So I was eating lunch today and waiting for Sunny from shntech.com. (We’ve been sharing notes between sessions so we can double our coverage.) As I was waiting, two similarly dressed youngish folks sat down and asked about Murdok. Webmasters and marketers, I told them, interested in online marketing with an emphasis on organic search.
Discuss AD:TECH 04 in WebProWorld.
That had them both scrambling for their business cards – they were eBay reps out recruiting new affiliates.
I had only just heard of eBay affiliates yesterday, and so asked Jason and Amy a bit about the program.
To my chagrin I learned it’s been around for about five years. Why haven’t I heard about it? I’m no affiliate expert, but I’ve heard of the biggies. Well, I’ve heard of AdSense at least.
So the eBay affiliates are making money in two ways. The first is by creating content pages and placing contextually relevant eBay ads there. You can specify how many listings appear though – anywhere from a few to 200 ads. (And you can put both AdSense and eBay ads on your site.)
The second way people are making 140k a month (that’s what they told me…) is through buying search ads for specific eBay listings. If you bid on cheap keywords that provide high conversion you can really make some money.
EBay also gives a payout when new people become members… though it seems this could lead to some serious eBay fraud if you could somehow optimize the sign up process and click through on your own ads. We didn’t get into that though.
I was interested to learn that Commission Junction (who gave me the train whistle)runs eBay’s program.
EBay’s just launched a new site for their affiliates, and they have a recently launched forum. I asked them twice if they ever posted in other forums and both times they told me they had their own forums already. But they only get 6 posts a day right now. I guess that’s part of why I’ve never heard of them.
Who’s using this right now? Why haven’t I heard of this already? Any thoughts on the service?
Garrett French is the editor of Murdok’s eBusiness channel. You can talk to him directly at WebProWorld, the eBusiness Community Forum.
