An Ebay PHPBayPro Experiment
Posted on January 19, 2008
Filed Under Damn Affiliates
Recently through the advise of a friend I tried an experiment with eBay affiliate marketing. I will go through the process step by step so that you can have a full understanding.
I began with a 4 year old PR4 website in an Antiques Niche. This site was getting about 20 uniques a days just off of backlinks (Wiki and DMOZ included) and minimal SERPs results, mostly for images. For all intensive purposes it was a pretty sleepy site. It had used to be an active retail site for me, but about two years ago I stopped stocking the products and held onto it. It was making about $10 a month in Adsense before I redesigned. This is what I did
- Downloaded and installed Wordpress
- Very Very easy to do. simply upload and follow a few instructions, find a nice theme and you have a site that is instantly SEO optimized and more beautiful than %90 of hand-coded web pages out there.
- Got an eBay Partner Network Account.
- Purchased and installed PHPBayPro by Wired Studios. Best $39 I spent this year.
- With PHPBayPro, I then commenced to simply drop a category code and search filter in for approximately 100 different sub topics relating to my website category. The result was approx 100 pages each specialized within the niche. So for Example if my website subject was on Barbie. I would have individual pages for Malibu Barbie, Ken Dolls and Barbie Dresses.
- Most people that throw together a quick store such as the majority of BANS (Build a Niche Store) users, just plop in the category numbers and leave it at that. This I have found is more or less ineffective for the following reasons
- This is what everybody does, so you will have duplicate content penalties de-indexing footprints with the other BANS and PHPBayPro Users
- This makes for a horrible shopping experience. Successful websites don’t just contrive ways to get one time visitors and then quickly try to convert them or grab their cookies before they leave. Successful affiliate websites actually add value to a customers browsing experience by better organizing the information at hand.
- This is the job of the webmaster, to create an optimized shopping experience. The site I made was very nice to look at and had everything nicely organized in the sidebars per individual subject within each of the categories. I used the Category Posts Plugin to smoothly display and organize all my posts as if they were static pages on the sidebar. So as the user scrolled down the 200 or so listings per page, they would alos get to browse the other sub-niches in the sidebar
- Most people that throw together a quick store such as the majority of BANS (Build a Niche Store) users, just plop in the category numbers and leave it at that. This I have found is more or less ineffective for the following reasons
That all being done, since this is Wordpress, it would automatically ping the search engines after I made the post. The result being that I got indexed in Google within about 3 minutes of each post.
Since PhpBayPRO was using the Ebay listing titles for content, suddenly I was coming up on the first page for many many long tail keywords. When a user would search for these particular keywords, my site would generally come up right after the ‘cgi.ebay…’ link to the product. Usually the next listing down was for my ebay results page and instead of having the messy ebay link code, it would be http://www.mydomain.com/Barbies/ or something like that. Much more tantalizing for the user to click on than the standard Ebay link that they see in most search results.
The results of this was that with approximately 100 pages of content, I was getting about 200-300 unique search engine visitors a day, mostly from Google who indexes fast. (Yahoo would get around to indexing a month later) and still the 10-20 uniques from my previous backlinks in the niche.
- Each one of these visitors visited an average of 2 pages so I was having around 500 page loads a day.
- For every 2 page loads I was having 1 click on an ebay Link.
- Yes that is a %50 Click Through Ratio. Granted many of the users were clicking on multiple links and some on none, but still that is astonishing
- For every 50 clicks I was getting about 1 Commission sale from Ebay
- Not including ACRU’s (new ebay member referral), for Every 1 sale I was averaging 2.00 per sale.
- Meaning that when it all broke down I was getting about $20 EPM or about 2 cents per page view within this particular niche
But Sadly some things are too good to be true and the party can never last.
About 2 weeks into my experiment, I logged into my stats one morning to drop jaw. My traffic had suddenly dropped to approx %20 of its former glory.
What happened was that for what ever reason, Google has deemed my site unworthy and dropped me out of the rankings for all but the most obscure search terms. Whether it was a footprint, dupe content or whatever is still being debated, but the fact was that I was now out of Google. Luckily at this point my Yahoo index had just started to appear and similarly to how I discuss in another post, Yahoo visitors generally are more serious about their searching and shopping and will convert better for retail items than Google surfers.
That aside, I was trying more than anything learn about the system that just slapped my site out of a steady $10 a day and growing. So what did I do?
Figuring I had nothing to lose, I did what any good webmaster would do and exported my Wordpress SQL database into a CSV file and uploaded it and had it indexed on a new domain name. I setup PHPBayPro same as before and also like before this was instantly indexed, but due to not having pagerank from previous backlinks, the SERPs were not as high, so I was experiencing about %50 the traffic as my original site. Not bad for a dupe content.
It took Google about a week to catch on to this before it disapeared out of Search engine existence, but thankfully not de-indexed, hovering along the floor somewhere in Googles Purgatory.
So what can we learn from this little eBay Affiliate Experiment?
- These sites work great if you can get directed traffic to them. Including Adsense, I was making about 3 cents per impression after all was said and done.
- The Long tail content of the ebay title listings is great for pulling in SERPs
- This same content being a dupe will eventually get you thrown into the Sandbox
Final Conclusion………………….
- For an eBay affiliate site with PHPBayPro to work in the long term, it cant just have listings unless you have some way other than search engines to drive targeting and interested traffic.
- Based on research of other sites, it seems that about 5-10 eBay listing per page completely surrounded by content on all sides is about what you can get away with and still maintain SERPs.
- Nobody said it was easy
- Now get to Work!
update: just last week the site came back in the google SERPs and has actually doubled in traffic and is a steady $20 a day including the $25 bounty for new user referrals.
I write about it here.
Comments
10 Responses to “An Ebay PHPBayPro Experiment”
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Hi,
Found this site via the DP forums. Nice.
This is an interesting post. I agree with everything you said about BANS users. Had no idea that they would get penalized for duplicate content. That alone should encourage serious eBay affiliates to roll out their own scripts.
Thanks for the info.
This is the best info I have seen yet, thank you. I hope that’s an affiliate link to phpbaypro.
HTD - Those that know my blog know that I love affiliate links - so yes it is, and thank you for the purchase. I figure we live in sort of a ’shareware’ type blog world where I give the information for free and if you find it useful and wish to use the product, then you use my affiliate link to purchase. In that way everybody prospers and I am able to continue to push forward on the front lines to bring you new information.
What about the fact that Google indexes NEW content higher initially, and then drops it after a period of time? Could your decline just be the normal Google pattern?
There is truth to that- I found the best method - which is actually very very time consuming is to spend all day every day manually publishing new posts and new sites - I say manually because to get best results, you should narrow it down via keyword/catagory# to where there are only 200-400 listings and let it display from there. Also when you do it manually, it is a natural ping from wordpress so it gets the initial index bump as you mentioned - to drop off later- there is lots of $$$ to be made with this, but it is like grinding rocks.
Do you use any other techniques (such as ppc, writing articles, posting comments on blogs, adwords, etc) for site promotion? Alternatively, do you think that the blog posts, pings and RSS updates through phpBayPro are enough to give you the traffic you have discussed in your post above.
all those things you mentioned above help the SERPs results so yes they are useful
even better - buy a domain name that has some PR in a remotely similar subject and half-the work is already done.
your sites will get big SERPs exposure at first as you publish and then drop down one they are figured out. Best would be to write content - but we are talking speed.
[…] a happy semi-pro eBay affilaite I have the chance to frequently study the traffic patterns and how users base their search […]
Seems like EPN is banning lots of people for no real reason now. Anyone know anything more about this?
I also found your site via DP, and I must say this is a very convincing story for anyone thinking about getting PHPBayPro. BANS sites have been getting crushed for the past 6 months by the SE’s, but it looks like you’re using PHPBayPro in a way that avoids getting completely hammered by the SE’s because you customize and do your best to avoid putting up the same content as other sites. Very well done.