How To Make Money On Ebay Without Actually Selling Anything
Last month I made $580 from Ebay. But the beauty is I didn’t actually sell anything. That’s right, Ebay sent me the money for referring buyers to their site.
Back in April I built several niche sites to that specifically targeted to specific niches like gold coins, iphones and ipod batteries. Several weeks ago, I also added an “investment store” on this site that sells cheap timeshares, real estate and income-producing websites.
The niche sites aggregate the RSS feeds from Ebay for related products and display them. I didn’t have to do the programming; I just bought the BANS software that does everything for me. It did cost $97 but considering that I’ve made over $1250 from ebay since May, I’d say it was a pretty good investment. I also had to pay for domain names, but Godaddy had a 99 cent sale on domains so that wasn’t much of a cost. Some of these sites rank pretty well on the search engines for certain keywords and get mostly organic traffic (that’s what search engine traffic is called nowadays).
If someone signs up as a new user, Ebay pays up to $35 (although its typically only $25). It also gives up to 75% (although 50% is more usual) of it commissions to affiliates who refer buyers. You can get more affiliate information here.
While it took some initial effort to set up the stores and market them online, I haven’t done anything for at over 6 weeks. Making over $500/month from several sites that don’t require much effort is really cool. Finally some residual income that’s really passive!
I’ll post my monthly passive income update sometime this week.
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October 6th, 2008 at 2:41 am
Congrats on your success with BANs.
I was very close to buying the program myself last month but decided I probably missed the boat. BANs seems to be very popular around in the IM world and I felt like the market was saturated. Plus, I am wondering when Google will get annoyed and find away to take away rankings.
October 6th, 2008 at 3:24 am
Good to see all of that hard work paying off. It will be interesting to see if you get a Christmas bump on those niches and to see how things go over time. Keep us up to date with it.
October 6th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
Nice work. If you don’t mind sharing, how much work went into marketing these niche blogs?
October 6th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
Carrie & Matt
It does take work. 10% of it is identifying a niche, 10% of it is setting up the site, and 80% of it is marketing it. However, if you know how to market it properly, you can even automate most of it.
Most people who enter this don’t have a clue how to market it. If you like solving problems (like doing crosswords, suduko or in general enjoy a challenge) then you’ll love optimizing your site for the search engines.
Except for my investment store, all of the other sites do not rank well on google, but on other search engines. As you can see, there’s still money to be made.
October 7th, 2008 at 5:03 am
I agree.
Marketing is where it is at and the biggest mistake people make when setting up a website or buying one from ebay, is not realising just how much marketing is necessary to get it noticed!
With that in mind: Do you think there is still potential for BANS sites?
October 7th, 2008 at 8:59 am
Excellent job! I find a lot of inspiration in your post. So for your sites, do you market them by SEO or other means? I have also thought about BANS but hadn’t decided to make the jump yet.
November 2nd, 2008 at 4:43 pm
Love your posts and your newsletter.
I’m currently using phpbay/wordpress for ebay but haven’t gotten very far with it (although I just started).
What kind of conversions are typical once they click into ebay (epc I think it’s called)?
I’m getting about 50% clicks/views but about 0% earnings per click. Could be that my site’s still young since I’ve only had about 114 clicks from 240 views so maybe not enough people have seen it to buy something yet.
November 18th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Is this the only blog you run or do you run a few different ones?
And you were the inspiration for starting my blog. Thanks for the ideas.
November 20th, 2008 at 12:11 am
Hi Dan
I run several blogs and affiliate sites. But I’m really busy and don’t spend much time updating them. All the effort was front-loaded and now I’m reaping the benefits of working for nothing!!!
good luck
Nirav.
November 20th, 2008 at 10:29 am
What kind of marketing/backlinks/SEO did you do with your sites before you set them adrift? I’m trying to figure out when to cut loose on each project before I focus on the next one. How much time/money is spent in that 80%?
I’ve now started putting eBay feeds into Joomla in addition to BANS and phpbay/search2post. I’d like to expand my portfolio to several projects but I don’t want to leave things on their own too early.
November 20th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
Hi Scott
I created a lot of high quality and low quality backlinks with specific anchor text.
I used an automated product to help with the backlinks. check out BMD.