Showing posts with label affiliate marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label affiliate marketing. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

What Is BANS?

BANS (Build A Niche Store) is a website builder
which enables you to create a network of traffic pulling, money making niche
websites focused around the eBay affiliate opportunity.

You simply choose your niche...build and develop your site...promote...make
money...rinse and repeat.



The BANS and eBay Combination


Each eBay marketplace has an affiliate program which enables you to promote
eBay listed products in exchange for a healthy
share of eBay’s revenue
for each sale that you refer.

The 12 eBay marketplaces that BANS currently supports (Austria, Australia,
Belgium, Canada, Spain, France, India, Italy, Netherlands, Singapore, United
Kingdom, United States
) hold a combined product inventory of over 60
million products.

These 60+ Million products cater to just about every imaginable niche
– from fishing rods to antique Chinese vases, engagement rings to Ipods
and it’s all these products which you can control and then market using
BANS.

As an eBay affiliate your aim is to connect relevant internet browsers through
to relevant eBay products and your BANS built niche stores are the medium through
which you can achieve this...

The more niche stores that you build the more people you will transfer to eBay
and the more eBay affiliate commissions you will make.

Step 1: Choose Your Country

Your country choice will determine which specific eBay marketplace
products you will be marketing.

If you choose eBay.com then you will be creating niche websites
focused around eBay.com listed products and will then be marketing
them to online shoppers in the United States.

If you choose the United Kingdom you will be doing the same
for the eBay.co.uk marketplace and UK based shoppers and so
forth.


Step 2: Choose Your Niche

With your target country chosen you then install BANS and once
installed your first choice inside your new BANS admin panel
is the niche you want to target.


If you choose the golf category BANS will build a golf eBay
affiliate store, the diamond rings category then a diamond ring
eBay affiliate store.

Straight out of the box your store will:
  • Contain all of those products listed on eBay relevant to
    your chosen niche.
  • Contain a sub-category navigation based on eBay’s
    hierarchical category structure.
  • Have all the search features of the eBay marketplace.
  • Have your eBay affiliate id embedded into each of the external
    product links to eBay.
  • Be completely SEO friendly.


Step 3: Develop Your New Website To “Match Your Market”

With your basic store built next comes development…

BANS is a complete content management system with the
development features to match any professional website builder.

The aim with this development stage is to “match your
market
” which means – make it feel like it’s
related to your target niche (through design) and add width
and depth to it through the Store Page and Content Page features.

With a little bit of time spent inside your BANS admin panel
you can transform your straight out of the box store
into one which is themed to your niche and has store
pages which target keywords that your market is actually using
to find the products listed in your store.

Once you get into content creation you can add as many new
pages to your site as you are willing to write or get written.
As with any website or blog, every new page you add targets
more keywords in the search engines which means more targeted
traffic and more eBay affiliate commissions.

Again all of this development is done online and whilst logged
into your BANS admin panel.


Step 4: Market Your Website To Your Target Niche

Once you’re “happy” with your new niche store
it’s time to turn your attention towards marketing.

If you’ve targeted golf then you want to attract golfers
interested in purchasing specific pieces of golf equipment,
if it’s a used motorcycle store that you’ve built
then you’re looking for those people who are about to
buy a new bike.

By following a basic set of marketing principles including content creation,
SEO, article marketing, forum marketing, Squidoo lenses, social bookmarking,
link building, USFreeads and PPC you will soon be finding buyers for the
products you have chosen to market and will be making a steady supply
of eBay affiliate commissions.


At this stage you can then choose to spend some more time developing
your niche store (particularly adding more content pages), pursue
a more aggressive marketing strategy, or…


Step 5: Begin Building Your eBay Affiliate Empire

Once you have familiarized yourself with the software and have
built, developed and marketed your first site you will have
a good understanding of how the system works.

You can then begin adding to your niche store portfolio
by building new stores to target new niche markets.

If you commit to the project, take action and use our member
forum as a support structure for your development you will soon
find yourself with your own growing portfolio of eBay affiliate
websites which are successfully funnelling buyers through to
eBay and adding a nice monthly income to your bank account!

There are no pre-set limits as to the depth of each store that
you create or the width of your entire portfolio…you get
back what you put in…and with a product inventory
of over 60 million products to market there are more opportunities
than it will ever be possible to target.



And That's All There Is To It...

Choose your country, choose your niche, develop your site, market your site,
rinse and repeat!



To Your Success



Monday, June 2, 2008

eBay Affiliates

If you're looking for a way to earn income from eBay without having to actually sell anything yourself, the eBay affiliate program is something to consider. eBay offers a staggering array of options for affiliates to utilize eBay's marketplace and its content for potential referral revenue. Search engine marketing, banners, auction feeds and Web Services are all part of eBay's offer to help affiliates profit from "the world's online marketplace."

Getting Started

Though the affiliates program is specifically not intended to market your own auctions (that's actually against eBay affiliates terms of service), to get started you do need to be an eBay member. The actual affiliate program itself, in terms of registration, tracking, payment and "some" of the linking options is done via Commission Junction, so you'll need to get an ID there as well. This is easily done by going to http://affiliates.ebay.com/. Approval for the eBay program is almost instantaneous so you'll be able to get right into the thick of it immediately.


Affiliate Links

There are three principal methods of building the media links for an eBay Affiliates program:


  • The Commission Junction interface

  • Banners, boxes, leaderboards, skyscrapers and search

  • The eBay Affiliates website

  • Product Kit media units, Flexible Destination Tool, Editor Kit (integrated eBay listings)

  • Web Services

  • Full XML feeds and calls

The Commission Junction eBay interface offers up to 5 pages loaded full of various affiliate banners and links of all sizes and shapes for you to choose from. As with all Commission Junction programs Earnings Per Click (EPC) for the last 7 days and the last 3 months are listed on the same row as the media unit. (On March 29, 2005 for all eBay Affiliates media Commission Junction reported a 7-day EPC of $4.22 and a 3-month EPC of $3.65).


Advanced Affiliate Links the Easy Way


Though you can potentially be successful with the Commission Junction buttons, banners and links, there are more effective ways to entice users to click.


The eBay Affiliate site offers excellent browser based tools to create advanced links and even site integration with simple and easy to use online interfaces. Users will click (and are more likely to convert) for items that are of interest especially if you've got them on a site where they are contextually relevant.


Instead of using a "plain Jane" eBay link from Commission Junction, the Product Kit Media units online application lets you create customized ad units (at custom sizes) with products (from Books, Cameras & Photo, Cell Phones, Computers & Networking, Consumer Electronics, DVD & Movies, Music, Sporting goods, and Video games) and prices pulled directly from the eBay marketplace.


The Editor Kit allows you to pull in eBay auction (or just BIN if you so choose) listings into your site with the use of a script snippet that is placed on your site page. It is customizable by color, number of listing, keyword, category and seller. Personally, I think the "Editor Kit" is the wrong title for this killer affiliate app. I'd call it an integrated eBay auction list kit because that is what it does.


The key with both the product kit and the editor kit is to make them look like they are part of your site by matching colors and by placing the units in a place where they make sense. For the Editor Kit, you can literally use it to create a listing site of your own that will then feed you referral revenue when a user clicks through and bids (or signs up for the first time so that they can bid on an auction they saw on your site's listing). It is not as elegant as the eBay Web Services API, but it is infinitely easier to execute and it's free to start and deploy.


eBay's affiliate Web Services API allows affiliate developers to directly and tightly integrate eBay data into a site, or application.If you're a small to medium size Affiliate simply looking to integrate eBay listings into your site, the Editor Kit will likely meet your needs.


eBay Affiliate Resources:

Main affiliates page

Payment structure

Affiliate tools

eBay affiliates best practices

eBay hot items report (PDF)

eBay developer blog for affiliates

Keys to eBay Affiliate Success

  • Use Commission Junction to determine and select creative units with high earnings per click.
  • Use the Editor Kit to show eBay listings
  • Put units on pages where they'll be contextually relevant
  • Read eBay's hot market report to choose categories with higher conversions
  • Use Shopper ID (SID) to enable proper tracking

to Your success