bubbajay.com

Here’s a little known secret about how to get your eBay listing in Google’s top 3 ranks for the keywords in your eBay listing title.

How? Make it a featured item.

Usually items in the last 2 or 3 days will show up in the top 3 ranks on a Google search for the keywords in your title.

Example: I found this item on the featured listings list: Life-size Bob Daddy-O Wade Longhorn Herd Sculptures

Now Google “life-size bob daddy-o wade longhorn“

Top postion on Google!

Here’s another: 150 Acre SW Oregon Mining CLaim Property

Google it: “150 acre sw oregon mining claim”

Number 1 again.

Now it doesn’t always work…for instance an item where there is a lot of competition for the exact description like:

sony cyber-shot dsc-w7 7.2 megapixel

It shows up as number 10 on Google. Still remarkable exposure don’t you think?

So, it may not always be worth the price of “featuring” your item, but in some cases, HOW CAN YOU BEAT A #1 RANKING ON GOOGLE for your eBay item?

Hope that gets the wheels turning!

It’s been a few weeks since my last post…I’ve been super busy! I’ve been working on some websites, where I’m using Adsense to make some money. And just to reinforce the fact that I seem to have Entrepreneurial ADD I’m onto something new…again.

The idea is called Adsense Arbitrage. On one side you make a website that provides some valuable information on your site. And of course you have Google Adsense ads on the site to hopefully generate some income.

Generally the websites are small, from 1 page to several pages. And they deal with niche’s. A niche is a very specific area of interest. Example: Hobbies is a big area of interest. Model airplanes is a bit more specific. Remote Control airplanes is even more specific. And gas powered 1/4 scale remote control airplanes is a pinpoint niche.

If you build a site around a very specific niche, chances are you won’t have too much competition for the keywords you’re trying to target, and will be able to get search engine ranking and traffic.

Traffic of course is the key.

On the site, you can also have affiliate products, or perhaps a product of your own…maybe an eBook. Here’s a site I created recently. BestSkyTV.com

You’ll notice this is a 1 page site. It has a few different income generating areas. First of all there are the Google ads at the top and near the bottom. Then there are the descriptions for my two eBooks which I’m selling. These descriptions provide the text needed to pull the desired Google ads that are related to SkyTV. And then at the bottom, I have a search feed where I get paid a very small amount per click for the searches performed.

Ok, so that’s the revenue generation side of Arbitrage. Like I said before though, Traffic is the key to success.

Now I just made this site a few weeks ago, so how do I get traffic to this fairly unique little niche? Google ads of course!

I use Google adwords to create a campaign as an advertiser. What am I advertising? My eBooks. So I create a campaign with a few hundred keywords having anything remotely related to satellite tv and SkyTV and I bid very low…2-3 cents per click.

Then it’s a numbers game. If I get 1000 impressions a day, and 100 clicks, that’s a 10% CTR or click through rate. Not bad. Then how many people will click one of the ads on the site? How many will buy one of my eBooks? How many will click the search links from the RSS feed a the bottom? And also important to consider… How many people will visit and do nothing?

Let’s presume I set a daily budget of $20 for my campaign. It’s not a ton, but if I’m only paying .02 cents per click on average, that’s a 1000 clicks from my Adwords campaign to the site. If I have that CTR of 10%, or 100 people visit my site, then it becomes a numbers game. The revenue depends on many factors. What are the advertisers on the site willing to bid to display their ads? The quality of information Google feels my site is offering, and several other factors. But at the end of the day, if the clicks (Adsense revenue) generate more than it cost to drive the traffic (Adwords campaign), then the difference is my revenue.

If I net $5 at the end of the day, it’s a success. It’s not a killing, but $5 a day is $150 a month and there really is next to no work once it’s set up. What if you made 10 profitable sites? $1500 a month. 50 sites? You get the idea.

This idea works well with blogs too. Here are the sites I’ve been working on.

Magic Site
Sky TV Site
Pet Information Site
Botox Site
Ticket Site

There have been many others, some I won’t share, some I may share later. I don’t want to give away all my secrets. )

On another post I’ll get more into the nitty gritty of how to research what profitible niche is, and how to find it. But that’s a topic for another day…

Perhaps you’ve heard of ‘affiliate marketing’. If you haven’t (or even if you have) I’m going to give you a brief explanation. Basically you sign up for an affiliate program with any number of suppliers. Then you’re assigned a unique tracking code. Then you refer online traffic to those suppliers using a link with that tracking code embedded in it, and the supplier pays you a commission for either the referral or a sale, whatever is outlined in their program.

It’s a simple concept. It’s basically ‘word of mouth’ advertising that you get paid for. Sounds good right? Of course it does ) . There are affiliate programs for just about anything and everything.

Let’s say you have an adidas website (like me). You’re already getting traffic there. You may or may not ’sell’ anything on your site, but you can still make some money. You do a search on the internet for ‘idiots Affiliate Program’ . On Google, it would return this page . As you can see, right away there are plenty of programs.

The first one is a program with a company called Soccer.com . Their program is described as “If you love soccer, have your own Web site, and would like to earn some extra cash, then our affiliate network is for you. Simply link your Web site to the center of the soccer universe and become a SOCCER.COM affiliate. By joining The SOCCER.COM Affiliate Network, you can open your very own online soccer shop and make money by providing Eurosport’s best selection of high quality, hard to find soccer equipment on your own Web site.”

They offer:

• You’ll earn 7.5% commission on all sales originating from your site!
• Receive monthly commission checks for all commissions totaling over $25.
• Team-up with The Fabled Soccer Traders at Eurosport, the name that people have known and trusted since 1984!
• Take advantage of the support, encouragement, and expertise of your friends on the SOCCER.COM Affiliate Team!

Now I’m not trying to tell you to sign up for this program, and I get nothing if you do. It’s just an example. So you put a small link on your Adidas site. Maybe something simple, like an image of a soccer ball with some simple text under it that says “Adidas Soccer Equipment”. The link takes them to that Soccer.com site. If they buy something, you get paid. I know you just dollar signs right?

Now, my Blog is about eBay, so you may be asking yourself “what’s he rambling on about this for?”. Well eBay has an affiliate program too….YES, they do. That means you can cash in on the world’s largest online marketplace without ever selling anything of your own.

eBay and many other retailers and suppliers don’t want to get too mixed up in the business of paying affiliates and all that. So they utilize a third party company that offers marketers (like you and me) a chance to get hooked up with these great companies. eBay uses a company called Commission Junction . CJ offers programs with literally thousands of companies including CompUSA, eBay, Citi Bank, Yahoo, Buy.com, Home Depot, REI, Tommy Hilfiger, USA Today, Quicken Loans, Expedia, Zappos.com and many, many more.

Ok, so you get signed up with CJ (it’s free), then you tell them you want to refer business to eBay. They give you a code to use for referrals. There are over 900 links they offer just for eBay so you can tailor it to wherever you think you might want to put the link. They even have links for eBay Canada (ebay.ca) and eBay Europe (ebay.uk) and many other countries.

Ok, let’s check out the links.

First a text link: ebaystores.com

This one goes to the eBay stores section. If someone signs up for a store within 30 days of following this link, I get paid $30.00. Not bad eh? I want you to mouse over it for a second, and notice the code at the end. This is my referral code. This is how they track that I sent the person to eBay. Now when I create the link I can encrypt the code also so it looks like this:

Encrypted code text link: ebaystores.com

Cool huh? Another thing I did was if you click the first text link, you’ll see it takes you out of the blog to the landing page. But, the second link I’ve elected to have it open a new page (my personal preference since I don’t want my site visitor to forget where they started).

I think you get the idea. I’ll put a few of the other eBay links so you can see what’s available.

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