Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

This one is just for “Web Hosting”, a quick explanation of why promoting eBay as an affiliate really rocks!

Just before I start it’s best to say that I only promote the US and UK eBay programs because that is where 95%+ of all my traffic comes from, so it’s where I make my money.

OK, first of all this is what eBay US will currently pay you at the very basic level:-

Winning Bid – Your Share
$0.00 – $99.99 50.00%
$100.00 – $4,999.99 55.00%
$5,000.00 – $199,999.99 60.00%
$200,000.00 – $699,999.99 65.00%
$700,000.00 – $2,999,999.99 70.00%
$3,000,000.00+ 75.00%

Secondly and most importantly this is what eBay in the US will pay you for a new signup:-

0 – 49 $25.00
50 – 1,999 $28.00
2,000 – 29,999 $31.00
30,000+ $35.00

Lots of numbers there but let me give you a real life example. Through one of my BANS stores I refer a new user to the US eBay website. He signs up and places a bid, I receive $25. He loses. Next week a different user bids on something else through one of my links and wins, I receive 55%. For the UK site the rates are the following:-

Winning Bid – Your Share
GBP 0.00 – GBP 999.99 30.00%
GBP 1,000.00 – GBP 4,999.99 32.50%
GBP 5,000.00 – GBP 24,999.99 35.00%
GBP 25,000.00 – GBP 49,999.99 40.00%
GBP 50,000.00 – GBP 99,999.99 45.00%
GBP 100,000.00 – GBP 499,999.99 50.00%
GBP 500,000.00+ 60.00%

And for new signups
0 – 24 GBP 8.00
25 – 249 GBP 9.00
250 – 499 GBP 10.00
500+ GBP 11.00

So you can see the numbers stack up quite well. From referring only a few active bidders to the eBay network you can add another regular income stream. In fact the 11 referred new users and handful of referred bidders from one of my websites have between them paid for my new TV that I mentioned yesterday.

How BANS Helps
Build A Niche Store has opened my eyes to the world of eBay referrals. I think it works so well because of the whole idea of niche marketing. eBay want new active users, the problem for affiliates then is finding enough people who haven’t heard of eBay and the bargains that can be found on it. Of course there are certain niches out there where although people do use Google to search for information there is a good chance many won’t be eBay users. It is these markets that you can really target with your BANS store. Hobbies are an obvious target for this, especially those that have a high cost for equipment associated with them. Now might just be the time to start that “Model Railway Fanclub” website (that just happens to have a BANS store stuck on it). You know what would work great? An exercise related website!

The only thing I would say is that I don’t think it’s worth buying the BANS script at the moment. Although a lifetimes worth of updates are totally free it might just be best to wait until they update to use the eBay Partner Network. It’s a very easy script to use but why make extra work for yourself by having to update when you can wait a little while?

So there you have it, the eBay Partner Network pays out great money for referring new users and a good percentage on any winning bids they place further down the line. BANS is any easy way of matching eBay offers to a niche. I can’t believe that more people don’t talk about it is a valid stream of extra income.

I’ve been using BANS (Build A Niche Store) to earn money for a good few months now and the results are still great. The reason I rate BANS is down to a combination of it making money and it’s ease of use, there are probably better blogging platforms out there than WordPress but WordPress wins on the easy of use front, it’s the same with BANS, it’s hard to go wrong. If you are looking for an easy way of adding an e-bay store front to an existing website or to build a new website based around e-bay products then you can’t beat a bit of BANS! Not that you can forget the basics of promotion once you have your website in place, BANS makes the content easy, it’s still your job to get links and traffic as you’ll need visitors to make money with the BANS system. The advantage of niche marketing with e-bay over making money with Adsense and PPC ads is that a few targeted visitors can go a very long way!

What’s New In BANS Version 3
A couple of the changes are cosmetic, some should really help improve your earnings.

1. A new better looking easier to use (IMO) control panel.
2. The ability to cloak affiliate links (not only better for SEO but also click through rates)
3. Much better customisation of the way individual items are displayed, you can add or remove e-bay item elements from your listings
4. Several new listing layouts
5. Another 8 e-bay countries supported!

BANS is available through ClickBank for only $97, I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again for my money I think that’s a bargain. The e-bay affiliate program has huge potential for all niche marketers and BANS makes it very simple to get a slice of that action. If that wasn’t enough the purchase price not only includes the current version but all future upgrades (version 3 was free for me) and access to the extremely active BANS members forums. The only concern I had before buying was that I was worried that as with a lot of CMSs my store would end up looking the same as everybody else’s, not so, this is how some existing Build A Niche Store users are making money from the system.

A Couple Of Niche’s In Which I Make Money With BANS
Because of the huge amounts of product variation on e-bay it’s really possible to build a store front around any niche you can imagine. Some which are earning money for me as I type now include domestic fish tanks and equipment, fresh water fishing tackle, dancing outfits and Nintendo 64 games. If you can think it the chances are that e-bay sells it, if e-bay sells it then you can profit from it. There’s no reason at all not to jump on the BANS bandwagon.

The Benefits Of Content Management Systems
Three of the easiest (read laziest) ways of creating a website that can earn you money. Essentially Pligg (A Digg Clone), WordPress (The number 1 blogging platform) and BANS (Build A Niche Store, an e-bay store generator) are all based around the same idea, combining PHP and a mySQL database to make creating content as easy as possible. Off the 3 BANS is the least hands on, in 30 minutes you can have a nice looking store front loaded with eBay goodies, Pligg requires some updating (sourcing new stories helps to encourage other people to contribute) whilst WordPress is all about your own content. What the three of them have in common as well is that they are capable of being made very much search friendly, it’s entirely possible to attract good amounts of search traffic with these content management systems if configured correctly.

So I was wondering what would happen if you combined all three on one website? This is my plan, I’m going to create a social shopping website that features a Pligg style front end. I’m going to load this up with more unusual items, the sort of items that you don’t search for everyday but are easy to rank for (WebCEO helps with this). Behind this I’m going to use BANS to build an eBay store front but only for eBay bargains, anything under $5 will do. The final element will be a WordPress blog to serve one purpose only, discount vouchers. I have a couple of sources for discount vouchers for big name stores and I’ll be using WordPress to put them out there. Eventually I’ll automate this process so that the blog can largely update itself. What I’ll end up with is a website that has unusual items, a bargain basement and a source of discounts for the big boys.

The Goal
What I’m hoping to achieve here is a website that will eventually update itself yet provide an income via the various affiliate deals (eBay and Amazon for example) being used. I think by offering Pligg and WordPress it gives visitors twice the opportunity to pass comment which will hopefully result in a more dynamic website. In terms of original content the Pligg front end will be entirely original posts and I’ll be taking time out each week to publish something meaningful to the WordPress side as well. Other than that I’ll be relying on comments and contributions, a vital key in this is getting a decent page rank to reward top commentators/contributors with.

I wouldn’t like to try and convince anybody that online shopping is an easy niche to get a piece of the pie in so I’m going to set very modest goals for this experiment. I’m giving myself half a day for initial setup and no more than 1 hour a week for updates. The first target as to get that first affiliate sale!

Some of you might have noticed that I’ve added a new money maker to the list, it’s not there only because I want affiliate commissions but because it works, really!

BANS (Build A Niche Store) is one of those products you see advertised from time to time that claims it’s going to make you loads of money with very little work. The trouble is that many of these PHP scripts are very buggy and you spend more time trying to actually get them to work than making any money with them. BANS is very different, it works with very little setup and it DOES make money. It claims to be search engine friendly and from my experience it certainly is.

BANS allows you to very quickly build a niche store based on one or more e-bay categories. You enter the category number(s) and it retrieves the products, sub-categories and automatically builds a great store front for you based on our choice of template. There are a number of templates built in and they are very easy to customise to anybody knowing even the smallest bit of CSS. The whole process from installation can be done in a little under 10 minutes (I’m not going to do a step-by-step, ShoeMoney has already done that if you need proof of just how easy this is). In order to profit from your BANS store you’ll need a Commission Junction e-bay affiliate account for the e-bay locale you wish to target (several are available with more to follow soon). At this time of year when the shopping frenzy is at it’s highest it’s possible to make good money with this, in fact I paid for my $97 copy in a little under a month on a site that only gets 40 visitors a day.

So that’s enough about BANS, what’s all this lazer targeting? Well as I said earlier your store is going to be based on e-bay categories, the trouble is that some e-bay categories are not as targeted as you and I would like. For example I wanted to build a dancing costumes store but the lowest level e-bay category I could select was Children’s Dancewear. This category includes all sorts of stuff ranging from break dancing mats all the ways to Irish dancing shoes! I only wanted to target one type of dance clothing so on went the programmer hat and this is what I came up with.

There are 2 files that you will need to alter in order for this to work, index.php and cont/FrontControl.php, in each you are looking for the line that retireves the products via the e-bay RSS feed for your country. The easiest way is to search in a text editor for the string “rss.api.ebay.com”, there will only be a few entries and you are looking for the one below the e-bay country you are using. For example the UK feed is below “elseif($siteType == “UK”)”. Now in that very long line that retrives the products look for
&satitle=”.urlencode($front->q).” and append + whateverkeywordyouwanttotarget, so if I was looking to target the boys toys category for only transformers I would change it from

&satitle=”.urlencode($front->q).”&ftrv=1

to

&satitle=”.urlencode($front->q).”+transformers&ftrv=1

If you do this in both the index.php and cont/FrontControl.php files then every time products are retrieved they will be filtered to those that include your keyword. It works for sub-categories and any searches within your store making sure that your whole shop is lazer targeting to your chosen keywords. As far as hacks go this is a fairly minor one but in terms of getting more affiliate sales it’s gold.

If you’re convinced and want to give BANS a go then you can get a nice $40 discount by signing yourself up as a ClickBank affiliate and buying through your own link. The problem with this is that you need to generate enough sales including three different sets of credit card details (and one being mastercard) before ClickBank will actually pay you. That’s fine if you’re experienced with ClickBank but a huge number of people never make that payment bracket and ClickBank even start taking money of you if your account stays inactive for too long. On the other hand if you want a much quicker $20 discount sign up using my affiliate link and I’ll split my commission so that you get $20 back via Paypal as soon as ClickBank pay me. If you want to do this buy using my link and use my contact form on this blog to drop me a line (including your paypal e-mail address). As soon as ClickBank pay me, (which they do every month) I’ll send you your $20.