Other ways to make money with your phpBay site
In addition to using just phpBay Pro on my phpBay sites, there are a few other ways I make money from my sites.
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?
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June 18th, 2008 at 1:24 am
Don’t forget affiliate banners. (if appropriate)
June 19th, 2008 at 12:41 am
Hi,
I just wonder if you have any experience with Pepperjam Network? They also offer ebay affiliate tracking and Phpbay support it now.
I have heard many people complaining about a lot less money since EPN took over from CJ. You have any thoughts on this?
Br,
Johan
August 3rd, 2008 at 12:42 am
I just applied for kontera. It should work well for pages with content.