A lot has changed in my ‘pension building online’ activities since I wrote the last post. I’ve really started to focus on the ebay affiliate side of my plans and I’m delighted to report good results.
I’m a member of a site called One Lung Thin. They offer training & an awesome forum centred around ways to make money by building websites that send traffic to ebay. There are lots and lots of information and lots of help, it’s terrific.
When I wrote last I had just built 30 sites and considered it a mammoth task, in the 6 weeks since I have built a further 120 and am now at 151 total. This is a numbers game and the numbers work well as long as you are willing to invest the time in building sites.
The other major change is that I have had to take on a server. My little shared hosting accounts nor my reseller account would handle these sites so I am now a very happy customer of Servint who have been terrific at getting me setup and providing 24/7 technical support. I have cPanel/WHM and fantastico and for that money anywhere else, you’d be having to check the apache manuals yourself. Great stuff. The sites zip along on the server now whereas they were grinding before and causing multiple clicks as people got tired of waiting for pages to load.
Regarding the sites themselves, there are different types of sites being built on One Lung Thin but all variations on the theme of ‘thin’. Affiliate sites are required to have contact us and privacy pages but apart from that the ‘TNS’ only have one page and a search list. It sounds pretty spartan and it is, however it is made that way on purpose.
Here’s the purpose: My sites focus in on a specific niche, they display it in a specific way that suits a particular group of customers with a specific intent – Purchase. The way I look at these hand-selected niche sites is as specialist shelving for ebay’s vast content. It is another way for ebay to help one customer, the vendor, interact with another customer, the buyer.
When you are in a store looking to purchase, you don’t need to know lots of information about the product on the shop floor. Just: Is It Available? How much is it? Can I Buy It Now?
…previous post …where a person is looking for the actual product to purchase, then the best thing I can do is to connect them and not put anything in the way or distract them with additional offerings.
The sites are MUCH smarter than just that though and they use some very creative techniques to ensure that before someone gets to the sites they have indicated they are likely to purchase. This is primarily done through keywords and key phrases. The keyword detail in the phrase and the length are two critical factors. Basically, long tail keywords are good because they are very specific. Specifics searchers have a specific reason for searching and that is very often to purchase.
OLT can make lots of resources available. A Keyword tool is available to subscribers that finds out what are the most popular terms on ebay – I bought Jarb’s Bot at $20 that with a single click will update all my 150+ wordpress sites with all the plugins to the latest versions - another will submit new sites for indexing and yet another will check for sites that have been de-indexed. I auto-pool info with others to auto-protect my sites against attacks by bots. Malicious pieces of code that click on every link in every page and can really mess with the quality score of the account or get your account suspended – That’s not a problem now. It’s a slick operation
In terms of the workload It does not take long to build an individual OLT site, it take a little time to do the keyword research, pick & purchase a domain, set up the account etc. However when it comes to site building, there is one specific form, the Thin & Spin that really is fast to roll out and very effective at bringing traffic to ebay. It’s the most popular form in use as you can imagine and it is how I managed to achieve 150 sites and I’m not finished building yet. I can create a site from scratch on a new account & new domain in 15 minutes and I can have a clone in 5. It’s amazing.
It all sounds too good to be true eh? Well Yes and no.
Yes – There is the not-so-minor hurdle of getting into EPN and then you are at the mercy of ebay and the search engines, particularly Google.
Yes – you will need to roll up your sleeves and start playing with code
No – it IS true that if you follow the plan laid out at One Lung Thin and invest the hours it takes to build a hundred sites, you will be making a good stream of money every month from that one time effort. Yes I said Every Month. That is until the rules change. Who knows when that may happen but the sites are flexible and can be re-used in many ways such as with alternative programmes such as Amazon.
How well the sites do in the long term depends on the niches and the keywords that I’ve picked. I have tried to select ‘evergreen’ niches. Things that will always be popular. I avoid fashion and fads but invariably tastes will change and as I have been learning my way along, I will definitely have backed a few donkeys in amongst the stable of racehorses that I hope I have. I’m also building sites in some ‘out there’ niches, a scatter gun approach and maybe a few will hit the mark. I’ve had some nice surprises so far that have led to sites in other niches.
If you have tried and failed to get into EPN or you wantto promote Amazon, there is another alternative but it does mean that you can’t use the TNS sites. Skimlinks would definitely work well if you have existing informational or useful resources online and wanted to monetise them. I have a number of sites recently put onto Skimlinks who are an ebay super-affiliate so they get an enhanced EPC click rate from ebay. That is just as well because they take 25% of your earnings for the service! Before you say anything, after their cut is taken off, it does largely equate to, or improve upon, the payment a normal affiliate would receive so you end up with the same take-home pay for that click as a regular EPN member, you just can’t use TNS. The nice thing about skimlinks is that you can also access affiliate schemes by Amazon and I think 25 other major online retailers. Check it out..
The Skimlinks approval process is much less onerous than EPNs but they will only acept sites with ‘an amount’ of actual information that supports the listings. Nobody is quite sure how much is enough. I have a feeling they don’t know themselves! That of course means that our “highly specialised niche shelf displays” built for the shopper & not the reader, just don’t cut the mustard - despite our specific customer not requiring the info they insist we provide. They’ve already passed that info stage - They’re at “Is it available? How Much is it? Can I Buy It Now?”
In any case, my progress in terms of this becoming a financial viability has been positive since I started this programme. I continue to build sites and graphs continue to rise, I obsess about statistics and I’m constantly searching out niches and keywords. I am building Amazon sites at the minute to spread the risk of ebay not being available to me and I’ll look further afield to see how I can maintan my momentum, putting little roots in the earth so the plant may be nourished. It’s working and gathering momentum but I’m not about to put a deposit on a yacht any time soon.
