All Posts Tagged With: "Make Money Online"

In the past I’ve spent a lot of time talking about Build a Niche Store. This is because this is it has made it really easy for me to build multiple affiliate stores in a small amount of time and has proven to be an extremely successful earner for me.

If you end up purchasing BANS at some point, one of the first things you will need to do is setup an eBay Partner Network affiliate account. BANS then fully integrates with ePN, allowing you to setup stores on your own domains for eBay products and receive a share of eBay’s fees.

In my experience, BANS is definitely the easiest way to find success with ePN, but there are actually other ways to use eBay’s API to display eBay items. The only other one I have some experience with is a plugin called PHPBay, which is a WordPress plugin that allows you to integrate eBay auctions directly into your WordPress blog. There is a small cost associated with it, but it is much lower than BANS and only requires some WordPress knowledge to use (no manually setting up databases, etc.). I’ve also heard a lot of good things about this plugin, so WordPress enthusiasts may want to check it out!

What are the benefits of the eBay Partner Network?

In addition to getting paid $25.00 for every person that signs up using your affiliate link, you will also get credit for each auction won within 7 days of your affiliate link being clicked. In other words, your site just needs to convince the person to click over to eBay. Once there, you can earn income on all of their sales for the next week.

Similar posts:

• How To: Find a Great BANS Niche
• How To: Optimize your BANS Income

Earlier this week I provided some tips for finding a great BANS niche.   As you might expect, the main focus with BANS should be to find popular products that sell well on eBay but don’t have good representation in Google’s search results.

Today I wanted to talk about some strategy when you are using the more standard version of affiliate marketing, which is through the use of custom built niche websites and using affiliate marketing techniques such as landing pages to sell products. 

The reason I broke it up into two posts is because you will typically want to take an almost opposite approach to this method of affiliate marketing.   With BANS sites, you will typically want a physical product that is both popular and can easily be shipped.   With niche blogs, you will actually want to avoid these types of products (for the most part) and place your focus on digital products, digital services, and other things people look to buy over the internet.

For example, if you start a niche blog and plan to monetize it with something like Amazon Associates, you can make money.   The problem is, when you are marketing actual goods, there is a cost with producing these items, so you can only earn a portion of the companies take.   One of my first BANS sites was to sell action figures and other types of figurines.  I am an affiliate with a company that builds busts and sells them in the $200.00 range.   Now, you think great comission right?  Well, after they buy it from the company that makes them, that company may only get $20-$50.00 per sale.   As an affiliate, you get a cut of their share.   In my example, I make about $10.00 each time I sell a $200.00 item.    Is that really worth it?   I mean, how many busts do you need to sell in order for this to become truly beneficial?   

Digital and other internet products are different, however, because there is only the one-time cost of production.   This means once they’ve created the eBook, built the plugin, or written the guide, there work is done.  There is no additional cost associated with selling additional copies of it.  As a result, these people can offer very lucrative affiliate percentages to their affiliates.  

I have one affiliate where I get 70% of the sale price, and the sale price is usually around $100.00 each.    They only get $30.00 per sale, but there is no additional cost with each sale beyond the first sale so the high percentages attract more affiliates and create free advertisements for your product.   As a general rule, I try to only associate myself with products that pay a minimum of $20.00 per sale, so that it is worth it each time a sale is made.

So, as you can see, if you find a good digital product, you can make large sums of money in a short period of time.  Build your landing page to sell the product, then create or buy relevant traffic to your post and watch the money roll in. 

A few things to keep in mind:

• Do Niche Research - Some niches are extremely lucrative, while others aren’t very lucrative at all.  Focus on profitable online niches such as insurance sales, debt consolidation, and other areas that have large payouts and a lot of interest.  
• Build a Christmas Site Now - If you intend to compete for affiliate sales this Christmas, your website needs to be up now.  You’ll want to start building quality backlinks and give it plenty of time to earn Google’s trust.   If you launch it three months or less before the holiday, people probably won’t find it. 
• Affiliate Shares - There has never been a better time to be an affiliate marketer because these companies are competing for you!  Feels great, doesn’t it?  Monitor how much each affiliate pays and keep an eye out for better deals.  If you have a large number of affiliations, keep a spreadsheet with this information to keep track of them all.
• Find What Works - If you know of some profitable affiliate campaigns, study the site to figure out what made it successful.   Even if you are in a different niche, look at advertising placements, the sales pitch, or whatever else successful people are doing.   Experimenting is good, but it can sometimes be more beneficial to look at what works for successful people.

Anything else you’d like to add?  Let me know in the comments below!

Yesterday while setting up a new online store I’ve been working on for a little while now, for whatever reason, I started reflecting back on this blog, and my evolution as a blogger.  Just like the domain name here has changed (the first year and a half this site was Kyle’s Cove), so has the focus of this website over the last two years.  

In looking back, in July of 2006 this blog was created as sort of a personal weblog.   At the time, I didn’t have any blogging experience and wasn’t even sure what I wanted to talk about.  Hence the very general name Kyle’s Cove.   Over time, this blog’s original focus ended up being mostly on technology and related content.   I’ve always been a person that was very in tune with the latest gadgets and have been playing online since the early 1990’s, so I had a lot to talk about.   While I wrote about pretty much anything in that niche that was interesting, I loved nothing more than talking about next generation web browers, so I placed a lot of focus there. 

Things were going good, but eventually as I became more passionate about blogging and started making money online, my focus shifted a little and I used this blog to explore my ideas in these areas.   This was a lot of fun, but there were so many “blogging” blogs out there, that many of the ideas and input in had in these areas seemed to get drowned out. 

In the 6 months since that time, I’ve grown a lot as a blogger, webmaster, domainer, and online entreprenuer, and this blog continued to evolve with me.   We’ve been tackling all sorts of subjects, ranging from my experiences as a domainer to keyword sniping, and lately even talking about niche affiliate marketing.   These three areas are where at lot of my focus has been, so it sort of made sense for me to talk about them.

Unfortunately, managing all of the projects I’m working on has really taxed my time and kept me from being as active in the blogosphere as I would like (linking to others, leaving comments on other blogs, answering comments on this blog, etc.).   I’m hoping that will change as I continue to setup my online presence and get everything in place where I want it to be.

I’ve got some exciting stuff planned for this site that I will be writing about, beginning with a post later this week.  I think a lot of this stuff will be affiliate marketing related, so hopefully there is some interest from readers in that area.   Hopefully many of you are not relying on Google AdSense to make money online, but if you are, I mean to change that! 

I will also try to make some “classic” posts from time to time, as I still enjoy and have thoughts about SEO tactics, making money online, blogging, and more.  If there are certain areas you want me to focus on, please let me know. 

In the meantime, if you’d like to do something fun today, do yourself a favor and spend some time digging through your archives and study how you’ve grown as a blogger.  Read some of your early posts.   This is a good way to see progress and stay motivated for the future.