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Build Your Bankroll With Craigslist And The Ebay Partner Network
Posted by Ad Hustler | Posted in Affiliate Marketing | Posted on 12-02-2009
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.
great post, homey. here’s a couple of notes from my own experience:
1) you’re either going to need a lot of craigslist accounts as people will flag these posts like crazy and you’ll likely be banned. no biggie, since you can buy confirmed cl accounts for rather cheap.
2) like you mentioned – I would highly suggest a double-refresh here to ensure that you’re covering your tracks.
3) small craigslist cities work just as well as big ones! although – they are slower to produce
Good post -
If you’re really stuck on a product go check out Google Trends and Ebay Pulse.
@Tangy The P.I.M.P. – Getting around Craigslist’s flagging, ghosting, blocking, phone verification, account suspension etc is a huge topic we will save for another post, but good point.
If you don’t post more then a few listings per day/account/ip address you should be ok.
You are right about small cities. They can definitely produce.
Sigh…time to move on from Ugg boots now I suppose
If you are able to find typo ebay listings which have low/zero bidders, you can get some killer bargains to pimp to the CLers.
@Mr. Wee – Very good call. If you can find hot items with killer prices, the chances of getting your links clicked go up astronomically.
There’s a problem with this. At one point, ebay will give you 72 hours to explain and prove how you get your traffic, and if you don’t they will terminate your account and not pay you.
An easy way to get around this is by setting up an auto reply email in gmail. When you create your ad, tell the user to contact you by email. When they send you an email, you automatically reply with a link to your actual website which contains a listing of the ebay auctions via the editor kit or the custom banner kit.
The user sends you an email, you auto reply that they can find more info by visiting http://www.yoursite.com/metalica.html. On http://www.yoursite.com/metalica.html, you actually display the auction items. They click, you cookie them, you bank.
When you write the ad on craigslist, include a price, a low price, and on your http://www.yoursite.com/metalica.html page, setup the editor kit to only display auctions with the maximum price as the price you included in the craigslist ad.
Question to Jonathon, how is your way any different? The only thing I see changed is that you forward the CLer to receive your automated email. Won’t Ebay still ask you how you got the sale?
No in his way you actually have a landing page instead of just forwarding.
@Kavika, Coops is correct. You have a landing page that you send the visitors too, and then they click on the ebay listing to visit ebay via your aff link.
I’m glad you are all debating different ways to go about this method. That’s exactly what I want you to do. Use your brains and come up with different ways to execute the same general idea. Jonathan has a great point. With any campaign you have to test different ways of doing things and see what kind of results you get.
although this method does work its not the best long term strategy…if you are serious about earning $$$ with ebay setup some niche stores with content & SEO the hell out of them
Is this for the $25 ebay pays you to register as a user or the % of the sales? How do you get the $25…what kind of LP? Also, won’t Ebay find out what site you are really promoting on just by seeing the referring links to their site?
Sorry so many questions…
@Mr Confused: The eBay partner network affiliate program pays 2 ways:
1) % of the fees they make off the seller of the listing
2) New registered users ($25+) aka ACRU’s
Your going to probably make a lot more % type commissions then ACRU’s since everyone and their momma has an eBay account nowadays (although ACRU’s do still occur)
If your going to use the method the way I posted it, the referrer should never be making it into eBay. That’s the point of doing a single or double refresh. It scrubs out the referrers from the traffic so that it looks like its coming off of your domain rather then craigslist.
If your going to use the method that Jonathan mentions above where you use a landing page, the type of landing page you use is really up to you. You can create a PHPbay or BANS type site or you can just use the editor kit from within your ebay affiliate account. You can really do something as simple as creating a simple HTML page that says “My Auctions” and then just listing all the auctions from the seller you are trying to represent yourself as.
Hope this answers your questions…
You’ve given me some useful insights – thanks!
Interesting method. What are the chances of getting caught when using a double meta refresh? Does eBay monitor Craigslist or does Craigslist report to eBay? Has anyone been caught doing this?
@Benny: Anything you do online thats shady runs the risk of you getting caught. Just weigh the risk/reward.
That being said, the chances of eBay tracking the traffic back to Craigslist are pretty low. Remember, there is no link to eBay in your listing. The link is to your own domain. Using the second proposed method here, you run pretty much no risk of getting caught but you will set less eBay cookies.
i have used this method with great success and have never been caught. great blog you got here. i do miss the social media posts though.
@prmassacre – Theres a reason I haven’t posted a new socialmedia case study in a while. I have a big issue with them I’m trying to resolve. Trust me, you will here about it soon enough.
Dude I’d LOVE to see a post that deals with getting around their phone verification that doesn’t involve buying up a bunch of prepaid cells or jacking your friend’s phones.
Nice posts lately, by the way.
Excuse my ignorance, but isn’t there a legit way of getting a verified Craig’s List account?
I’ve posted on there before with some of my rentals that I needed tenants for.
What makes an account verified?
Awesome post, by the way; I’m subscribing to this Ad Hustler Dude’s feed……You Da Man!
@Todd – A verified account is actually a phone verified account. Theres a couple of reasons you need this:
1) Certain sections just require it. If your posting to a section that requires a phone verified account (PVA) there is just no way around it.
2) Your IP address can get soft blocked. What that means is Craigslist suspects something is up with your IP, like your posting too many ads or something and then they make you verify your account by phone.
The process is pretty simple, you need to enter your phone number, they place an automated call which has a pin and you type the pin in to verify.
Now…the fun part is if your doing something sketchy, figuring out ways not to put your real phone number in.
Love this idea and plan to use it. Here is my payback – head to a freelancer website like GetAFreelance.com and hire someone to do the postings for you. There are folks who do this for a living and have multiple PVA’s, IP address changing software etc.
Best part is, it’s pretty cheap. You should be able to get CL ads posted for about .40 ea ad.
Good idea. Apart from craigslist one can also use other upcoming and cool classified ads sites like AdsGlobe.com