While I do much of my online work in affiliate marketing, and do pretty well at it, I do like to look at the other business options out there. I had been just considering dabbling in selling ebook on eBay when they dropped downloadable products, in fact.

I’ll admit to being a little frustrated by that timing.

But a new eCourse being offered by Brian McGregor looks quite interesting to me. He allowed me to review it and I must say it looks quite good. Actual paying students will get it a bit better, with the ability to contact Brian and ask him questions. He’ll even review auctions you run during the class. Quick feedback on if you’re understanding what you’re learning!

Hurry up and buy it during the prelaunch and you’ll save $300 off the full price. If this is your kind of business, paying $197 versus $497 should make plenty of sense. The launch is on July 7, so you do have to hurry.

Check it out now.

I’m getting to be quite a fan of datafeeds for marketing. Sure they’re a lot of work, but they can also bring in the sales. And there are some great tools to help you along.

Now one of the first things you need to understand about datafeed affiliate marketing is that you cannot just throw up the entire feed and expect a ton of traffic. You might get bits and pieces but you really need to do something to make your pages unique. Without that you aren’t going to get the natural search engine traffic.

With some of my sites, the very first thing I looked for was programs with a datafeed I could use. That’s one of the things I love about ShareASale - free datafeed access for affiliates. Commission Junction only gives it to you free if you make enough sales. And of course there’s a lot you can do with Amazon or eBay feeds, although these are run differently from the ones at ShareASale.

If you aren’t a programmer, however, you’re going to want some software to put the feeds up on your sites. And you’re probably going to need to clean up the feeds (merchants can be sloppy with them) and figure out how on earth you’re going to make your little datafeed site stand out. We can’t all replicate the entire Amazon site, after all.

Here are some of the tools I enjoy using:

Build a Niche Store (BANS)

An absolute delight if you want to sell products that are being auctioned on eBay. I’ve reviewed this product in the past, and things have really picked up for me again since eBay’s transition to their own Partner Network.

You might be amazed at some of the niches that do well through eBay. You can get pretty creative with your sites. And the cookie is good for more than just the auctions you refer people directly to, so you never know what’s going to come up.

The Affiliate Datafeed Profit System (ADPS2)

My favorite tool right now for ShareASale datafeeds. It works within a WordPress blog. All you have to do is find the merchants you want to represent who have datafeeds, sign up with them, request FTP access to their feeds, activate the plugin and put in your information. These are all really easy steps, and many merchants auto-approve affiliates.

Once it’s set up, ADPS2 can download the datafeeds for you, and you click a button to have it create posts to the specifications you select. You choose the number of products per post, the number of posts created and the category posted to. ADPS2 will randomly date these, with a few being posted in the next couple hours and the rest over a number of days. How many depends on how many posts are being created.

You can have up to 5 merchants going on this, and the posts will mix them up. Keeps things more unique.

This is a great addition to a blog that you have some content already, and need products. As with many things It’s not going to do you a lot of good to use it without some content you’ve created and promotion of the website.

PopShops

The two systems above cost money. So now here’s one that can be free, if you choose. Or you can pay for additional features.

PopShops is nice if you want to use a datafeed from Commission Junction, LinkShare and so forth, but don’t want to pay for the privilege of accessing them. It also handles updating and removing products for you, which is very convenient when you’re using datafeeds. And you can mix the merchants up to suit your site.

The free version runs on JavaScript. In other words, it’s not going to attract search engine spiders for you. But if you have some content going and want to test the waters, it’s a place to start.

You pick the categories and your layout. Then the products. It’s a simple drag and drop interface. They brag about it being so easy a 3 year old could do it, and even have a video to prove it.

You can pay a monthly fee to get a PHP or ASP version for your site. This is, of course, much friendlier to the search engines. The Pro version is just $5 per month or you can go for even more features for $30 a month. But even in the free version all your commissions are your own. Just make sure you sign up for every program you put in your shop. You can even create widgets for your blogs.

The disadvantage, of course, is that you have to trust to their cleaning of the datafeed. But since you can mix up the products as you like you can still make some pretty unique pages.

Associate-O-Matic for Amazon

Now this is one I haven’t tried, but looks promising. The most recent update to the script was May 10, 2008 as of this writing, and it has been around for a few years.

It has a free option that costs you 10% of clicks rather than an upfront cost, or the full version is $99 for the first year, $20/year thereafter.

Amazon, like eBay, sells just an amazing range of stuff. The disadvantage is that they have a very short cookie life, one day as I recall. Compare that to 30 or more days for many other programs. But people trust Amazon, it’s familiar and they buy lots of stuff there sometimes. There are affiliates making very good money through that program.

Why Use Datafeeds?

With all this information about it, the reason why you should use a datafeed may not be quite so apparent.

A datafeed allows you to get traffic for the individual products, potentially. No guarantees, of course. But if someone is looking for a product they aren’t going to find your site if all you do is link to the merchant’s home page.

A datafeed site also has a lot of pages generated automatically for you. It can come down to more pages being more ways for visitors to find you.

No, datafeed affiliate marketing has not made me rich. It sure would be nice. But it has opened up some areas that I am developing sites that should bring in some income I’d have trouble earning otherwise. My datafeed sites have had some very promising beginnings.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know about the Build a Niche Store software I use occasionally, and the transition of the eBay affiliate program from Commission Junction to their own eBay Partner Network.

And if you read around other sites, you may have heard many rumblings of discontent as many sites lost significant income in the process.  If you haven’t, I’m talking about people who went from mid to high 4 figures, to low to mid 3 figures or worse. It was pretty ugly, despite eBay’s insistence that all tracking was working just fine.

I’ve mostly been sitting back, gritting my teeth to see what would happen. I lost quite a bit of income in this process too. But I’m happy to say that I’m starting to see signs of life at long last.

Not quite the income from before yet. But it’s early days yet, as it’s been about a week of income coming in, more than the few dollars I got last month. Hard to say if it’s actual new sales or if they’re quietly correcting tracking problems. But I’m seeing a difference that I hope keeps up.

I promised the other day I would post about finding great niches on eBay for people using Build a Niche Store. It’s time to start that process!

Check Hot Sellers on eBay

eBay makes this relatively easy in some ways. Go to the Sell page, and scroll down to the “Cash In!” section. You’ll see a link called Find out What’s Hot! There’s a ton of information there to help you figure out what you want to focus on.

Now there are a few big clues I can give you to help you pick. First of all, don’t go too general. Sure, lots of people buy iPods on eBay, but lots of people are trying to earn money through the affiliate program on them too. Go more specific. Tighten up that niche.

You can, of course, go for the big niches. You just have to be prepared to deal with more competition. If you’re just starting out, it’s generally a shorter learning curve and less frustrating if you start out with a smaller niche.

Another important thing is to pick something you will enjoy creating content around. While BANS creates a great site for you, you will still want some unique content that you’ve created on the site as well. You can buy and rewrite private label content, you can review individual products that tend to sell well, just create something more to draw the search engines and (more importantly) buyers to your site.

Now whether you create that content on or off your BANS website is up to you. I’ve done it both ways.

Also consider is whether the product is seasonal or sells well year-round. There’s nothing wrong with promoting seasonal products, but you should be ready for the impact that will have on your site.

You can see a lot of hot products by checking out the Hot Items by Category. It’s only updated every few months or so, so it’s not terribly accurate.

And here’s a biggie: eBay has a new Marketplace Research tool. It offers up to 90 days of completed sales data, average sold prices, top searches by category and trend graphs. It’s not free, but you can pick your subscription level depending on if you’re just doing some quick research or if it’s going to be ongoing.

For free tools, there’s also Terapeak. It will give you similar data, as well as the percentage of auctions that actually sell, which can help in deciding if sales are good enough in your niche.

The higher the percentage of successful sales, the better, but don’t be at all surprised to see many in the 30-50% range. Just wander through eBay and you can quickly realize that most products do not sell more than half the time. Many sell far less often.

The other metric you’ll be interested in, of course, is the average sale price. Since your commission is based off what eBay earns, which is based on the final sale price, you want good numbers here. However, a niche that is easier to dominate that produces a lot of little sales can be better than a more challenging one with larger sales. It’s all a matter of balance and personal preference.

Personal Interests

What do you like? Is there something you’ve bought on eBay? What do you see around your house?

It doesn’t take a lot of detailed research to find things that you know people tend to buy. Pretty much anything you own has the potential to be sold online.

Once you’ve found your potential niche, you can use Terapeak to see how well it does on eBay. Maybe it works, maybe you need to think some more.

What About Pay Per Click Costs?

Even if you aren’t doing pay per click, it can be interesting to see what others are paying for traffic on Google and other search engines. A niche with a large number of PPC ads on it is often profitable for those running the ads.

But sometimes a profitable niche has been missed in the pay per click market. This is more common on the tighter niches, another good reason to really work on choosing your niche.

There’s a free tool offered by Google that lets you check out your keywords. You can add in the average CPC in the filter section so that you can see what others are paying. Type in $50 for your estimated Max CPC to see what it thinks you would be paying for that keyword.

You don’t have to use pay per click to promote your sites if that’s not your style. Many do just fine with other kinds of marketing. But the data’s still interesting, and you might come up with a niche you hadn’t yet considered.

There are lots of other ways you can research a niche, but I find these ones work pretty well. The key is to get creative and find a topic you want to work on.

With eBay’s changes to their affiliate program, I’ve had to take some time with my BANS sites, getting them updated. But I also wanted to start some new ones.

The particular site I’m working on today is one I’d never switched to Build a Niche Store in the first place. I’d used eBay’s affiliate tools back before I’d ever heard of BANS. It’s brought in some sales depite being in Javascript, so it’s definitely a category I want to update to something the search engines will actually care about.

The installation of BANS is very simple. Create your database on your hosting, then upload Build a Niche Store. They’ll tell you to CHMOD the cont/cont.php file to 777, and the instructions tell you how to do that with your FTP program. It’s pretty simple - right click on the filename, select properties and change the 644 to 777. At least that’s how it works for me.

Then you go to your site and follow the instructions to install it. You’ll need your mySQL host and login information for this. A few seconds later, it’s all installed. Delete the install.php file and CHMOD the cont.php file back to 644.

Login, and you have one more very, very important step: Change your password. You can change the login name too, if you like, but since all BANS installations come with the same default admin name and password, changing the password is a vital bare minimum.

Next you’ll want to set up your store. I’ve circled the areas you need to fill out to get started.

There are other areas you can fill out, such as if you want to customize your site wide meta tags, but you don’t absolutely have to do that. You can also decide if you want open or closed navigation - that is, do you want links to all the categories showing or not?
The campaign ID you get from the eBay Partner Network, and you can follow the link to get your eBay category. Make sure you create a new campaign ID for every site so you can track which sites are profitable for you.

Hit Save once you’ve added all your information. Your basic store is now active… maybe. Some hosts need you to switch from normal mode to curl. That’s at the bottom of the Setup page:

Just make sure you customize it. The basic templates are very plain. I always change up the colors and give it a header graphic. In this particular case I’ll be coordinating it with the main site. There are several to choose from, so it’s pretty easy to find something that matches the basic layout of most sites, and you can customize from there.

Now I know I’ve skipped over one very important step - researching the niche. There are many ways to do that, and I’ll discuss it when I start my next BANS site.

Now that there’s been just about a week for the bugs to be worked out, I’ve decided to go through with updating my Build a Niche Store websites to the new eBay Partner Network program. I want this done well before the end of April deadline, after all. No point in procrastinating and losing out on sales.

I’m starting this out with one of my lower performing sites, one that doesn’t currently get a lot of traffic. This way I can learn about any road hazards before dealing with a site that has more visitors.

The update should be very easy. According to the instructions, I should be able to just upload the files, go to update.php on the relevant site, and it should be done, aside from entering my new affiliate information.

So of course I’m backing everything up first. Files, database, the whole thing. It’s the most sensible thing to do in any website update.

Deep breath and here goes…

Everything looks great! Not at all surprised really, since I gave it a few days, but upgrading any site is a bit nervewracking. So much that could go wrong.

There are a lot of changes in here. The interface is completely different, but it looks good:

Now I just have to figure out how to plug in my affiliate information. That looks easy enough to do, just by going over to the Setup page, with another tab open so that I can create a campaign ID over at the eBay Partner Network for this particular site. Always nice to be able to track the commission sources, after all.

I have my affiliate links cloaked, so for a quick check I uncloak. Sure enough, I can see my campaign ID in the links.

I have to admit, it’s a bit tricky getting used to the new terminology. I had to look in the highly useful User Manual to be certain that my initial guess that the campaign ID was in fact what I needed for tracking. I’m more used to affiliate IDs, after all, or Commission Junction’s PID.

One more little step: removing my old sitemap. The new version includes a sitemap, so I don’t need the old mod. And with the updated pages the old one isn’t even functioning, so it goes beyond redundancy. But that’s incredibly easy, and I could even switch the page off if I so chose.

Believe it or not, it was really just that simple. I may have time tonight to start a couple new sites even, although I may instead choose to work on some more of my article marketing which is my usual for this early part of the month. So much I want to do, so little time!

But when I create a store I will show the step by step process here. Probably won’t actually do it for at least a few days since I’ll have to research it, buy the domain and get things set up so it functions first. Usual little delays. But I’m really excited about the changes.

The hardest part no doubt is going to be finding the occasional eBay links on my non-BANS sites! I know they’re out there, and now I have to do something about them.

Well this is taking longer than I hoped it would. Submitted my ebook for approval on Sunday, here it is Wednesday afternoon and no approval yet. I’m just about climbing the walls here.

That’s not to say I’m sitting still. Today I applied to eBay’s new Partner Network and was approved. If you haven’t applied yet, I read on the BANS forum that you need to list one of your sites on the application or it may go to manual review which takes about 2 weeks. No idea if it’s really that bad, but it’s pretty easy to list a site. Build a Niche Store has their new version out, so I need to get my sites changed over and start at least a couple new ones.

My son has speech therapy 3 days a week, and when it’s my turn to take him, I brainstorm. I have about 6 more ebook ideas lightly mapped out. I think I will get these going much more quickly than this first one was, now that I know a bit more about what I’m doing.

And of course I continue with my article marketing. My normal routine is to spend the first part of the month writing out articles to be distributed throughout the month. That works pretty well for me. A nice steady stream of articles linking to this site or that of mine.

So while I’m getting twitchy about this whole ebook approval thing, I’m still being pretty productive. Getting it off my to do list really helped. There’s something about getting stuff accomplished when you’ve been blocking your own progress that really feels good.

This is creating quite a bit of commentary. As of March 31, eBay will no longer allow people to sell downloadable products through the auction system. They will only be allowed in the classifieds section, which costs $9.95/month. Obviously, the people who have been making a good living from this are going pretty nuts.

It’s an understandable decision to me, however. One of their stated concerns has to do with feedback manipulation - it’s very easy to build a good reputation with instant downloads, I understand. But I also think it has to do with copyright issues. I know a lot of ebook sellers who have had troubles with people reselling their products on eBay without permission.

It’s also a nice challenge to marketers. Some are debating whether mailing the product on a CD would get around the restriction.

I had, at one point, considered selling my ebook on eBay. But in the end, it’s a place people go to find bargains. I’d rather get people shopping at my site and build a list of affiliates to sell future products, than sell at too cheap a price.

Scott over at Self Made Minds has another good point: Could this also mean no more selling domains on eBay? They’re transferred electronically too. A little something to watch for, I guess.

This is one of those reminders, of course, that one should never rely 100% on a single source of income for your business. You never know when things will change, especially if you don’t have control.