eBay suggest a number of ‘business models’ for their affiliates. Before people can click your affiliate links, they need to be at your website. There are two ways to get them there using a search engine, which eBay refer to as ‘natural’ and ‘paid’ search.
Natural search: This is when someone finds your website in a search engine’s normal results, either because something you wrote is relevant to them or you used SEO (search engine optimisation) techniques. Be careful not to use any dodgy methods to get a high search engine ranking, though, or eBay might come after you and keep your affiliate money.
Paid search: This strategy involves paying for traffic to your website or directly to eBay, by buying ads on search engines. If you go for this option, it’s actually worth placing ads on the less popular search engines instead of the big ones: they’ll have similar click-through rates as a percentage, but the cost typically won’t be anywhere near as high.
Content: What you can do is just have a normal website, with articles on a variety of subjects and perhaps a community forum. Run the website for pleasure, but place the occasional eBay affiliate link there.
Newsletters: Don’t ignore the potential of putting your affiliate ID in each time you send out a newsletter. You can get 10c for every bid it generates with no extra work, which could be enough for the email to pay for itself, whether it leads to any sales or not.
Sadly, our time together is nearly at an end, but there is one thing that I have left to show you. It’s called the featured gallery, and it could help your sales. Look out for the next email!How to Use eBay’s “Featured Gallery” Section.
The ‘featured gallery’ is a little-known and little-used eBay feature, but that’s part of its power: it is far more used by buyers than it is by sellers, which means you can pick up some new buyers by advertising there.
Basically, the featured gallery works a lot like ‘Featured Plus’ for normal listings, which shows your item before all the other results. Buying a ‘Featured Gallery’ listing shows your listing at the top when someone chooses to use the picture gallery instead of the list view.