventionally, not do anything this year. Instead, I’ll be making a few SMART goals. My mind is still clouded by massive amounts of sugar along with the various customary overblown holiday meals, so it may take me a few days to put pen to paper on those goals. But I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that having fewer domains being monetized in some way or another is not going to be on that list…

All of five days passed since the last purchase before I had to pick up another domain: Get Snorkeling. With this one, I thought I’d have a little fun with it and see how quickly I could do a site. From initial idea through keyword checking through domain search (yeah, I know, quite the shocker of a name from me) through registration to fully populated site: 22 minutes and change. At that pace, it would be a long weekend to get those theoretical 100 domains up and going. But I definitely see some room to tweak the process, mostly involved with the layout of the various customizations each site needs in my minisite script. A little time spent massaging the layout of those items, and I think I could easily get it down to <15 minutes a site... maybe even 10.

I keep catching myself looking up new domains whenever an idea pops into my head, so it is definitely time to start developing what I already have before I get buried in them! The parked minisite are doing alright - .05 here, .60 there - but the developed sites are doing so much better so much more consistently.

I did spend a bit of time this evening working on one of my Build A Niche Store sites, trying to get the look and feel of the site into what I have in mind for it. I’m not going to bother linking to the work in progress, as the search engine bots seem to like BANS sites too well, and they’d just index all the nonsense that is in it right now if they’d stumble upon it. I still get a fair number of random kitchen item searches that got indexed from when I let my sushi site sit undeveloped over a weekend. Not that I don’t appreciate the traffic; it’s just that I don’t expect any of it to convert into a sale, so really, outside of cluttering my stats, what’s the point?