Losing the Rat Race

Earning Money from eBay 1: Choosing an eBay Niche

roland — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:04:50 +0000

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.

Make Money Online: Three To Watch

roland — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:06:44 +0000

We have an awful lot to thank the Make Money Online gurus for. They are the guys and gals that are responsible for triggering that epiphany inside of us when we read their blogs and realise that life needn’t consist solely of plodding through the routine corporate slavery of a 9-5 job. They tell us that by getting our heads around a few simple SEO techniques and having a clue about on which markets to apply them – not to mention putting in hours and hours of work writing and building links! – we too can follow in their footsteps, and free ourselves from the bonds of working for someone else by building an independent online income.

But once you’ve set off on the journey, the gurus earning their thousands and thousands of dollars per month can seem so distant compared with your own reality. It’s hard to relate their continuing success to the £2.53 you earned in your first month, and doing so seems to diminish your own achievements, underlining just how far you have to go to match them.

Instead it’s a good idea to find peers in the blogosphere or on forums that are also just starting out. Following their progress – something you’ll find much easier to relate to – will be an inspiration, and dare I say you may find a little bit of healthy competitiveness rising up in you as you try to raise your game and redouble your efforts to beat their earnings.

Discovered largely via the comment pages of Lissie’s great Passive Income blog, here are three individuals who have just recently started out on their own make money online odysseys who you might like to follow closely:

• Matt from A Little Extra Money
Matt has been blogging about his online money making antics since February of this year. His revenue streams include completing surveys for cash at OpinionWorld, and writing articles at Hubpages and Infobarrel from which he earns a share of the advertising revenue via Google Adsense. Reflecting his blog’s title, Matt seems to be treating his extra earnings as “the icing on the cake” and tries to put in time whenever he can take it out of his busy schedule. He earned £16 in August, but he’d had more successful months than that in the past, with his total income from his various revenue streams totalling up to hundreds of pounds so far this year.

• Joel from the Keyword Academy Scam Experiment
Joel has taken a very interesting line indeed with his blog, choosing to set it up as an “experiment” to test the effectiveness of a popular make money online program, The Keyword Academy (TKA). His plan is to apply the techniques taught by TKA over a six-month period, and to see if he can at least get his money back from what he spent on the program in that time. It’s a novel idea and something I’ve been following with interest. As of early August, Joel had made £18 from his sites by following the techniques outlined by TKA, which I expect to see rise significantly if he has got his head around the techniques and he puts in the elbow grease.

• TipTopCat from My Money Making Experiment
TipTopCat has dabbled in the world of online income for some time now, having taken part in last year’s 30 Day Challenge but not really having found any success with it at the time. However, she found as the sites she created for the challenge aged, they crept up the rankings and started earning her Adsense income. She took part in this year’s 30 Day Challenge, as well as the 100 hubs in 30 days HubChallenge, which to me shows real commitment: few people actually finished that effort, despite many taking part. As of August 2009 she was making £100 in Adsense per month and an extra £17 in Amazon affiliate earnings, a new revenue stream for her. It’s looking very good for TipTopCat indeed and hopefully in September she’ll be able to bust the £150 or £200/month mark, on her way to her ambitious yet achievable goal of £1000/month in passive income by the end of the year.

I hope you enjoy following these new starters just as much as you do reading the success stories of people like Griz et al, and that seeing them out there making money will inspire you either to redouble your efforts or to get started in the first place on your journey to make money online.

Climbing the Mountain

roland — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 13:13:35 +0000

Pursuing an online income can be quite a rollercoaster at times. The very first time you read about those who are really making it big and living the dream, you are inspired to act, and so you throw up a wonky website and patiently try to draw traffic to it. That’s often followed by a period of disappointment when you don’t make any money in the slightest. Then the thrill of that first Adsense click coming through – hooray! I still clearly remember receiving my first ever Adsense click arriving into my account. I had a Firefox plugin that displayed by Adsense income in my browser at work. It stubbornly sat at $0.00 for three whole days until one morning, sitting in the off*ce and staring zombie-like at the screen, it updated – to $0.05. I’d made my first passive income!

But what keeps you going after that? There’s a huge gulf between a 5-cent click and the thousands your favourite gurus are making per month. It’s at this point that some people throw in the towel, as they realise the absolute hard slog, day-in and day-out, that is required to get to the top of the mountain.

As much as I hate to sound like one of those bullshitting managers I left behind in the corporate world, your chances of reaching the top of the mountain are, in my opinion, greatly enhanced by setting achievable goals, month on month. So you made £100 this month? Well done! Aim for £150 next month. How are you going to make the extra £50? Write another website? Target these five keywords? Give a new affiliate program a go? Breaking your goal down into achievable tasks makes it so much easier to stay the course.

I’m at the stage where I can finally make out the top of the mountain. I haven’t quite made it yet, but I can damn well see how to get there. A few months back I set my ultimate goal: by the end of 2010 I want to be earning £5000 per month; more specifically, from five completely independent revenue streams each earning £1000 per month. A big ask indeed, but doable. I’m a little over halfway there at the moment, but still with a long way to go.

I cannot stress enough how diversification is absolutely key in the world of online income. You might be raking it in with a single site plugging an affiliate program bringing in £5000 per month, but all it takes is a Google algorithm tweak to send your money site cascading down the search engines – or worse, you could be banned outright by the affiliate programme for putting a foot wrong, and lose your whole income almost overnight. There are so many risks just waiting to nobble us, and I don’t believe it’s overly paranoid to be prepared for them. Simple steps such as not linking all of your websites together in some kind of easily identifiable chain for the Google Axe to cull in one go, not relying on a single niche to bring home the bacon (e.g. mortgage affiliates – not a good year for them, is it?), and varying your sources of income (Adsense, Amazon, eBay and so on) will help you dig deeper into the mountain and make it less likely for you to fall off.

Have a safe journey up there – and enjoy the view from the top :)

How to Make Money on eBay

roland — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:00:46 +0000

In response to a call to action from Grizz’s excellent Make Money Online blog, and inspired by Tracey Edwards’ detailed response on How to make money with Amazon, I thought I would come out of hiding and enter the blogging world by penning my thoughts on how I currently make in the region of £800-1000 ($1300-1600) per month with the eBay Partner Network. The outside chance of a healthy backlink from Grizz’s authority site was exactly the wake-up call I needed to stop hoarding my ideas and share them with the wider community. If it was his plan to coax the mice out of the holes with a possible offering of cheese, it worked with me.

For a little over a year now I have been free of the horrors of the nine to five treadmill of office work, interfering bosses, playing bullshit bingo in bland meeting rooms and all the rest of the trimmings which come with the Life^TM package known as Corporate Hell. Following the example of others who have managed to free themselves from the daily grind, I managed to build a online income comparable to that of my full time job, enabling me to kiss goodbye to office life once and for all.

Perhaps it is time for me to pay it forward and lend a hand to others who wish to do the same. In the past I’ve shied away from giving away too many details about my operations, as I was once badly burned for doing so. I certainly learnt my lesson from that particular experience. But providing my posts remain anonymous and non-specific to my sites, I think there is value in relaying what I have learned since I dropped out of the rat race.

I have a number of different ways of earning online income, but on this occasion I’m going to focus on how to make money on eBay, through referring buyers to auctions they may be interested in and receiving a portion of the selling fees back from eBay on referral of a successful sale. I’m sure by now many of you are well aware of the tried and tested method of identifying search engine keywords you can hone in on, penning your site’s content to optimise for them, and building an army of targeted backlinks from relevant, on-topic sites to boost your site to the top of the search rankings. This timeless method can be applied to Adsense, Amazon, eBay or any affiliate program under the sun, it works, and has been done to death in blog posts far better than anything I could ever write.

Well, you can safely pack away your Keyword Elite and Market Samurai and forget about all that for now, as the business model I use to make my passive income via eBay doesn’t involve hunting and optimising for elusive keywords, and is in fact not really dependent on search engine traffic at all.

Piqued your interest?

Used pink bathrobe

Every man and his dog uses eBay, from teens through to silver surfers the whole world around. But for this particular business model we’re going to ignore most of them, only honing in on a certain personality type and age group that uses eBay.

We aren’t going to be marketing to the casual eBayers. We’re going after the addicts. The hoarders. The collectors. The enthusiasts. The obsessives. The hobbyists. Call them what you will; for whatever reason, these people live something that regularly requires the purchase of material goods. They may have devoted their lives to collecting pre-War German stamps, or renovating a 1959 Chris Craft wooden boat. Whatever their passion, these people are driven to buy, and to do it regularly.

They are the perfect target audience for an affiliate.

Rare mint snowglobe

My business model goes one step further to narrow down my affiliate audience. I ignore the hobbyist pursuits that are most popular amongst the younger generations and focus instead on those prevalent amongst the over 50s instead. It’s a whopping generalisation, but the over 50s are likely to have a fair bit of disposable income to splash on their hobby, and are less likely to be both computer savvy and adaptable to change (more on that later).

Smurf TV Tray

Next, brainstorm some potential hobbyist niches that might appeal to your target audience. Here, the eBay category index comes in handy. Ensure you pick a niche where there is a healthy turnover of new items listed, and more importantly, being sold. eBay Pulse can also give you the skinny on what is most popular in each category. Try to ensure that the niches you settle on have some big ticket items; it’s simply not worth your time to build a site around a niche in which the items sell for just a few dollars apiece.

Once you’ve identified some potential niches that might appeal to your target audience, you need to study them and analyse their online (and real world) presence. You can get a headstart here if you know someone who can give you a crash course on the hobby, but otherwise you’ll have to do the hard graft of reading the web, sourcing the authority sites, hunting down the magazine publications and genning up on the hobby yourself. You’ll have a much greater chance of success at this stage if you choose something you find vaguely interesting yourself.

Evaluate how easy it would be to become known in each of your potential niches. Ask yourself: how easy will it be to spread the word about my new website? A key factor to look for is an active forum or two on which posting of links in signatures is allowed; also look for niches that have healthy mailing lists or Yahoo! Groups you will be able to participate in.

Pet Rock

Once you’ve identified an area around which to build a website, you can use all the knowledge you have gleaned to build a website around the hobby. Your goal is to build something that is so useful that instead of going directly to eBay for their purchases, the hobbyists will go to your website first – and they’ll do it via a bookmark or type-in. A tall order…. so how on earth do you achieve this?

Start off by trying to identify any complaints people in your niche have with eBay, and make sure your site resolves them. For instance, your research into the niche could have told you that some of your hobbyists might not like the fact that eBay is slow to load, cluttered, or covered in adverts, or it’s hard to find exactly what you need. If that’s the case, make your site the opposite: fast-loading, uncluttered, free of adverts and with a clear index of relevant topics tailored to those in your niche going directly to pages on your site displaying relevant auctions. As a case in point, every time eBay fundamentally change the layout or search functions, you’ll find a core of buyers unhappy with them “messing with things”. Some people – especially the older audience of buyers we are targeting – are averse to change, and the unchanging, uncluttered window on eBay our site will offer the hobbyist will be lapped up by such individuals.

Furthermore, offer enhancements that make your site more useable than eBay’s. Use eBay’s little-known search operators to build meaningful pages of auction listings specifically tailored to your niche. As an example, a enthusiast unaware of how to use search operators who is only interested in looking at 19th century US coins currently has a hard time trying to pick through the eBay search results for items of interest, as the eBay search facilities don’t currently allow him to filter by date. But show that man a page of auctions powered by the eBay wildcard query of

US* COIN* (180*,181*,182*,183*,184*,185*,186*,187*,188*,189*)

- a “clever” query returning pretty much all 19th century US coins listed on eBay – and you can bet he’ll be back to your site again, and that you’ll be earning the commissions on any of his subsequent purchases.

Finally, if you’ve some knowledge of PHP or simple programming – or have the funds to pay someone who does – you’ll find the eBay Developer Program another key feature for adding unique value to your eBay hobbyist site.

Alf Alarm Clock

Having developed your site based on understanding and meeting the needs of your target audience, you have to introduce it to them. You can do this via the entry points you evaluated earlier in your niche research. Inform people online through forums and mailing lists. Personally, I find it pays to be honest – tell them you have made the site to make it easier for them to find things on eBay, and that you will be making some money out of it for your efforts. Ensure your website has clear instructions on how to bookmark the site for future reference, and that there is a method for visitors to spread the word to other hobbyists who might find it useful. Prize draws can be a popular way of encouraging people to spread the word; ask your visitors to tell two people about your site to put their name in to win an eBay gift voucher – which they will spend on your site, of course!

In terms of offline marketing, contact the printed publications you identified in your research with press releases – more often than not they are dying for any old content to fill their columns. Display adverts in local hobbyist shops or newspapers. Attend events and give out freebies with your website address splashed all over them (objects likely to be placed near computers, such as mouse mats, are best); the list is endless.

Shatner’s Old Toupee

The business model for how to make money on eBay that I’ve outlined above is not a silver bullet by any means, nor does it involve a trivial amount of work. But it has certainly worked in my case. Over 50% of the visitors to my main site arrive there directly, which means either via a bookmark or from typing the URL directly into the address bar. 25% come from search engines for a range of relevant keywords, of which the dominant term is my site’s brand name. By applying the old-skool business rules of spotting a need and fulfilling it, I’ve managed to carve myself a pretty penny of a passive income, month on month, largely independent of whatever mood Google is in today.

The latter point certainly helps me sleep a bit better at night.