Category Archives: Affiliates

Selling An Ebook on eBay

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Always one for adventure in ebiz ideas, I recently have tried selling an ebook on eBay. Admittedly, ebooks are a dime a dozen on eBay, but this ebook is a quality product and I think has great value to aspiring webmasters.

I first tried the suggested category: Everything Else > Information Products > Other

The listing had sales copy but no pictures. All listings in this area failed to sell. Ebook priced at $9.99.

I then tried listing it in: Business & Industrial > Other Industries > Websites & Businesses for Sale > Internet Businesses, Websites > Other Internet Businesses

The first listing had text only sales copy and again no sales. I had someone make me an ebook cover and relisted the ad. This time the ebook cover version sold (same ad copy and still priced at $9.99). The amount of interest judged by page views is quite low (< 20 views).

I am still going to try experiments with sales copy to see if I can boost page views. Overall, I think that eBay is saturated with ebooks. I can also try pricing changes but I don’t have much interest in selling ebooks for 99 cents.

As a side note, when I do research on completed auctions, the only ebooks that are selling well and for lots of money are the ebooks for police auctions that say things like “Xbox 360 90% Off Police Auction Ebook”. It appears people aren’t paying attention and somehow think they are buying an Xbox 360 at 90% off. Some of those ebooks are selling upwards of 100 dollars! Scratching my head on that one.

How To Use CSS With An HTML Ebay Listing

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Let’s face it, eBay is not that user-friendly when it comes to creative listings. I labored over a nice CSS layout and when I tried to upload the listing, the CSS mods would not take. So after much trial and error, I found a way to make it work.

If you want to get CSS working with your HTML eBay listing, you need to make it an externally linked style sheet.

Nothing is simple with the html on eBay. When you paste your HTML code, be sure and just cut/paste what’s inside your body tags and nothing else. Then make sure that the first line of the HTML code is the linked style sheet. When you preview the listing you’ll see your CSS mods.

I’ve also heard that inline styles work, but I haven’t tested that. For me, it was much easier to keep the CSS separate.

Preparing for the Holiday Shopping Season

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The catalogs are starting to show up in my mail. The holiday shopping season is starting and it’s time to start preparing your Adwords campaigns for the coming season. Here is an example of the type of traffic patterns you’ll find for various electronic items.

Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
0.35	0.36	0.62	1
0.39	0.37	0.56	1
0.36	0.42	0.52	1

I’m getting these numbers from the Google Adwords keyword research tool. I’m running numbers on a particular DVD player and you can see the spike in traffic volume coming in November and December. Now is the time to find the products you want to promote!

I’m starting to go through the catalogs, looking for niche products for an affiliate Adwords campaign. I’m also redesigning one of my websites to take this traffic and sell it. The basics remain the same. You have to do your homework and make sure that what you are going to pay for the traffic is acceptable at a 1 – 2% traffic conversion rate. If you can’t turn a profit off the affiliate commission, don’t run the campaign. There is no need to donate to Google this Holiday season.

Let’s examine being an Amazon affiliate. Currently, the basic payout for electronics is 4%. If you want to run an Adwords campaign, you’re going to need a fairly expensive item in order to make a profit at the typical 2% conversion rate. If you have to pay 20 cents a click, you will need to promote a product that sells for > 250 dollars. The higher your pay per click goes, the more expensive the item must be.

Stay tuned for more…