Losing the Rat Race

I put the cart before the horse a little bit with my first post about how to make money on eBay by giving an overview of my business model without too much in the way of details, so I’d like to revisit the subject in a series of more detailed posts explaining the steps I took to build my current monthly income from the eBay Partner Network, which currently lies within the region of £800-1000/month. Currently that’s earned from referring visitors to auctions they may be interested in and gaining a percentage of the seller fees when they purchase something, but the way commissions are calculated is due to change radically in October to a quality-per-click system. The change is good news for me; as a result I hope to bust through the £1000/month barrier, as the quality of the sales I drive to eBay under my business model is very good indeed. But more on the quality-based commission system in a future post.

The business model I use to earn beans with eBay is not of the usual form you’ll read about (that of finding juicy search engine keywords with low competition, optimising your site for those keywords, and setting off on a campaign to build backlinks to hoist your site up to the top of the search engines for them). These days, it is becoming increasingly difficult to rank an eBay affiliate site in Google; they are either being de-indexed or penalised as thin-affiliate sites. The days when you could throw up a domain of eBay listings related to a niche and expect it to perform well in Google are long gone.

The good news is that my business model couldn’t care less about the existence of Google.

My model involves focusing on a specific group of people who use eBay, studying how they use the auction site, and from that building a website that improves their user experience to such a level that they will find it irresistible, and either bookmark or type-in my site and use it as a portal into eBay. It sounds simple, but there’s a lot of legwork and reading to be done to get there – and the first step is choosing a niche to operate in. So as the first in a series of posts about how to make money with EPN, are the rules of thumb I use to decide on one.

• It should be a hobbyist/enthusiast niche
This is vital. We aren’t interested in people who make the odd purchase on eBay. We’re after people who are on the site most days, largely for one area of interest. We want to zero-in on a group of passionate people who live and breathe a hobby that requires frequent purchases in a particular niche. Think coin collectors. Think model train enthusiasts. You get the picture.

• The niche must have a good turnover of new items on eBay, with a high average ticket value
There’s no point choosing a niche which only gets a few new items per week listed. We want to choose one in which there is a healthy turnover of new items for people to be eyeballing via your site, of which a good proportion actually sell. We’d also be wasting our time thoroughly if the items only sold for a few pence each on average; ideally we want to pick a niche with higher-ticket items that sell on a regular basis. This basically adds up to choosing a popular hobby – not too general, but not too specialist either – in which there are rare, sought-after or generally high-priced items that nevertheless frequently sell.

• Consider targeting a niche popular with older enthusiasts/hobbyists
The reason I do this is twofold. Firstly, retired people typically have more time, and are fairly likely to have disposable income to spend on hobbies. Secondly, they are – generally speaking – less likely to be computer savvy than younger generations, and so I feel are more likely to find a website created to save them time searching for hobby-related items on eBay of use.

• You find the niche interesting, and/or have some real-world connection with it already
You’re most likely to succeed in creating an interesting and useful eBay affiliate site that gets bookmarked and frequented by others if you have at least a vague interest in the topic yourself. Even better is if you have a real-world knowledge or connection with the hobbyists or enthusiasts you are targeting. If you don’t have knowledge of the hobby yourself, perhaps some of your friends or family do? You can ask them for feedback as you develop your niche site, and then when it comes to launch, you can use their connections to feed your site into the hobby’s community.

These pointers come directly from my personal experience building niche eBay affiliate sites. My leading eBay affiliate website receives around 400 visitors per day, over 50% of whom come via direct traffic – that is, either from a bookmark, desktop link or from typing the url directly into the browser. This independence from Google is a godsend for anyone wanting to build a full-time income from affiliate marketing who knows how fickle the Big G can be at times, and I think it’s the real strength of this particular approach to creating an eBay affiliate site rather than the keyword sniping approach that others may take.

The next post in the series will cover how I recommend going about researching your target audience and building your site around their needs, using a mock niche case study to highlight the sorts of things you need to consider.