How to Become an eBay Super Affiliate

About a year and a half ago I read a post over at AssociatePrograms.com about an eBay affiliate who was making over $1.3 million as an eBay affiliate per year. That's some serious cash, right there. In fact, that's over $100,000 per month.

According to the post, the top 10 eBay affiliates were all making over $1 million per year, and the top 25 eBay affiliates were making over $25,000 per month.

How do you become an eBay super affiliate?

According to their best practices page, you can become an eBay super affiliate through a number of different strategies:

• Natural search (regular old SEO)
• Paid search
• Content/niche site (They give RollingStone.com as an example.)

To truly rake in the big bucks as an eBay affiliate, no matter which of the 3 models above you want to use, you're going to need a tremendous keyword list. (And in fact, you'll probably use a mixture of all 3 business models.)

One of the top ten affiliates at eBay on their success stories page explains that he has a keyword list of over 100,000 phrases, and he focuses almost exclusively on doing PPC for those keywords. I suspect he was using a Google Cash type methodology, where he just sent folks directly to his affiliate link. This strategy is probably not going to work the same way as it used to since earlier this year Google changed their policy about how many ads they'll display for a given URL in a given search.

But the brilliant thing about eBay is that a good bit of the keyword research has already been done for you. eBay lists all the items that they sell throughout their site, including a section which is literally nothing more than a tremendous list of keywords.

All you have to do is build pages around those keywords, and drive traffic to them, then collect your check from eBay every month through CJ.

My suggestion would be to create an auction portal of some sort which is a categorized directory with sub-directories of different products, and have some actual content on each page about whatever product phrase is being targeted.

Or you might start with some small niche that you're interested in. Just picking a category at random from the homepage of eBay, I clicked on "musical instruments". You could build an entire site around musical instruments, and sub-divid the pages like this:

• Brass
• DJ Gear & Lighting
• Electronic
• Equipment
• Harmonica
• Strings
• Woodwind

And each of those categories could have sub-categories too. Harmonica for instance could easily have a Hohner sub-section and a Johnson Blues King sub-section.

Those are all keyword phrases I picked up just by going through their site and clicking and browsing.

Another way to find keywords for eBay would be to go to your favorite keyword suggestion tool and search for "find cheap", "find good deals on", and "buy". Each of those is going to give you a list, usually in order of popularity, of keyword phrases that you can go after that are targeted and will make you money. Doing a search for good deals, I got the following ideas for keyword phrases to build pages around:

• good deals on cell phones
• good deals on cars (Some people might not know they can buy a car on eBay/)
• good deals on computers
• good deals on hotels (Did you know you can book travel on eBay? It's amazing.)
• good deals on laptops
• good deals on appliances
• good deals on digital cameras

What about putting together a buyers' guide around each of those terms, and not only directing traffic to eBay from there, but also running Google Adsense on those pages, AND possibly even having an affiliate link to a retail website like Amazon for each product category? Now you're looking at diverse revenue from several different sources.

According to eBay's best practices page, the categories that produce the most first activities are:

• Collectibles
• Toys
• Sporting Goods
• Consumer Electronics
• Computers

If you're going to go for it, then maybe choosing a sub-category of one of these categories is the best way to go.

If you're going to go for it, then you need to put together a system to track which keyword phrases are producing for you and which aren't, especially if you're spending money on PPC traffic. And if you're going to go after this niche, get some capital behind you as quickly as possible, because you want to drive enough traffic to hit the higher commission tiers at eBay.