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.

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.

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…

So how are things going? Well, I can’t quit my day job yet. The linkshare check was for a whole $8.94.

My recent work has all centered on starting and maintaining various Wordpress blogs on unique domains. I’m still learning the Wordpress API and other features. It’s a powerful tool and I do recommend it.

What do customers ultimately buy after viewing items like this?
31% buy the item featured on this page

They also list the percentage of other items purchased. Spending a little time searching through these items will yield gems. What will you do with this type of knowledge? The DVD player that I do my amazon affiliate testing on sells at 50%!

Obviously that is good news, but I’m not yet seeing that type of conversion from the adwords traffic I’m sending over. If you’re having success, let me know!

On pulse you can find popular searches, stores, and products (to name a few). You can select categories as well and find the top ten popular searches for each category. What’s great too is that as you select down the category tree, you can further narrow down your search by the various subcategories listed.

As an example, say you want to know what are the most popular cell phones being searched for on eBay. The pulse lets you drill down to All Categories->Cell Phones->Phones Only. You can also see the most watched items as well.

This is just one more tool available to help you find popular items you can target with websites or an Adwords campaign.

Total Amazon.com Items Shipped
12, $614.77, $29.25
Total Third Party Items Shipped

4, $182.46, $10.37

Total Items Shipped

16, $797.23, $39.62

Total Items Returned

-1, -$11.5, -$0.58

Total Refunds

0, $0.00, $0.00

TOTAL REFERRAL FEES
15, $785.67, $39.04

My income is the 39.04.