002 - Can I Affiliate Market On EBay?

Just about everything that I’ve read on the subject of generating easy cash online indicated that affiliate marketing is the way to go. First of all... In my humble opinion, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is not a good way to get your affiliate products in front of potential customers. Once upon a time, you could find very high quality keywords for 5 to 10 cents per click. Now, you’ll pay 1 to 5 dollars (USD) per click for those same keywords. True... there may still be a few uncovered micro niche markets with low cost keywords; but, believe me when I say... you’ll probably just throw your money away! Secondly, making money with affiliate marketing is anything but easy! Well... unless you already have a web site or BLOG with 1000’s of targeted visitors each day!

Regardless of what has been written about putting classified ads on Craigslist; it’s just not worth it! Craigslist was designed for classified ads of “local” interest. The site has been abused by SPAMMERS to the point that Craigslist has made it difficult for people to place legitimate posts. There’s also an ethical issue here. Craigslist is a great public service and we should respect the intent of its creator! In general, I am not in favor of SPAMMING and BLACK HAT techniques for making money!

I’m currently posting classified ads on USFreeAds.com and eBay Classifieds. I’ll talk more about USFreeAds in later posts; but first, I want to focus on eBay Classified Ads. There’s a lot of hype out there regarding eBay. Some of the hype is justified, but at the same time, if you just jump into placing classified ads without understanding how eBay displays them in the search result; you can easily throw your money away - and I've done that!

eBay limits the item categories where you can place classified ads. This places affiliate advertisers at a disadvantage. Also, eBay seems to sort classified ads to the bottom of the search results. This is another big disadvantage to affiliate advertisers. Selecting high quality keywords and placing ads into the correct categories is really critical here. I have some ideas about how to do this, which I’ll share over the next few posts; but I welcome the comments of others who are having success affiliate marketing through eBay! Experience is, after all, the best teacher!

In the next post, I’ll list all of the categories where affiliate advertisers can place their classified ads. I’ll also provide a link to download a text file containing this list.

Until next time!

-Ron