Paid search and buying traffic are not the only ways to make money online. A lot of people that are new to affiliate marketing are often scared off by the thought of spending thousands of dollars per day to make thousands of dollars per day. There are a ton of ways to make some decent money using affiliate marketing and free traffic sources on the net. Here is a guide to using craigslist to drive traffic to the Ebay Partner Network and build yourself up some money to reinvest into affiliate marketing.
Please Note 2 Things:
1) I have not used this method in a long long time…If I say something that is wrong by todays standards please correct me in the comments
2) I am not claiming to be the originator of this method. I started doing it after reading a bunch of different methods. I put them all together and came up with something that worked.
The premise to this method of affiliate marketing is quite simple. You need people to click your ebay affiliate links. That click sets a cookie which may result in a sale. The more people you can get to click, the more income potential you stand to earn. Here’s what we are doing. We are “helping” eBay sellers, sell their items. That’s right. We are driving traffic into eBay listings that already exist. Heres how it works:
1 ) Get a domain name setup on a web server.
2 ) Get an Ebay Partner Network Account. Obviously don’t tell them how you plan to promote eBay. Just give them a link to a blog or something.
3 ) Pick a popular Craigslist City. I’ll use Los Angeles for example. Check out the For Sale section and see whats hot. You can also figure out hot items by using your brain. At one point Nintendo Wii’s were really hot and you couldn’t buy them in the store. There were plenty on eBay so it was a perfect niche. Other niches ive used that worked well include Ugg Boots, Hannah Montana memorabilia & sports tickets (just to give you some ideas). Go ahead and pick the first thing you want to promote. For demonstration purposes I will use “Metallica Concert Tickets.”
4 ) Go on eBay and use the advanced search function. You want to search for Metallica Tickets in the Los Angeles Area. Search for fixed price listings only. Find the cheapest tickets you can.
5 ) Use the eBay tools to create an affiliate link for this particular item.
6 ) Back to your web server. Set up a structure something like this: domain.com/mylinks – In the mylinks folder put in an html file (name it something like metallica.html) with a simple meta refresh to your affiliate URL at eBay. If you want to get really crazy and make sure you don’t get caught you can double meta refresh. Your affiliate URL is now www.domain.com/mylinks/metallica.html
7 ) Create a Craigslist listing (if I have to explain to you how to do this your too dumb for this industry). Make an interesting title. DO NOT PUT A PRICE. You can use something like “Metallica Tickets For 2/28/09 – Great Seats & Cheap.” For the content of your post you want to just grab the description that the eBay seller already put in their listing minus any personal information about that seller.
The most important part of your listing is now added. After the description put a line something like this: “Please view my sales page for additional information and pricing.” Link that with your www.domain.com/mylinks/metallica.html affiliate link.
8 ) Post The Listing.
9 ) Rinse and repeat with other cities and niches.
Your “Please view my sales page for additional information and pricing.” will get a ton of clicks if you choose the right products to help sell. You can even look at your site logs to see which html files are getting the most clicks and then you know which niches are hot. This method can be twisted and turned in a million directions each MAKING YOU MONEY! I used to do this when Commission Junction ran the eBay Affiliate Program and easily pulled in a couple hundred dollars a day with only a few postings. This post was meant to get your creative juices flowing and demonstrate a simple way to make money online with minimal expense.
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