This guest post was written by Nelle Hoxie who has become one of the most prolific eBay Hubbers that HubPages has ever seen. This is a post that I asked her to write based upon what she’s learned after publishing 33 eBay-focused Hubs over the a span of 30 days and generating $95.02 in earnings as a result. Nelle is the real deal and if you would like to catch up with her you can currently find her neck-deep in the November Hub Challenge.
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This was my first serious month of promoting Ebay – prior to this I just stuck an Ebay capsule on the end of my 200 Amazon hubs. The result was that I made about $10 each month. Actively promoting Ebay this month, I made $95.02 on 33 Ebay hubs.
Ebay also made substantial changes to its program this month, it is now a pay-per-click program instead of paying a commission (which is known as Quality Click Pricing). The first thing you have to learn is that what you’re paid per click will be determined by the value of the traffic that you send to Ebay. Of course the traffic has to convert and lead to a sale, but that sale will have more value in Ebay’s eyes, if it is from someone who has never shopped on Ebay before. And while the Ebay has a 7-day cookie, a sale that results in the beginning of the cookie will be valued more than a sale that occurs at the end of the 7-day period. That’s why several of us requested that Hubpages include a way for us to focus on Buy It Now products which the visitor would buy immediately. Auctions can take several days to complete so those may be valued less under the new system – although Ebay has stated that they take that into consideration when valuing the click.
To compensate for this I looked for Ebay sellers that focus on Buy It Now items. Hubpages’ Ebay capsule does allow you to limit items to particular sellers. So whenever possible I focused on Buy It Now Items, by looking for sellers who had them in the niche I was looking for.
You also have to be aware of what an Ebay Campaign is – because each campaign gets its own click value each day. If you create too small a campaign you get pooled in with other small campaigns and you lose the control over your click value. A campaign is a way for you to track the efficiency of your marketing, similar to channels in AdSense, but make the campaign too small and you might be in trouble. I highly suggest that if you’re going to start promoting Ebay, (or if you want to get accepted into the program) that you very carefully read their blog, general instructions, TOS, and anything else they write. Because the changes were so recent, it is still quite confusing in places.
To protect your Ebay account, it is important that you start to make sales and become a productive affiliate. Ebay gave an important hint to what they considered a good affiliate when they wrote the following statement on how to optimize for their Quality Pricing Click.
“From our experience, the publishers that are set to gain the highest increases in commission are niche content, shopping comparison or review site publishers who direct link to the related product and category pages or publishers who surface some of eBay’s great deals or products available in a user’s area. “
They are really looking for sites that have lots of organic shopper traffic, who haven’t been to Ebay before, and who sell targeted products.
That was my basic strategy to create hubs that would be positioned for an immediate traffic burst and to target lots of products. Of the 33 hubs, about 7 were responsible for 80% of the sales and sales weren’t based on age of Hub. Those hubs were no better or worse than the others – and all were in the same targeted niche. That’s why I truly believe in writing a lot of hubs – regardless of the program. Most of my hubs were indexed by Google and Yahoo within 24 hours and started making sales within a few days.
I never optimize for Google Adsense so I don’t worry about the value of a Google click when I choose my niche or products. I look for lots and lots of existing traffic, and I scour the shopping malls and shopping channels looking for hot new items and trends. I also subscribe to 3 different keyword tools.
So enough of this chatter, thanks for having me Ryan, back to my HubChallenge Hubs – and the Greenbay / Vikings game.
HubPages Blog 
Nelle truly is a great role model for how it’s done. What a valuable asset to HubPages! Keep up the good work, Nelle!
Cheers for that Nelle!
Gonna try something similar and I myself am stuck in thick with the November challange too, but what I am concentrating on is all three income streams – Ebay, Amazon and Adsense, at this point in time I am not bothered about Kontera as I need lots of traffic for that to work well.
But $95 out of 33 hubpages is pretty good, it would be even better to see what the future earnings of these hubpages will be…
Good Job Nelle!
I think that writing a lot of hubs is good, but only if they’re quality. The higher the quality, the better your odds are in terms of traffic and making money. I don’t think promoting quantity over quality is the message we should be putting across.
I would love a ‘Buy it Now’ feature added to the ebay capsule though.
Thanks for the kind words guys. Wayne, you better believe that I’ll be watching those 33 hubs between now and Christmas. Since they are focused on Christmas products, once December 20th comes, I’m sure they’ll drop like crazy. But given the traffic they’re generating quickly I’m confident they’ll be fine. I chose products that should do well every Christmas with a minimum of tinkering.
I just can’t get overly enthusiastic about ebay modules because I am in the UK and it’s difficult to try to write into another culture, with different spelling, to get some ebay sales.
A lot of what I write is UK-based and there’s no UK ebay in hubpages.
I get torn between writing for the UK and wanting to use ebay modules, which doesn’t work out.
I wish the hubpages ebay modules could be country specific sometimes, like when I’m writing about specific local areas where I know there are great ebay products on the UK site, but nothing on the US site or it’s simply not going to be relevant as Brits are unlikely to buy from abroad.
I got turned down by eBay a few months back . . . thought I’d followed Hubpages steps and we even have an eBay account. I’ll try again. Also, I’ve not sold one thing through Amazon on here . . . I’ll look at your Hubs more closely.
So, you mean to say that you did not build any back links to your hubpages? Wow, you are really watching trends and digging into the keywords. Mind sharing the keyword services that you are using?
Have you used Google Insights, or Google Trends to find out products to “hub” about and sell. What is your “trend” or product niche finder – if you will? Also, are some of products you “hub” about – and make money from – do you think – that they will be consistent money makers over time? Or, do you constantly have to hub about new products?
I would probably concentrate my product efforts for Ebay only. I live in North Caroina. Since the state legislature has threatened to impose a tax on affiliates in the state – Amazon.com has closed their affiliate program to NC residents..
Great reading about you…Thanks for any and all additional information you can find..
Robert C – The Wholesale Guy
Keep working at this, great job! This was what I needed to know. We are all experts on something!
Strangely enough I have the opposite success, eBay was not working out for me, so I moved to Amazon, and now i make around $50 a month, with £70 a month from Google. i still include the odd ebay module, but it never seems to pay out as well as Amazon.
My reasoning has to remain that most people who want to shop on e-bay go straigh there, where as an Amazon link promotes a simple online store, you see the price and you buy it at that.
I don’t understand, surely you would expect more than $95. for all that research.
I have written over 50 Blogs and have received to date just on $4000. I think the figures must be wrong, somehow, I am moving onto Amazon now, and hence seeing this Blog.
i would be immensely upset, if e bay only generated this much.
Can you please clarify. As I will not be going ahead if this is correct.
This a very interesting article. I have been selling stuff on eBay for about 6-7 years. I have found that if you put some really good keywords in the tile. Which you can check with the free Google tool, that you can make a lot of money with eBay. You can then send promotions to affiliate products or what not to your websites and get more sales on the back end. eBay is very powerful tool for making money.
Thanks for sharing and keep up the good work!
Pretty much all my friends want to take a shot at banking fast and easy money online these days, either through selling on eBay, affiliate marketing, ppc networks
Wow!
I will follow your advice and try to write my 1000th hub!