photo credit: TW Collins

The first affiliate program that we became part of was the eBay affiliate program. This program allows us to create a web site that features eBay auctions and receive anywhere from 50% on up to 75% commission on eBay revenue.

There are two ways that you can make money as an eBay affiliate:

• Get people to sign up for eBay. You get $25 for each person that joins eBay by clicking a link on your site and then goes on to buy an item or win an auction on eBay in the next 30 days.

• Get people to win eBay auction items from your site. You get up to 75% of what eBay makes on the auction. So, if your site is showing current listings for widgets and someone places a winning, $20 bid on a widget from your site, you would get anywhere from about $1.15 to $1.72 (50% - 75% of about $2.30). The percentage that you get depends on how much you have sold from your site. We’re still in the 50% range.

How Much Can You Make?

This doesn’t seem like much, but we’ve actually seen it add up to a couple hundred dollars since we launched our first site in January - Low Price Drums. Since then, we’ve also launched Morgan Dollars Online, Low Price Bass (bass as in guitars, not the fish) and Huskers-Gear.com. We’ve been fairly successful with the new sites as well.

Since I’m in IT, I was able to write the code necessary to get the auction information from eBay. If you’re into creating web sites and working with programming languages like PHP or Java, eBay has some very good examples that you can use to implement this into your site.

If you’re not into writing code or creating your own web sites, fear not! There are a couple of things that you can do to start out:

• If you have an existing site, eBay provides you with a tool that allows you to build a display that you can place right on your existing web site.

• If you don’t even have a web site you can use BANS. BANS stands for “Build A Niche Store”. It’s software that you can buy in order to set up your own web site and display eBay auction items. Here is our affiliate link for the software - BANS software. Again, we don’t use this software, but we know of quite a few people who do and they were able to set up multiple sites. They have also been happy with the support that they have received from the company as well.

Steps To Get Started Making Money

1. Sign up to become an eBay affiliate. Go to http://www.ebaypartnernetwork.com to sign up. It’s free. They also have a lot of the tools that you can use to get started listing auctions on your web site. You will also be signing up with someone like Commission Junction which manages a host of other companies offering affiliate programs that you might be interested in as well (Edit: eBay is taking over the management of their affiliate program from Commission Junction).
2. Think of a niche that has potential. It maybe something you know a lot about. Maybe you want to create a site about collecting antiques. You could display antique auctions on a site with a lot of articles about collecting antiques.
3. Create your site. Again, if you’ve never created a web site — and don’t care to learn how — we’d really recommend the BANS software.
4. Once you’ve got the site up and running. Promote it by writing articles. Write an article about collecting the antiques that you have on your site and then place a link in the article. Submit it to sites like EzineArticles and GoArticles.
5. Repeat — the BANS software can be used for an unlimited number of sites.

Conclusion

All of this may be overwhelming to some of you just starting out. Don’t worry, it was a bit overwhelming to us at first too. You’ll learn as you go and have fun doing it. It’s fun to see more and more people coming to your site (more on how to track visitors to your site on a later post).

We give the eBay affiliate program our recommendation. We won’t be able to retire by the end of the year, but we are bringing in a pretty good income doing this. If you find a good niche, you could easily see a four or five figure yearly income — eBay states that their top 50 affiliates have averaged $1 million a year.

If you have any questions or things that you’d like us to clarify, don’t hesitate to let us know!