How to Make Money on eBay
September 1st, 2009In 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 LifeTM 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.