I am only a small EPN publisher. I have never really bought into it, and it has never made me big bucks. However, some of my established sites are best monetized with Ebay auctions as they are physical product related niches. Anyway, lets look at an example site for the new floating PPC pricing system, i.e. the we will pay you however much we want to system.

The site is fairly low traffic about 80-150 visitors a day. It is very specific traffic though, from google and is targeted. The site ranks first on google for a range of keywords relating to these very specific products. These products are hard to buy on the high street, and are mainly purchased online, so I have a pretty good conversion .i.e. most of my visitors are looking to buy stuff, and I am sending them to Ebay.

The numbers

Looking at the 15 days in this month so far here are my figures:

I have sold $385 worth of product…this was calculated by adding the unique figures from the “eBay Total Sale Amount” column of the transaction download file. Under the old system this would have made me $33.87 in commission. Sounds pretty fair, it’s a small site. It pretty much runs on auto pilot, so about $70 a month seems alright to me. Like I said above, not big money, but a nice little earner that runs on auto.

And how much did they pay me for the first 15 days of the month? $16.00
I have given it a few months, but essentially, PPC for EPN has halved my earnings.

So in conclusion, EPN PPC Sucks.

Recently I introduced a friend of mine to SEO, and the methods I use to make money online. As part of this process we exchanged a whole heap of emails with useful information for beginners. This article includes all the best parts of these emails.

Keyword Research

If you are serious about looking into search engine optimization (SEO), which is what I do, and wanted to research what keywords would bring you traffic this tool is free and probably the best as it’s by Google.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

The idea is to find keywords that closely relate to what you are selling, but that also get a good search volume. To find good stats that we can use you need to search for a term, then change the match type setting to exact. This stat will tell you how many people are searching for the exact term. It is an estimate.

The next thing I do is search that term in google. And see the sites I am competing against. I know I can outrank most sites for a specific keyword, if I target it, but some are a lot more work than others.

Analysis of competition gets a bit harder, I have a tool that does it for me…it looks at how many links the site has, how long it has been around, if it is optimised for your keyword, the google page rank of the site…all of which are important.

To illustrate my example…it would be easy to outrank Harvey Norman for the term “3 seater couch”. They are a big brand, there is no way they are going to target such a specific term. They will naturally rank for a term like that, as they probably have a category page on their site called “3 seater couches”. So if you then go and optimise for that term, and build links to your site that target that term, you will eventually outrank them. However, it would be impossible to outrank them for the term “Harvey Norman”.

What sort of site should I make?

The big things are:

1) How will you get traffic to your site?

2) How will you convert that to money?

My friend had an interest in property investment. I explore this niche as an idea.

I have had a bit of a look and property investment is a huge Adsense niche….massive money to be made and very competitive. To give you an idea of how much money is involved, if you were to buy traffic from Google, a click from a search result page for someone searching for the phrase “property investments” would cost you $8.30nz….for one click. What this means is huge competition for the main keywords, and that you will be competing against people who know what they are doing. This is also very evident when searching for the term in google.com…look at all the sponsored listings surrounding the search results…this means there is big money to be spent and made in this niche. So it’s not going to be easy to make money, but when you do start ranking, you should make very good dosh!

A few thoughts:

Just because you would be writing about NZ property investment, doesn’t mean you should only target NZ search traffic. This seriously limits how successful you can be. The key to making money with adsense(google ads) is to get lots of search visitors for high paying keywords, but not to satisfy what they are looking for….i.e. if they find the information they are looking for on your site, they won’t click your ads. A great strategy would to be write property investment articles that are generic, but in places using NZ as an example. You then have a huge market. When they get down to the guts of it, they may find much of the information is relevant to NZ only, but all that means is that they haven’t found what they are looking for so they keep searching….and in many cases that search would involve clicking on what will be a very well targeted Goolge ad that you will have on your page.

The highest volume keyword for this niche is “investment property” - which even from google.co.nz you are looking at nearly 500 searches a month for. However, because of this all of the direct match NZ domains are gone… investmentproperty.co.nz .net.nz .org.nz and .gen.nz are all gone.

Google.com gives nearly 50,000 exact searches a month for this term, so you can dream about the money you would make ranking well for that term…possible, but a lot of work, and time for your domain to develop.

So if this were me, I would buy a .com or .net and target international traffic. But a less competitive keyword from the same niche…something with 3000 exact searches a month…You could easily turn that traffic into 100’s a month, but you won’t be up against such hardcore competition.

I had a look for some keyword domains with exact matches:

When buying domains you are always either looking for brandibility .i.e easy to remember names: twitter???  or exact matches to keywords that are searched often.

The idea once you have a domain is to get 5 keywords that closely relate that you will target – For this niche terms that are getting around 300 searches a month look good. In niches with lower competition, you can target higher volume searches more easily.

Creating Content for the site

As you get the site up it is worth putting a good substantial amount of original content up on it. Write at least 7 articles for your site… 2 with the main keyword in the title of the article + 5 articles that have with each of your other keywords in the title. These 7 articles need to be 500 - 1000 words, good grammar, spelling etc and have appealing human readable titles. Lists are always good, Top 20 mistake you should avoid, Ten things you didn’t know about Property investment, The biggest mistake I made as a Property investor  etc , just make sure you have your keywords in the article title. Also as much as possible you need to include you main keyword in the text…it needs to look natural, but including your keywords 3-4 times in each article will help a little.

For this site I suggested a good beginner link building strategy would be to belt out some Ezine articles.

After you have these 7 articles you need to write 5-7 articles which we will use to promote your site on ezinearticles website. This site will get you authority links and direct traffic.  These articles need to be greater than 250 words, but greater than 500 where possible. From each of these articles you get two links back to your site, one we will link back with your main keyword, the other we will link back to each of your secondary keywords. With ezine you can’t have keyword terms with greater than 3 words.

Adding one article to ezine jumped a page on one of my sites from ranking 41st in Google to ranking 2nd in Google for a very nice 1000 searches a month keyword related to making money online. Link building is very important and ezine is a very good place to get very good links…you just have to work for them…there is a particular way you have to include your links in articles, but I can help you with that when you get to it.

Wordpress Permalinks

For SEO reasons it is important that we have our article titles in the URL. The default setting displays an id number as the URL for a post or page. This is no good. Go to settings and select Permalink, and change it to custom structure and use: /%postname%/ . I almost always just use the above template, although it is fine to use things like dates and categories in your URL as well, as long as you have the post title.

How do I show excerpts on my homepage with a read more link?

Firstly go to appearance/editor, you will see all the theme files on the right, select the page either named home or Main Index …it probably has the file named home.php or  index.php.

You need to find the content php tag <?php the_content( ));?> and replace it with <?php the_excerpt(__(’Read more’)); ?>

Save the modification. That will make you site show an excerpt instead on a full post on the homepage. Problem is excerpts by default are rubbish and they kill all your images and formatting. So you then need to install this plug-in:

Advanced Excerpt

Once installed, it will allow all your formatting to show, and give you a excerpt option page in your setting where you can define the length you want the excerpt to be.

How do I add a read more link to the bottom of my excerpt?

To get the read more part add this line to your home.php under the excerpt tag:

<p align=”right”><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>”>&raquo; Keep reading &raquo;</a><br /></p>

You can change the &raquo; Keep reading &raquo; part to whatever you want .. read more etc

What are hex numbers and how do I change colours of my text and links etc?

In your Wordpress theme editor, select the style sheet file down the bottom of your theme files.

A style sheet defines properties of various page elements in your theme. Colours in style sheets are represented by a 6 digit hex number i.e. #ffffff is white. You can alter any colours in your theme using this file. Use this site to find colours: HTML Codes

Ezine article tips

• You need to write 250 + word articles.
• It helps to use low to medium volume keywords that related to your main keyword in your title, stuff that gets searched 50-300 times a month. Ezine articles will rank easily in google for low competition keywords.
• You add your links to the resource box, not the article text
• You get two links per article, use the following format and always target your main keyword, and another targeting an article keyword.

Format:

<a href=”http://google.com”>Google</a>

• You can’t have more than 3 keywords between you anchor.
• Just place the keywords into some sort of generic self promoting sentence. i.e. On my site, I give Property Investment Tips and advice on how to Buy Investment Property…and place the links around your keywords…try and use attractive language that encourages clicks. You can’t be self promotional in the article body, but you can in the resource box…so sell your links to try and get extra traffic. Ezine traffic is targeted, and often comes from google as your articles will rank for keywords. Because of this, if you get them to click to your link, they will often click your ads which will use similar self promotional language. I don’t often bother targeting any direct traffic other than google traffic but ezine direct traffic is worth the effort…so use language that encourages people to click your link.

How do I find out how many backlinks a site has?

I can look at the backlinks a site has by using:

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

Setting Up and Using PHP Pro

Once you have paid for the plugin and You put the auction file and image folder into your root directory.

Copy the phpbay folder into your plugins folder, login to wordpress, go to the plugins tab and then activate it.

You need an Ebay Partner Network account. Enter details into the main screen…phpbaypro will show up in your settings panel.

Once the plugin is set up you use the following tag in posts to display listings.

[phpbay]Keyword, X, “Y”, “Z”[/phpbay]

Where The first option is the keyword search term in Ebay you want to show. X is how many listings you want to show. Just using those two will work…but if auctions displayed are not a good match you can use the Y and Z options… Y is the cat number for the products you want to show…you can find a good cat match for your stuff here:

http://listings.ebay.com/_W0QQloctZShowCatIdsQQsocmdZListingCategoryList

And the Z you use if you want to exclude listings…i.e. a keyword for something you don’t want to show.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a crazy science of wizardry. It involves millions of factors that are so hard to understand and comprehend that I think we should leave it to the experts. And lets allow them to charge premium dollar for their efforts too. Really? … Well not so much. SEO isn’t really all that difficult. In fact I would go as far as to say that a lot of it is mostly grunt work, applied intelligently. So why do people think it is so difficult to understand how to rank in Google? Well the truth is that it isn’t that difficult to understand, and it certainty isn’t rocket science.Wouldn’t you like to know what the key factors are that determine what pages rank well in Google? Well the information is out there freely available, and you don’t have to buy some dick head’s Ebook to find out, lets take a look.

Key Factors for Ranking in 2009

• Keyword use in title tag
• Keyword use in domain name
• Substantive, unique content on page
• Keyword focused anchor text in links
• Quantity/quality of links
• Diversity of link sources
• Page specific trust rank
• Relevance of link sources
• Keyword specific anchor text from internal links

Source: Search Engine Ranking Factors

Keyword use in title tag

This one is straight forward and the most widely used SEO technique. If you simply include a keyword in the title of your page, you tell Google what the page is about. This will help that page rank for that keyword.

Keyword use in domain name

Domain names that have keywords in them will rank much more easily for a keyword than ones that don’t. It doesn’t mean your domain won’t rank well for any chosen keyword. But it may mean you need to build more backlinks to be on a level playing field. Believe it or not this site ranks on the front page of Google.co.nz for the keyword phrase “Make Money Online“. This doesn’t bring a huge amount of traffic because nz is small in a global search market. But it is still well worth the effort.

Substantive, unique content on page

Google loves unique content. And pages with lots of it, targeted to a keyword will rank better than those pages that may be similar in every other way, but lighter on unique content.

Keyword focused anchor text in links

For me I rate this the most important factor, but also the most hard work. To rank well for competitive keywords you are going to have to build links to your site that have your keyword as the anchor text of those links. I obviously want links aiming at this site with the phrase Make Money Online as that anchor of those links.

Quantity/quality of links

A lot of links aiming at your page or site is going to help you rank better. And a fewer amount of quality links will have the same effect.

Diversity of link sources

Having a site wide link on another site may help you rank a little, but to improve your site ranking you are going to need to build links from a variety of different sources.

Page specific trust rank

Does Google trust your site? Is it new? Or have you been around for a while. Google likes to sandbox new sites to avoid spam sites. This will stop them from ranking for a period of time. The longer your site has been around to more trust Google applies to that domain. As a result very old sites rank easily for competitive keywords.

Relevance of link sources

Relevance of links is important. If you are trying to rank for a term about Internet Marketing, You are going to want to gets links from other sites about Internet Marketing.

Keyword specific anchor text from internal links

This is something you can easily control, and it certainly does help. Think of it this way. Google doesn’t know what your site is about unless you tell them. You can tell them by including the relevant keywords to links around your site. The link at the top of this site has my main keywords in it. The links to different articles have keywords in them as I try to use keywords in titles.

Ok so that’s it. It doesn’t sound that hard. And the above list was agreed upon by 72 of the industries most influential SEO’s. So these factors are very close to fact rather than opinion. Obviously understanding SEO is one thing. Having the skills and character to be able to pull it off is another.

Having written this article for ezine to build some backlinks to this site, I had it turned down for no good reason, so Ezine can kiss my ass, I will put it on here instead.

If you are a webmaster or blogger you probably already know about the importance of backlinks for building organic traffic to your site. You understand that there are many different ways to build backlinks, some are moral, and some are not. If Google considers every backlink that you build yourself that doesn’t occur naturally to be “Grey Hat SEO” at best, what do you consider the most moral of link building tactics? I think it is particularly naive to assume that people won’t try and build backlinks to their sites to improve the ranking in search engines, however, I want to look at the morality of link building, so here we go.

10) Bookmarking your site or page on a bookmarking website

This task can be completely innocent, and in most instances is completely moral. There are websites that allow you publish and share links to your favourite sites. When you bookmark your own site, that bookmark becomes a link to your site. In some cases these links are even do-follow links. When this activity becomes immoral is when you start spamming the sites with 100’s of links, and setup up multiple accounts using automated tools such as bookmarking demon or SEnuke.

9) A forum signature

Many forums allow members to include a backlink to their site in the signature of their posts on forums. In some cases these are do follow links. If you have a lot of posts on that forum you get a lot of links. This practice is fairly moral, although I don’t consider the links to carry much value.

8) Commenting on a blog

Commenting on a blog is a good way to get a backlink. It is moral because the blog owner wants people to interact with their blog. If the blog is Do-follow you even get a valuable do-follow backlink for your blog. This activity becomes a lot less moral and more dodgy when you start leaving your desired anchor text as you name, to get a more valuable backlink. The plugin Keywordluv allows you to achieve this task morally however.

7) Submitting to link directories

Google and Yahoo both have their own link directories, so these must be considered moral. As these sites are not very content rich the links from most link directories don’t carry much value. The directories where the links do carry value tend to cost money to submit to or are very hard to get accepted into, which is uncool.

6) Submitting something free to a resource, image or video site

There are plenty of sites on the internet that will give you a backlink to your site of choice if you submit stuff to them. This might be software, slideshows, videos, images, for example. This act is moral, as you are simply getting credit for your work, and the site is getting new content.

5) Submit your site to a CSS directory

CSS design inspiration directories are very common, there are 100’s of them. If you have a unique site, that is well designed, you can build backlinks using sites like these. Once again this method is moral, as you are getting credit for the hard work that has been put into your design.

4) Design a theme for a common content management system like Blogger or Wordpress and include a link back to your site in the footer.

Again, moral because you are getting credit for your work right?

3) Exchange links with other webmasters

Within reason this is moral. You should do in it in the correct manner though. It really should be to a site that is about the some topic as yours, so your link is suggesting an endorsement of the other site. As link exchanges normally involve reciprocal links, they can carry less value than one way links, however they are still worth the effort from the right sites.

2) Guest post on blogs

A guest post is when you write an article for a blogger, and that article gets published on the blogger site, with a link back to your site. You are creating content for the blogger, so they are happy, and you really deserve a link for your efforts. This is one of the more moral methods of building backlinks.

1) Writing articles on articles sites like ezinearticles, go articles or hubpages

This allows you to include a link to your site in the resource box for ezine or goarticles or in the body for hubpages, and you can select any anchor text which you want. As you are building content for these sites, so it’s good for them. Surely for this effort you deserve a backlink. So I have decided that this has to be the most moral of backlink building tactics. Links from an authority site such as these, can carry a lot of value, particularly if you then build links that that article also.

Today when I signed in to check my Adsense earnings for the day, I found one of my Adsense articles on how to make quick money (above) was performing much better than normal. So my first impression of the performance of the new units is that they are fantastic. Time will tell how much better they are, but so far, so good. It is also possible that the ads will be more effective for a while, but then fall back down to what they were before, once factors relating to ad blindness kick in.

The Link units

The font size of the link units remains the same as before, so these units should look the same as before. See below:

I would be interested to hear what other peoples experiences are so far with the new units?

Anyone who has read anything about SEO(Search Engine Optimisation) knows that keyword research is important. You probably know that ranking for certain keywords will bring you a lot of traffic. But what else do we know about keyword research? What other factors should we look for when selecting keywords?

Keyword research is probably the most important step for success when trying to Make Money Online, and yet it is probably the step that most people get wrong. Some people don’t consider SEO important, so they don’t do keyword research at all. This leaves things up to luck. Maybe someone will link to their site using a relevant search term, and they will do well. But most likely no links will mean no love from the search engines.

Then there are the people that understand that SEO is important, but are too lazy to do it properly. In most cases they select keywords which they haven’t researched properly, or that they copied from someone who they want to have a site like. In the end they will end up having too much competition, and will struggle to rank.

Good research will find keywords that have lower competition or at least comparable competition for the level of your site, for terms that will bring enough traffic to justify your efforts. There is no point creating and optimising a site, and ranking for a term if it won’t bring you much traffic.

Other factors

Not all keywords are equal. Some are well worth ranking for while others will bring you lots of useless traffic which will be hard to convert. A good way to ensure you are using the right sort of monitization for your traffic is to consider what users are searching for.

Information keywords

An information keyword is a keyword that suggests the searcher is trying to find something out. They are not looking to buy a product. You need to have contextual or CPM ads on sites where you target these types of terms. An example might be: Start a Small Business Online

Buying keywords

Buying keywords are keywords that suggest the searcher is looking to buy a product. You should use affiliate products, Ebay or Amazon ads to make money from sites targeting these terms. Buying terms are going to have a much lower search volume and they are often much more specific, but as the visitor is looking to spend money you can make more money from them. Good examples of buying keywords would be terms like: “42 LCD TV For Sale” or “Buy 42 LCD TV”. The searcher has used the terms “Buy” or “For Sale”, which suggest they are shopping. Other great buying keyword terms are: “Review + Product”, “Scam + Product”.

The Adwords Keyword Tool

The Adwords keyword tool is the best free keyword research tool. Here’s some tips to help you use it correctly.

The first thing you will notice is that I have changed a few of the default settings. I want to see the “Exact” term matches for my keyword, to know how much traffic ranking for that exact term could potentially bring. I also want to see the estimated “CPC”. This tells me how much I would have to pay to buy traffic, I am more interested in how much I would make from a click. The money you make from an AdSense click is normally about a 3rd of that price that the Adwords will will give you. Google take some of the cut, and content ads (ads on your site) cost less than ads directly on the search engine results.

The idea is to select terms which have a healthy global search volume, then search for that term in Google to see what sites your would be competing against.

Competition

Search for the term in Google. What sites do you see? SEO quake is a free browser plugin that will show you the sort of information we need to make decisions. How high is the PR of that site, and how many backlinks does it have. The sort of sites to avoid competition with are typically high authority domains with a lot of backlinks, domains that are government owned (govt), and exact match domains with authority (weightloss.com when targeting the term “Weight Loss”).

What sites do we like to see? Depending on what site/page you are trying to rank with different sites in the ranking can be very encouraging. For example if I am creating a hubpage, I am love to see other social sites or article sites in the rankings. e.g. squidoo pages, e-zine articles, go-articles etc.

Keyword research is really where the money is at. Let me know what you think?

The top 10 Make Money Online Tips for making money with websites.

1. Build quality links - Build links to your sites every day. Do site link exchanges, use do follow social bookmarks, comment on do follow blogs, submit your sites to directories, post articles in article directories, build hubs or squidoo’s, any of these techniques work, but you have to do them often. The more links your site has the more traffic you will get from  search engines.
2. Write or get fresh original content for your sites. Fresh content is gold, but it must be original. You don’t need to post every day, but posting more often does encourage more visits from search engine spiders. I don’t post to this site often enough, so I am a hypocrite.
3. Research keywords that will get traffic, and optimise your content for these keywords.i.e. use those keywords in your article title, body text, and for the anchors of incoming links.
4. Select niches that will make you money. Sure writing about blogging tips might be fun, but it won’t make you money.
5. Don’t jump on band wagons. People that write e-books will sell you anything. Most of it isn’t worth the hard drive space it wastes on your PC. Find out what works for you, and stick to it. Stop trying to find the next big thing, make more content and get more backlinks. Everything else is just distracting you from making money.
6. Select appropriate monetization for your content. Adsense earns me a nice check each month, but I wouldn’t use it on all my sites. For example use Adsense on sites where you get a lot of search traffic for targeted keywords. Use affiliate links or Ebay Partner Network for product related sites.
7. If you can’t think of an article to write for your niche, research some good keywords that have good traffic potential and create articles around each of them.
8. A pretty site might get you an RSS subscriber or a tweet follower, but it may not increase your click through rates. Simple design, with well placed ads are more important than bells and whistles.
9. Research your content. Read other blogs about the same topic. Use them to inform your content. They don’t have to be your competition, they may also make great link partners.
10. Build quality links to your sites. It really is that important so I am going to say it again. I define a quality link as a link that’s from a relevant, related source, that is anchored using a keyword that you are targeting for traffic from search engines.

Hope these help. It’s not that hard to make good money online, but it does take time and effort.

If the heading pulled you in and you are actually reading this I am guessing you are looking for ways to make money at home. If you have a computer and an Internet connection, there are plenty of opportunities to make money at home. There are some morally gray methods which I won’t go into, and there are plenty of good honest ways to make extra cash online. I am going to be honest with you, if you know nothing about online money making opportunities I am not going to turn you into a “work from home” legend over night. What I can do if give you some solid advice on how to make money at home, that will work for you, and get you started on the right path.

Where to start

A safe any easy way to make money at home that isn’t going to hit your pocket too hard is to produce content sites, or articles and then optimise them for search engines, and then run ads on them once you start getting traffic. Sure there are other faster ways to make money online, but they require experience, and some of them can cost you a bucket if you don’t do it right. So content sites are a good place to start. You can even use free hosting options such as blogger to host your site, so there is no chance of losing money.

What should I write about?

I recommend writing about a topic you enjoy, although this is not necessarily mandatory. Plenty of people make good money writing about insurance, and pharmaceutical products. But I will leave that decision to you, what is most important is that you create content for a niche that has good advertiser competition, and money involved. The easiest way to find this out is to use Google’s External Adwords Keyword Tool. Try typing a generic topic that interests you into the box, and search. This will give you a few interesting stats. The ones we are most interested about are search volume, and cpc. Cpc is hidden when you first search so you will need to un-hide it. Obviously the more searches and the higher the cpc, the more money there is that can be made from writing about the topic. The higher these two factors are though, the higher competition you are likely to find. If it is your first project I don’t suggest you pick a topic that will have too much competition.

What next?

Write your content. Good content is more linkable, but it is also important that you use relevant keywords throughout your content. I am not going to go into depth about SEO in this article. Read some more of my content to find some good free links and ideas about how to best optimise your content. If you have selected a larger topic, then you should find plenty of different article topics to write about. Write articles that are optimised for specific search terms that have a good volume of searches. If this article has been useful for you and you are looking for more help keep reading my other articles. Cheers.

When building a new website most people are aware that it will need traffic to do well. But where will you get this traffic from?

Social Traffic

A quick glance around the blogosphere might have you believing that the secret to success to to gain lots of readers, and to build traffic from social media sites such as Digg or StumbleUpon. What good is this traffic? Visitors that come from these sites are webmasters like you. They don’t click on ads. So they won’t make you money. Yes “social traffic” can make you money. If you have a great site with a lot of great content, and you work really hard on it over a long period of time you will probably manage to build up a good sized readership. This readership may even be large enough to allow you to sell ad spots on your site at a flat rate. However, as this traffic is mostly made up of webmasters like you, the people who buy your ads will find that they are not getting many clicks, and it is not worth their money. I don’t recommend you chase this sort of traffic.

Organic Search Traffic

Organic traffic is traffic that comes to your site from search engines. You won’t get any organic traffic until you have a good amount of backlinks to your site. So new web masters who find backlinks hard to come by often give up and often go looking for the social traffic above. There are two types of organic traffic that you can target, and here is how the theory of getting this traffic works:

a) Long Tail

A long tail search term is a term that isn’t searched for often. Something like “How can I make money using free blogger accounts and Google Adsense”. This term is very specific and and the visitor will be highly targeted, so worth a great deal to you. However, because this exact term is not likely to be searched by great deal of people, you can’t, and shouldn’t target this term. The theory of gaining traffic through long tail terms is that you write a lot of content about your chosen topic, and the more you write the more possible long tail traffic will find you. More content = more possible terms = more traffic. Simply writing more content will get you more visitors.

b) High Volume Keywords

A high volume search term is a term that is searched by a lot of people. Something like “Make Money Online” or “How to Make Money Online“. If you can rank for these terms you will get a lot of visitors. It is important to research high volume terms to find out i) How many visitors the term will bring? ii) How hard it will be to rank for the term? and iii) If you are using Adsense, how much will clicks from that visitor pay? For the first and last points you should use Google’s free Adwords research tool. Go to the tool and search for a general term relating to your site.i.e: “Making Money Online”, you you will get a list of relevant terms. To find out how hard it is to rank you need to consider a few factors. The first place to start is to search the term in Google. What site is ranked on top? What PR does the site have and how many backlinks do they have? To find out the backlinks part there are a number of tools that can help you. A free option I use is the browser plug-in SEO Quake. The more backlinks the sites at the top have the harder it will be to rank for them. That’s not to say you shouldn’t try, it’s just that it will be harder. A lot of competition for a term suggests it is worth ranking for. For information on how you rank for terms read more in my article about Making money online for free.

This resource is a complete guide to show you how to create an Ebay niche store. There are thousands of profitable niches available on Ebay, probably tens of thousands. Anything that has a good number of people searching for it in search engines like Google is a potentially good niche. As a beginner who is looking to make money from Ebay niche stores you should probably be looking to make 10+ good niche sites rather than 1 amazing one to start off with. There is only so much you can do with a site like this before you are over capitalising and wasting your efforts. It’s fairly easy to make a site that makes $1 - $10 a day… and much harder to make sites that make more than $20 a day. However, if you have 10 sites that all make $1 to $10 a day then you are on the right track.

Sign Up for a Ebay Partner Network account (EPN)

To make money from an Ebay Niche Store you will need to register for an affiliate account with the Ebay Partner Network. It’s straight forward. Just fill out the form, and once approved you will be allowed to log into their site to get your code and affiliate banners for your websites.

Select an Ebay Niche

The best way to select a niche is to search through Ebay’s Listings.

What are we looking for is a niche that has:

• A good amount of listings - Not too brood (1000’s of items), not too obscure, there always needs to be at the very least 10 or more listings, otherwise your not going to have much of a store.
• You make money based on commission, so higher priced items will make you more money. There is also good money to be made by signing up new buyers, who didn’t have Ebay accounts. So you could argue having cheap items listed will increase the likelihood of getting more sales, and increase the chances of more signup’s. But you would be hoping for a lot more sales. Either way, we are going to need lots of small sales or a few big sales.
• It’s not entirely essential but it surely helps if you are interested in the niche and have a bit of knowledge about it. What items are always going to be in demand?
• We want to get our traffic from search engines. So we don’t want to select a niche that will be too hard to rank for in Google.

The niche I am going to select for this example is Wolverine comics. Wolverine is an Xmen character, and there is a separate line of comics about him. There are some nice expensive collectable’s + some normal and cheap priced items for sale on Ebay.

Further Research - Keywords and Competition

Once you think you have a good niche, some further research is needed. We need to find some keywords to target. For this we will use Google’s free Adwords Keyword Tool. Search for the name of your selected niche i.e “Wolverine Comics”. Find out how many searches are made each month for your keyword term and terms that relate to it. We need to build up a list of words to target.

Here are some related terms from the Adwords keyword tool.

• wolverine comics
• wolverine comic
• wolverine marvel comic
• wolverine comic book
• wolverine comic books
• x men wolverine comic
• wolverine comic pictures
• marvel wolverine
• wolverine punisher
• wolverine vol 1
• wolverine cover
• wolverine covers

As we hope to bring in traffic from Google we need to see what we will be up against. Search Google for your main terms…I would search for the top 5 from my list above. A search for “wolverine comics” in Google brings up a PR5 Wikipedia page in the first spot and a Pr4 Marvel page. Both of these will require a lot of effort to knock off. Below that is fairly easy pickings. High PR sites that have lots of links are hard to knock off, so keep an eye out for terms that have a lot of competition and stay away from them.

My main concerns with this particular niche is that 1) The first 2 spots in Google will be fairly hard to knock off. 2) Wolverine Comics don’t always sell for lots. So we might not make that much commission on each sale. If this was a perfect Ebay Niche I would have started a site for it already, and I wouldn’t be using it in this article. It is good to illustrate my example though.

Set up your platform

Hosting: If you don’t have hosting I use Dreamhost. For $9.95 - $10.95 US a month, you can host an unlimited amount of domains. You get what equates to an unlimited amount of system resources, storage and bandwidth. And one of the best parts is that they have one click installs, so you can install Wordpress (The content management system we will use) easily and without any advanced knowledge.

Domain: You will need to buy a domain for your new site. A domain is the web address your site will have. i.e. example.com or example.net. You can buy new domains for $9.95 a year. You can use Dreamhost for this also.

Setting up Wordpress: I prefer to use Wordpress for all my sites as it is both user friendly, and has any amazing amount of free templates and plug-ins. So you can make professional looking sites without spending a dime and with very little technical knowledge.

You need to install Wordpress onto your domain. If you are using Dreamhost, just log into your control panel, select Goodies and one click installs. You then need to select “install new website software - Advanced mode”. You need to use advanced mode even if you are a newbie.

Select Wordpress, select the domain you wish to install to, (must be hosted with Dreamhost). Make a new database, give it a meaningful descriptive name you will remember with no spaces and all in lower case.

Select “create your hostname”. name it something like msql.yourdomain.com.

Create a new user and password. Use something with at least 6 letters for both. Then select “install it for me now”.

That’s it. Your new Wordpress site will be installed for you in about 10 minutes.

The next step is to visit your site. It will ask you to name your site (Name the site your main keyword term - this is important), and it will generate an admin password for you. It will send your admin password to an email address you supply. Copy the password and log into your new Wordpress site.

Setting up FTP so you can put files onto your site

You install themes and plugins to your site using an FTP client. You can download and install a free one here. If you are using Dreamhost, you will need to browse to your user tab, and set up a new FTP user. Select “Add New User”.

For type of user account select FTP. Make a new user name. Using something like your name in lowercase will be fine and a password that has 6+ letters. You have to add the password twice. Then select add user. In your FTP client software you will now need to add your site’s detail to be able to upload your themes and plug-ins. If you are using Filezilla as your FTP client you will need to enter your domain name “ftp://exmaple.com” + your username and password which you set up above. Leave port set as it is. And connect to your site. To upload themes and plugins you will need to browse to the wp-content folder of your domain.

Wordpress Themes and Plugins

There are 1000’s of great free themes for you to use for your site. The next step is to find one that will fit in with your theme. Download it, unzip it, and upload the theme folder using your FTP client into your Wordpress theme folder in wp-content. A good place to start is the Wordpress Theme Directory. Having the ability to customise your theme, i.e. Photoshop skills, CSS skills will help you here. However it is not essential. You can use most themes as standard + maybe changing a header images which is simple. When you start making good money you can pay others to do design work for you.

Here is an example of a free Wordpress theme that has been set up as an Ebay niche store: Gia Wedding Rings. And here is a link to a download for the free theme used: Polaroid.

The easiest way to incorporate Ebay listings into your theme is to use PHPBay Pro. PHPBay Pro is a fantastic plugin that basically does all the technical stuff for you, and enables you to place a tag wherever you want a current listing from Ebay.

Once you have installed the plugin (see FTP instructions above), you will need to activate it from your plugin section of your Wordpress dashboard. Then select settings / PHPBay Pro. You will need to enter your Ebay PID number into the plugin settings so Ebay knows who is sending them traffic. This number is found in your Ebay Partner Network account under the “Campaigns” tab…under the heading Campaign ID.

Once you have the settings sorted for your plugin you will need to tell Wordpress where you want to display listings. You can have them in your template or in your posts. You use the format below to add listings:

[phpbay]search term, 5, 123, “exclude”[/phpbay]

Where search term is what you want to show”Wolverine Comics”. 5 is the maximum number of lisitngs to show, 123 is the category number which your items come under on Ebay, and “exclude” is what you can use to exclude items from showing.

To add listings to your Wordpress template you will need to add it to the source code of your Wordpress theme. This can be done under the design tab of Wordpress.

Getting traffic

To get traffic to your site that will buy products on Ebay you will need to focus on building search engine traffic. The only way to build search engine traffic is to build links that aim at your site. The higher authority and more relevant the links are to your niche the better. Trade links with friends, or ask other people with sites about similar topics if they would consider a link exchanges. Online forums are a good place to find link exchange partners. There are plenty of sites that give you links, check out my list of free backlinks.

There are two types of way we will build traffic. 1) By focusing on building links that have your higher traffic keywords in their anchor (anchored links) 2) By writing some content about your topic, to pull in “long tail” keywords. These are keywords that are about your topic and relevant, but searched much less often.

That’s it. You should have enough information here to build basic Niche store on Wordpress. It’s only worth focusing on  search engine traffic or traffic from other sites about the same topic with this sort of site. Other traffic (barring paid Adwords traffic) won’t convert well so don’t bother going after it. Good Luck.