phpBay Pro Tips

Archive for May, 2008

I just found a great phpBay Pro tutorial on Eureka Diary. This tutorial will walk you through the basics of setting up a phpBay pro site from start to finish. It is detailed and has screen grabs so you get exactly what to do. This is a must read for pgpBay beginners looking to set up their first site.

Check out this phpBay tutorial

Hope you find that a useful phpBay resource!

Here is a question I get a lot: “How do I know which ebay items people buy from my phpBay site?”

It’s really easy to figure out with the Ebay Publisher Network. I’ll walk you through it.

First, log into your Ebay Partner Network account.

Second, click the “reports” tab from the top menu.

Next, click the “transaction download” option from the bottom of the list of options on the reports page.

Then select the date range you want to search. Click the “Download Excel File” button.

This will download the Excel Report for the date range you selected. Open it. This file has all the information for all of your campaigns. Each row is a sale or lead. The event type (column C) says if it was a winning bid or an ACRU. ACRU means a lead. You likely get $25 for each lead (read all payout details here). (more…)

Now that you know how to Drill for Niches and see if those niches have potential, and you know how to find a good theme for a phpBay store and you added the essential wordpress plugins to that theme, I’m gonna teach you how to optimize your site for your niche.

Optimizing your site for search will help you rank well for searches on your niche. This will give you free traffic. And what could be better than free traffic? (Besides free candy.)

Know your SEO
Let’s go over some very basic SEO concepts. SEO is not nearly as hard as you think it is. When I started my phpBay sites, I knew very little about SEO. Two months later I was in the top five results for almost all my targeted keywords for my Fender Blues Junior site. (more…)

Now that you know how to pick a good theme for your phpBay Pro site, you should install some essential wordpress plugins. If you don’t know how to install plugins, read this.

I install all of these plugins on any wordpress site I make, not just phpBay sites.

Some of these plugins are not the most recent versions, but if you have wordpress 2.5 than you can upgrade them all automatically in your plugin menu. Upgrade them all before activating them.

If you don’t have wordpress 2.5, install the “wordpress automatic upgrade” plugin first, use it, then install the rest and you can then auto-updgrade them all.

All of these plugins are compatible with wordpress 2.5 There is a link to download the zip file at the end of the post. Make sure you read the instructions in the readme.txt files before you use the plugins. They don’t call it “readme” for nothing…

alinks: Automatically link certain words in your blog to other blog posts or websites. This is great for internal linking targeted keywords for SEO. Note: this plugin can conflict with phpBay if you set up an aLink for a keyword you are using in an auction. Keep that in mind when making aLinks (more…)

So you used Niche Drilling to find a good niche, then you researched that niche and saw it had potential. Now you need to build a site for it. I generally like to look for good themes before I start writing any content.

Create some fake content and auctions
I start by creating one fake post with a phpBay auction in it. And then one fake post with Greek. I do this just so I can test themes and see how they will look with content and phpBay auctions.

What to look for in a wordpress theme for phpBay
Don’t just pick any theme. You need to think about what niche you are promoting and who your audience is. I wouldn’t use this theme to sell motorcycle parts. Ok, maybe that’s obvious.

But I also wouldn’t use this theme to sell golf stuff. “But it’s a golf theme!” you say. Who cares? The number one thing I look for in a theme is that I can make it look like a website and not a blog. (more…)

Making money as an eBay affiliate is much different that making money with general affiliate marketing. How? The biggest difference is the product selection.

Affiliate Networks have too much overlap with offers
If you browse affiliate networks like Hydra Media, CX Digital, Neverblue, etc. you’ll start to notice a huge overlap of offer selection. There are the standard offer types: ringtones, dating, insurance, crush offers, freebies/surveys, diet pills, skin care, and a few others. I would be surprised if there are more than 75 unique niches to promote. That means, like a piñata, lots of people are fighting for the same prize.

eBay offers something unique for everyone
eBay is different because there are literally hundreds of thousands of products to promote. So you can find ways to make money on eBay that other affiliate marketers are not targeting.

How to find a good eBay niche
So how do you decide which offers to promote? I already discussed finding the right sized niche to give you a better chance at getting organic traffic. (more…)

If you want to make money on ebay with phpBay Pro you’ll need to be smart when it comes to choosing your niches.  But the niche choosing strategy that will be discussed here can be applied to any site you want to get good SERP rankings for.

There are a few things to consider when choosing a niche for making money on ebay.

How popular is your niche?
You definitely want to choose a niche that people are searching for. The problem is that when lots of people search for something it tends to be because the product/service being searched is in high demand and the more competition you will likely have when it comes to SEO.

The trick is to find a balance of a product or service that is in demand, but not too competitive.

I like to look nichea that have at least 100-200 estimated searches a day (more is even better). This tells me that a nich is being searched enough that I can get some decent traffic if i place high in the search results. A great free tool to estimate search volume is the Seo Book Keyword Tool. This tool tends to estimate keyword search volume slightly on the low side. Keep that in mind.

As a test I looked up “Nike Golf Clubs” and SEO Book estimates 159 daily searches. That’s a good start, but we need to check the competition.

How much competition does your niche have?
After you find a niche or keyword with at least 100-200 searches a day, you will need to look at how much competition there is. To check your niche competition, do a phrase search in google for your keyword. (more…)

Let’s start with the basics. This post is just going to explain what phpBay pro is and what you need to do to set it up in order to start making money on ebay. Specific strategies to make money on ebay will come in later posts.

What is phpBay Pro? PHPbay Pro is a plugin for wordpress that allows you to import eBay listings into your wordpress site.

How will phpBay make you money? Simple. As a member of the eBay affiliate program, ebay will give you a commission for every sale that comes from your site. The basic payout structure is (more…)