Reason #1: Tracking delay
eBay updates your earnings every day with the previous day’s earnings. So if I go to your site today and buy something, you won’t know about it until tomorrow. But ebay also has a 7-day cookie. So if I go to your site and bid on something, but don’t win the auction for 7 days, you won’t know about those earnings for up to 8 days.

The key to successful PPC campaigns is tracking. You need to know what keywords convert and how often they convert. That way you can set your bids so you profit based on your conversion rate. But if you don’t know what converts for another 8 days, then you could be wasting lots of money before you know what is converting.

Reason #2: There is no set item price
Since you get commission for anything someone buys on ebay, you have no idea how much you will make per sale. You could spend $50 on PPC and earn $100, but maybe $75 of that was from a really expensive item on ebay. So if you say, “Hey, I spent $50 and made $100” and continue your PPC, you are unlikely to sell another expensive item every day.

Since you never know exactly how much a winning auction will earn, it’s hard to set your bid prices so you can make a profit.

Reason #3: SEO is the way to go
You want to build a phpBay site with long term potential and a long-term strategy. And SEO is the way to do that.

A short story: I decided to test PPC on my golf ball site for a very short period of time. I ended up spending about $400, and only earned about $200. So I lost $200 bucks. Then it hit me; I could have a writer write over 100 articles for that money. That would be 100 unique pages of keyword-rich content.

In the long run that would have been amazing for my SEO and would have brought in way more visitors than I got with the money I spent on PPC, and it would have been a long-term solution. I could have spent the money once and got visitors for long after that. And I wouldn’t have even had to spend that much. I could have just spent $100 for 25 articles. That would be more than enough content to get me great rank for my keywords.

In fact, after I realized my blunder I paid a writer to write 25 articles for me. So far I have only published 16 and I am already getting over 60 organic visitors a day and the site is only a month old (and the articles have only been up for 2 weeks).

So, in summary, the reason not to do PPC is because it’s too hard to track and because it would be smarter to invest the money in good content and get steady traffic over the long run that won’t keep costing you.

If you’re going to try PPC…
If you feel the need to try PPC then here is the way to approach it. First, make sure your niche is small enough where you can appear on the first page or two of Adwords for your keyword. Second. Don’t bid more than 10 cents a click.

Run the campaign for a week and then stop (just lower your budget to $1.00 a day, Google doesn’t like paused campaigns). Wait a week so all the cookie sales catch up. Then calculate how much you made. It will be tricky to calculate if you are getting organic traffic as well as you wont know which commissions are coming from organic traffic vs. paid traffic. You may just have to see your earnings increase over what you had been making.

Also, if you are selling high-ticket items that sell for a ton of money on eBay, then you may be able to earn on PPC if your site traffic had been converting well for organic search. But it’s still more risky than the SEO method.

Has anyone else tried PPC? Would love to hear how it went.

A website’s rank is a combination of the websites relevance to the term being searched, which on-site optimization helps with, and the website’s general popularity. The biggest way search engines determine a website popularity is by counting inbound links. And it makes sense; the more people that link to you, the more popular your site is. (Kinda like high school: the more popular you are, the more kids want to sit next to you in the cafeteria).

There are many ways to get inbound links to your phBay sites. And I’ll discuss them in a later post. But when your making those links, there are two rules to follow to maximize your inbound link strategy. They aren’t a big secret; just age old SEO and link building techniques.

phpBay link building rule #1: Be smart with your anchor tags
A general rule when building links back to your site: whenever you have control over the link, make sure you are smart in using the right anchor text.

Anchor text is the text being used for the hyperlink. Anchor text plays a big part in a search engine determining if your site is popular for a given search term. So if I create a link to http://buydiscountgolfballs.com with the anchor text “discount golf balls”, search engines see that as me labeling that site as a site about discount golf balls. So if someone searches “discount golf balls”, I’ll have a better chance of showing up.

The key is to create inbound links using your niche keyword as anchor text. And you want to use your top 3-4 keywords. Use your main keyword about 70 percent of the time and use the other keywords the rest of the time.

phpBay Link Building Rule #2: Get links from other popular sites about your niche
Another important strategy: it’s better to get links from other “popular” sites based on your niche, or in your niches category. So a link to BuyDiscountGolfBalls.com from Golf Digest will be of much more SEO value than a link from phpBay Pro Tips. Google Page Rank will give you a general idea of how popular a site is. You should target links from sites with a page rank of 4 or higher.

Those are the two concepts to remember when building links to your phpBay Sites. Soon I’ll talk about specific strategies to get links back you your phpBay sites.

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.

Two types of SEO
First, there are two main types of SEO tactics: whitehat SEO and Blackhat SEO. Whitehat SEO is typically SEO that is done the traditional way: writing good content, smart keyword placement on your pages, and getting inbound links in a way that is not shady.

Blackhat SEO tactics are generally done to “fool” search engines into thinking you have good content. They include auto-blogging, spamming, and other tactics (some not as bad as the aforementioned).

The tactics I will discuss in this post and on this blog are all whitehat (to my knowledge). While blackhat can get you results fast, it is hard to sustain as a long-term strategy, since search engines are always getting smarter and working against you. It will be a back and forth battle. I’d rather put in a little more work up front and get better long-term results.

SEO basics for phpBay sites
SEO is all about letting search engines know what your site is about. It’s that basic. If a search engine thinks your site is relevant for a certain keyword, your site will be in its results. If Google thinks my site is about how to make money on ebay, then my site will show up when someone searches “how to make money on ebay”.

The trick is to let the search engines know that your site is more relevant than the other guy’s. And since we are building an entire site around one niche, and since we researched that niche and there aren’t any other sites entirely focused around our niche, we have a very god chance.

The five steps to building your phpBay site around your keyword

Follow these five steps to help you make money on ebay.

Step one: Write down 3-5 target keywords. Your #1 keyword is likely the exact name of your niche. For my discount golf ball site, my top keyword I want to rank for is “discount gold balls”. Then I have a few related keywords: cheap golf balls, discount new golf balls, and discount used golf balls.

Step two: Add your keywords to your meta data. If you have the All-in-one SEO Pack plugin, which you should, make sure your page titles and descriptions are rich with your target keywords.

Step three: Write ten to fifteen posts/pages with at least 300 words each. Make sure you use our keyword often. A good trick is to always refer to your product by its name. For example, if your keyword is fender blues junior and your writing a paragraph about the amp. Don’t say “this amp has tons of cool features” but say “the fender blues junior has lots of cool features”. I did this all over my fender blues junior site.

Step four: Build internal links by linking your target keyword to your home page at least once per page/post. So using the previous example: “the fender blues junior has lots of cool features.” Would have “fender blues junio” as link t the home page. But I don’t do it every time I use my keyword because it gets annoying to the reader. Just do it once or twice. For sure not more than three times.

Step five: Make sure any images you add have your keyword in the alt text. Search engines scan your images as well as content.

A great way to make sure you have a link to your homepage on every page is to put one in your footer. Make the link text your main keyword.

There! Those are the basics to creating a site optimized for your niche keyword you will use to make money on ebay. Is there more you can do? Sure. But using these methods will give you a great start on getting good rankings for your niche.

I’ll talk about SEO tactics you can use off your site in later posts.

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.

Let’s say your niche is Nike Golf Clubs, do a phrase search by searching “Nike Golf Clubs” in goolge (with the quotations) and then look at the total number of pages on google for that phrase. That would be the bold number in the blue bar above the search results and below the search box.

“Nike Golf Clubs” reads “Personalized Results 1 – 10 of about 96,300 for “Nike Golf Clubs”. (0.25 seconds)”

The only number I care about is the “96,300” as that is how many pages contain the phrase “Nike Golf Clubs”

You want to target a niche with less than 1 million results, but the fewer the better. Less than 500 thousand is good. Less than 100 thousand is really good.

So far so good. We have a niche that gets over 150 searches a day and has less than 100 thousand pages containing that phrase.

How targeted are the top 5 results?
Now we need to look at the top five results for the phrase “Nike Golf Clubs” so we can see what we’re really up against.

Result #1 is Nike.com. That’s no surprise. The next few results are golf related sites.

What I’m really looking for is to see if there is an entire site devoted to Nike Golf Clubs. My thought is that if I have an entire site dedicated to Nike Golf Clubs, and the sites in the top results only have a few pages, than I should be able to outrank them relatively easy.

So if I see general golf sites, I’m not so worried. If I see golf club sites, I’m a little worried, but not really.

Since I just see general golf sites, this seems like a niche worth pursuing to try and make money on ebay.

Other considerations when looking for niches
Many people also like to consider the cost of the item they are promoting. Since you make money on ebay through commission, the higher the item price, the more you make.

While I agree with this philosophy, don’t let a low priced niche turn you off. Here’s why:

First, people tend to be less worried about buying cheaper items online. So while your commissions may not be as big per item, you are likely to sell more items, so you can make good money on ebay as your commissions add up.

Second, eBay has a great cookie system. When users click an ebay link on your site, you will get commission on anything they buy on ebay in the next 7 days, whether it was the same item they clicked on your site or not. So if you can conquer a low priced niche and get lots of clicks on your ebay links, you will still get commission on other itmes people buy.

This month I got made $115 on ebay in one day from my site discount golf balls. How did I make so much selling golf balls? Well, a visitor clicked on one of my links, but then ended up buying a $4,250 fridge. I got the commission on it. So don’t let low priced niches deter you.

I hope this article helped you decide what niches will make you money on ebay.

Soon I’ll post about how to optimize your site for your niche and some other niche finding exercises. Cheers!