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…