www.affiliateconfession.com

With all the available categories on eBay, you can be an affiliate of theirs and never run out of products to market. There are so many opportunities to be found if you just look around and think about what you do in everyday life. I thought of a good niche today when looking for a USB cable for my Samsung SYNC cell phone.

The trouble was, I couldn’t find one, not at Radio Shack and not even at the AT&T store, so that tells me there must be somewhat of a market online for these cables. I need a cable for my phone, but the only way I’m going to find it is by looking online by either doing a search or looking on eBay. I would like to exploit this niche, but as an affiliate marketer you only have time for so much work. So, on occasion I will share a good niche opportunity I find for using Build A Niche Store and the eBay affiliate program. I might kick myself for this some time in the future by giving away one that turns out to be super lucrative, but there are plenty more available.

So I went checking to see if this usb phone cable niche was even worth the trouble to build an affiliate store around. There wasn’t much search volume according to the Keyword Discovery search tool, but I expanded the search to include usb cables in general and found a large amount of search volume for some pretty good words.

I then went over to eBay and did a search on usb cable to find out there are 27 categories under which this search term shows up for. So if you decided to build a niche eBay affiliate store based around usb cables you would have at least 27 product pages and then you could expand it even more to add specialized sections for cables for specific phones, which was the original idea.

You’re probably thinking, why go to all the trouble to set up a store for items that aren’t that expensive? Don’t forget, with eBay there’s always that $25 sign up fee and I have found that with items that are the least expensive you actually have a higher chance of getting new sign-ups. And of course anyone going to eBay might purchase more than just a $5 to $10 cable earning you even more.

The goal with being an eBay affiliate is to get as many people as you can to their site, so if you already have a hosting plan, all you need is a domain name or you can even use a subdomain and you can set up a new niche store in about 20 to 30 minutes. If you had to build a store based on a product like usb cables by hand it may not be worth, but with the easy implementation of Build A Niche Store, it is well worth your time.

You see, there are little niches like this everywhere, all you have to do is be observant as the world unfolds around you. Take advantage of what you can.

Alan

Tags: build a niche store, keywords, usb cables, ebay categories

I’m doing some testing on switching out one of my top recommended affiliate programs because of poor performance. Ever since Apartments.com changed their landing pages to have a small email form on every single page once you get to a specific apartment, my conversion rate has plummeted. They used to have a page for each apartment complex that was just dedicated to an email form and then several links from related pages to that form. I used to send my traffic directly to the email form landing page and now that page no longer exists.

That’s part of the affiliate game. Apartments.com used to earn me around $200 - $250 per month, but the last couple of months it’s only been in the range of $30 - $50 per month. When you see that kind of drop over an extended period, it’s time to get off your butt and do something about it. Keeping up with the maintenance of your sites is a critical part of affiliate marketing.

The only other real alternative to Apartments.com is Rent.com an eBay owned company. I can find nearly the exact same apartment complexes at Rent.com as I could Apartments.com so the switch out is easy. However, the payout is quite a bit different along with the lead time. At Apartments.com you get paid $10 for every email lead you generate and you are paid as soon as the email is verified which can be in a few minutes to a few hours. With Rent.com you get $25 per confirmed lease which can take around 45 days from the time someone clicks through your site to find an apartment until their lease is confirmed. With Rent.com it is important to keep the pipeline full.

Rent.com also offers it’s customers a $100 reward for signing a lease on an apartment found through them. This is a great incentive to customers and really helps an affiliate click convert into a lease.

The test will consist of changing the links on my top 20 most visited pages from one to the other program to see what happens. I’m sending so little traffic to Rent.com right now anything would be an improvement. I send about 5 to 10 clicks a day to to them and end up getting about 1 $25 lead per month. With the 40 to 50 clicks a day I’m sending Apartments.com I end up earning about the same amount, so there isn’t any reason I shouldn’t at lease try the switch.

I don’t normally like to share my websites for concern that someone will copy a niche I’m fully entrenched in, but the apartment rental market is so vast that the field is wide open for lots of players. You can check out one of my current apartment rental sites here.

If this test is a success I’ll be switching out all my apartment links (that I can) to go to Rent.com. I should have a good idea of what to do by the first week in February and I’ll let you know how the test went.

Alan

Tags: apartments, affiliate marketing, ebay, leads, incentives

Congratulations to Erz at Erzology for winning a copy of Build A Niche Store, the eBay affiliate niche store builder.

I’ve already sent him an email and all Erz has to do now is respond to that email and purchase Build A Niche Store through this link and I will refund him either $100 through PayPal or send him a check.

We had 6 entries to the contest (less than I had expected) and I chose the winner by assigning each of the comments that stated, “here’s my entry” or some such thing, a consecutive number starting from the top of the comments. I only counted the actual “here’s my entry” comments, not the trackback from a post on their blog. Once I assigned the numbers I went over to Random.org and set it up to choose a random number out of a possible 6 numbers and it came up with 2. And the second comment entry (which was the 10th comment) on the contest post belonged to Erz.

So congratulations again to Erz and hopefully he will start building his eBay affiliate empire right away.

Alan

Tags: build a niche store, bans, ebay affiliate, blog contest

I’ve blogged a couple of times about the benefits of EntreCard and how you can get some pretty decent traffic from it, but now Sam at Sam’s Freedom has taken the whole EntreCard thing a huge step forward and has started The First Entrecard Meme Know To Bloggers.

The premise behind it is to get even more traffic to your blog than you would through Entrecard and to get and receive a few links and maybe a one sentence review in the process. So how does this whole thing work? Read below:

Here Are The Simple Entrecard Meme Instructions

1. Read these instructions twice so you completely understand them;
2. Drop your EntreCard at this site;
3. Drop your EntreCard at the 5 EntreCard users’ sites listed below;
4. Choose 5 other EntreCard users;
5. Copy these instructions to your own Entrecard meme article and tag (link) those 5 people;
6. Include a link to the Entrecard meme article of the person who tagged you;
7. Link to the original article “The First Entrecard Meme Known to Bloggers“;
8. Notify the people you choose that they’ve been tagged;
9. Comment below so even passers-by can drop their card at your site, too (it shows you are active and will likely return the favor)
10. (optional step) IF you tag your blogs, use both “entrecard” and “entrecard meme” as tags so that others can find them AND so that we can find them all later as this grows. 

I’m tagging these Entrecard users: 

1. How To Blogger- Lots of good “How To” information for your blog from how to overcome bloggers block to How To Have Fun With Junk Mail. Some funny stuff here!

2. Joan Joyce - Reloaded - Joan explains various ways to make money and rants on a multitude of subjects on her personal blog.

3. Andrew Hansen - Andrew blogs about the life of an Internet entrepreneur. 

4. Marco Richter - Marco gives good practical advice on every avenue of blogging, but mostly deals with how to get traffic to your blog. I especially like his article on writing a series of posts which can dramatically increase your loyal readers and traffic.

5. knupNet - Lots of short and to the point posts on news and how to make money in affiliate marketing.

There you go! Now get out and see what these blogs are all about and drop your Entrecard. Remember, you aren’t going to be a good blogger and affiliate marketer if you aren’t reading about what other bloggers are doing.

Alan

Tags: entrecard, entrecard meme, writing, affiliate marketing

If you haven’t had a chance to enter the win a free copy of Build A Niche Store contest, you only have one more day to do so.

The eBay affiliate program is my biggest money maker right now and you can take full advantage of it by using Build A Niche Store (BANS). BANS lets you build a niche store based on any of eBay’s 28,000 US categories as well as any of the categories in several other countries eBay is in, with only the click of a mouse. It couldn’t be any simpler to get started.

I love BANS so much I want introduce it to my readers and give one fortunate person a free copy of it because that’s how much I believe in the product. You can read my full review of BANS here.

It’s pretty simple to enter the contest. All you have to do is link to the contest post from your blog and leave a comment on the post letting me know you’ve done so, that’s it.

The complete rules can be found here. The winner will be selected tomorrow at 12:00 noon eastern time. Sign up now and the best of providence to all.

Alan

Tags: build a niche store, bans, ebay affiliate program, blog contest