Why eBay needs Affiliates
Posted on August 6, 2008
Filed Under Damn Affiliates
As a happy semi-pro eBay affilaite I have the chance to frequently study the traffic patterns and how users base their search behaviors. With eBay I have noticed a definite pattern in how users interact.
First off to tell you a little about my affiliate sites that drive eBay traffic
- All driven by PHPbay and Wordpress (PhpBay is better than the eBay RSS because it allows the search engines to index the eBay results as content)
- Almost %100 of new traffic comes from organic google results. (No PPC or major inter-linking)
- People most often find one of my sites by searching for some obscene long tail keyword string
- For Example - Goto Google and search for “vintage schrade 225ot”
- (at the time of writing) What you will find is on this long tail keyword it just happens that the only results that match up are eBay results. But wait whats that at the bottom of the page? An entry from some site called My Antique Finder.
- Now the regular searcher will see all these eBay results in the results and just kinda sigh. The issue is that eBay has what we call “Negative Saturation” meaning despite the fact that they do in fact have for sale everything you could ever think of- most people have a worn out image of eBay and wont go there if they can avoid it.
- Meaning that they WILL NOT click on an eBay result even though it may be at the top, but they WILL click on a result for My Antique Finder, because it looks new and interesting
- Once they are at your affilaite site, then they will browse like it is an independent shopping site and then they click on a link -expecting to get more information.
- And Wham!!!
- Then they are at eBay and have your 7 day cookie.
- The trick is that once they actually go, then they remember the value of eBay (so easily forgotten) and buy things.
- So your job as an affiliate is to just get them there and eBay will take care of the rest.
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2 Responses to “Why eBay needs Affiliates”
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Great article. I couldn’t agree more…if you look at my site I am using the some method…wordpress and PHPBay pro…works a charm…as of right now your My Antique Finder site isn’t ranking for that term you mentioned, and this article is
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