The first way is with Google Adsense, the second way is with product links from Commission Junctions advertisers.

The question is: are these methods write for your phpBay site?

They may be.

Let’s start with Adsense. Many people don’t want to put adsense on their phpBay site because they feel it takes away from their eBay sales. This is a valid concern.

Whether or not you should have adsense on your phpBay site depends on a few things. First, are you selling high priced items? If you’re selling high-priced items than it may not be worth it to put adsense on on your phpBay site. If you could easily make $10 a sale, it doesn’t make sense to send your visitor away for a $0.10 click . But if you sell lower priced items and an adsense click earns you close to the same amount as an ebay sale, it would be worth testing adsense on your phpBay site.

Second, is your site converting? You may be getting lots of visitors, but for some reason people just aren’t buying from you site. It may be time to test out some well-placed adsense units. Even if you sell high-priced items.

Third, if you have content on your site that does not have auctions on the page, you may want to test out embedding adsense into that page if people tend to exit on that page. Many times you will pick up a visitor to a content page of your site from a search engine, and the user will exit straight from that page. Check your Google Analytics and look at the stats for your content pages. What percentage of people exit from them? What’s their bounce rate? If it’s a high number, test adsense.

Truth be told, you should even test adsense on your site if it doesn’t meet any of the above criteria. It may be that it does not hurt your ebay conversion rates, but still gives you some extra earnings. Put up adsense for a few weeks and test your earnings. But it’s important that you are monitering your phpBay earnings per visitor, not just overall. You may get more visitors next month and wrongly assume that adsense did not hurt your eBy earnings, when in reality you just have more visitors to your site.

Another great way to make some extra money is to put new product affiliate links on your site. Face it, there are people on this earth who will never buy from eBay—no matter what. Having a link on your site that says “Buy new” and then link to a page with new products on it.

I use commission junction to find products. They have thousands of product links you can use. I make about an extra $100-$200 a month on commission junction from my Fender Blues Junior site. That’s a nice addition to what I’m making from phpBay on that site.

So if all you’re doing now is using phpBay to make money, you may be missing out on some extra earnings. Try adding adsense or affiliate product links and see what happens.

Anyone else using other methods than phpBay to make money from their phpBay sites?

Many sites built with phpBay Pro use the wise tactic of making Wordpress look like a website, not a blog. Part of this tactic includes making your home page not display posts, but display a static page (I’ll share a few ways to do this in later phpBay Tips).

Once you make your home page, it should have keyword rich content (at least 200 words) and some product images. But there’s one other thing your phpBay Pro site should have on it’s homepage: at least one ebay auction result.

This may seem obvious to some, but I can’t tell you how many phpBay sites I see that have phenomenal looking homepages, but don’t have any ebay auction results there.

Why do you need an eBay auction result on your homepage?
It’s simple. You want to entice the “bouncers” to click right away. The bouncers are the people who browse sites quickly and typically scan the homepage and leave (reflected in your home page’s “bounce rate” if you have Google analytics). But with a phpBay site, you never want anyone to leave without clicking on an ebay auction. You want to plant as many ebay cookies as possible.

Having an auction on your homepage entices the bouncers to click by showing them an amazing deal right away, so they don’t have to browse your pages to find it.

How to display ebay results naturally
Sometimes it’s hard to get ebay auction results on your home page in a natural way. The way I do it is I typically create a sub-head titled “featured items” and then display 2-3 ebay auction results in column view.

(To set the column view, change the 15th parameter to the number of columns you want to show. For example [phpbay]ipod, 3, 345345, case,,,,,,,,,,,3[phpbay] would display 3 ipod results side-by side, excluding the word “case”. Note that I made up the category number in field 3. This only works in phpBay 3.0).

Also, make sure you display your auction results above the fold, or as close to the fold as possible. The idea is that you really want to get people to click. So don’t burry it.

Other tips to increase homepage clicks
Another god way to entice people to click is to set the auctions on the home page to display lowest price items first. This is even more effective when you remove the “bids” from the template, so all the user sees is the price, and not the fact that it’s so low because it has zero bids. I’ll write a post on how to remove the bids in the next week.

To show lowest price items first put a “3” in the 13th parameter:
[phpbay]ipod, 2, 345345, case,,,,,,,,,3,,2[phpbay]

Lastly, if there are multiple models of your product, make sure you display the most popular model. It may take a few minutes of research, but if you know your niche, it should not be hard to find out this information.

Keep in mind that having phpBay auctions on your homepage will help you dynamically change your homepage content as new auctions display. this will have some SEO benefits.

Well, there you have it. A super easy way to increase your clicks on your phpBay sites.