The Complete Guide to creating and Ebay Niche Store

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.

Tagged as: Ebay, How To