How to Make Money The Honest Way

After my last post Make Money? What’s What!, where I made a valiant attempt to set the record straight as to what really needs to happen if your want to make money online, I think its time to bring things right up to date with the new eBay affiliate changeover.

Today is the first day of the new system where the eBay affiliate program is taken away from its traditional home at Commission Junction and placed firmly at the feet of its originator – eBay.

That means some big changes for those using the editor tools to generate live eBay listings on their websites. I’m affected too in a reasonably big way as I’ve been quietly building a lot of sites based soleley around the eBay editor tool software. Those of you using BANS may have different issues here, as your CJ PID will only work for another month and then you’ll have to have migrated everything over to your eBay affiliate id.

BANS is not my speciality, so I’ll leave it for Vic to explain.

What is my speciality is the eBay editor tool that generates BANS-like windows to ebay live auction listings that I’ve been placing in my sites.

I’ve been waiting patiently for today to happen so I could sign-up for my new eBay affiliate account at the eBay Partner Network. That was pretty painless and now I’m a fully fledged member of said network. But the thing I was holding my breath for was the new id that I could place in my editor tools generated eBay windows so that I could transfer my payments from CJ to eBay.

But to my dismay, when I got to the new editor tools page, the message “…coming soon” stared back at me. There was no link and no editor tools to get into. ¡Joder!

So it looks like I along with the lord-knows how many other marketers will have to wait for our precious tools to become available so I can start making more money from my sites!

That’s as far as I can go right now, until I know more about ths.

I’ll post an addendum when I know more…

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Ok, I know more!

I just logged back in and the editor tools are up and running. This is so cool!

First you need to create a campaign id for the site or page you’ll be displaying the eBay listing. That’s as easy as entering a website name and some unique identifier that is relevant to your site. You are given a numeric campaign id which you need to copy.

Enter the editor tools page and log in with your ebay account name and password (NOT your new affiliate user. Fill in the boxes as before – its all the same except when you get to the bottom of the page. Where you used to put Commission Junction in the drop down box then enter yoru PID, you now enter eBay Affiliate Network and then enter your campaign id in the box. Then create your page.

I just set up a new page and loaded it into my website and it looks great!

Now I just need a decent stream of organic traffic to come see what I have on offer on my site!

Perfect. I’m as happy as Larry. Sorted!

Now the hard work begins with setting up a lot of sites with the eBay editor tools software and then figuring out how to get traffic to them. My niche affiliate marketing site is already set up to host several subdomain niche sites which are all separate websites in their own rights. There are a couple that I’ve worked quite hard on in order to bring them up to speed quickly and that’s my designer bag site and my sunglasses site. At this point there’s not a lot of point deep linking to all the sub-pages for both those sites, as they need to get placed in the serps.

For that, I’ve been getting links for them slowly and naturally as possible so as to get them growing naturally. Its a long term effort as with most things on the Internet. If you try to rush things, you’ll just get sent straight to the “box” from where you’ll do no business. One more site to provide a link for as it is already getting traffic from one of the other search engines and could do with being placed in Google’s pages and that’s my diabetic shoes site. It’s exciting that this site is already producing clicks, but so far no successful bids. That’ll come in good time, I’m sure as its getting a nice trickle of organic traffic of around 20-30 uniques a day already.

To add to these sites, I’ve been buying some new .info domains while GoDaddy are having a 99 cents sale. That’s too good to resist, as each domain is a potential link producer as well as host for more eBay listings.

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way