I Got a Free Mug from Ezinearticles.com
Posted on December 16, 2007
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I recently received a mug in the mail from Ezinearticles.com for being one of their “platinum authors.” It came with a nice little note and a small bag of coffee. It was very nice of them to think of me and send something; I’m always grateful for free stuff. Ezinearticles has been helpful in my IM journey, and I’ve found that they are among the best for article submitting.
I’d take a picture, but my camera died while I was in Mexico on Thanksgiving week. It appears there’s a recall right now because of a faulty CCD sensor in the camera. Turns out that’s what it is, and I’m in the process of requesting a repair from Canon. I’ll take a picture of my shiny new cup when I get my camera back…
Setting Up eBay Affiliate RSS Feeds
Posted on December 14, 2007
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing | Leave a Comment
For those wanting to take part in eBay’s delicious affiliate program, eBay has so conveniently made a way to easily display a live feed of auctions with a person’s affiliate link automagically inserted into every product, so that someone looking for Harry Potter stuff will visit your store, click on the auction they like, sign up with eBay and buy something. You, the affiliate, then get a referral commission ($25 or more) plus a 50% cut of eBay’s revenue from the product. Pretty sweet.
Well, this post shows how to set up an eBay RSS feed, which can then be put on a website, blog, Squidoo lens, and many other places. The end result? Well, if you get enough targeted traffic…big money. eBay affiliates combined make millions per year, just selling other people’s stuff on eBay. Affiliate revenue share tiers go in excess of $3,000,000, as seen here. There has been, and still continues to be, serious money to be made with eBay.
Build a Niche Store, phpBay, and others, use this very same RSS feed in their products, and charge upwards from $30 for it. Of course an easy-to-use interface is included, support, and in BANS’s case, an exclusive members-only forum. Great products, but nothing compares with free in my opinion. 
So, without further ado, here is the tutorial.
Step 1
The first step in creating an eBay affiliate RSS feed is to visit the eBay Advanced Search Page. This is where you input the item you’re looking for, category it’s in, etc. You can also narrow the results down even more with a number of different filters. But for this purpose, I’m just going to put gold american eagle in the search box, and choose Coins & Paper Money as the category, as seen in the image below (click it to enlarge it).
Step 2
Scroll down to the bottom of the page, where it says Affiliate Tracking Information. Click the show link and input your Commission Junction PID, which can be found in your CJ profile. Once that number is in there, and you have all of the options selected that you want, go ahead and click the Search button to finish up.
Step 3
Once you’ve clicked the button, you’ll be sent to the search results page. You can now see all of the auctions for the criteria you entered in step 1. For example, I was presented with what I was searching for, gold american eagle coins.
Step 4
Scroll to the very bottom of the page, until you see a thin grey bar labeled Tools. Somewhere in there is a button labeled RSS. Click it to be taken to a live RSS feed of the auctions in the search results you just viewed.
Step 5
Now you’ll be taken to the actual feed page. Copy the URL of this page and paste it where you want the feed to be, such as on a Squidoo lens. Make sure that your Commission Junction PID is in the URL somewhere, just look around until you find it. No affiliate ID, no earnings for you, and you’ll just be linking directly to eBay. You could be sending tons of customers to eBay, and therefore missing out on what could be a nice bit of money.
And that’s all there is to it!
BANS Returned
Posted on December 13, 2007
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I purchased Build a Niche Store a few weeks ago for $97, as I heard tons of people raving about how awesome it was and that they were earning loads of money with it. I couldn’t resist, and even though it’s pricey, I went ahead and bought it to give it a try. When I was installing it, I wasn’t happy because there isn’t (as of this writing) a function for database prefixes. So, what that means is there has to be a separate database for each and every store. If I were to make 100 stores that would be 100 MySQL databases. Yeck.
Other than that, though, the software is built nicely and makes it easy to set up an eBay affiliate store. I don’t consider it to be worth the $97 price tag, even though it comes with a license for unlimited sites and free updates. I’d maybe get it for half that, but $97 is just too much for a tightwad (and broke) college student like me just getting started in affiliate marketing. I sent in a request to Clickbank and the refund showed up on my credit card 2 days later.
There are other, cheaper, alternatives to BANS such as phpBay Pro. It’s $39, and is actually a Wordpress plugin. Which is neat, I think, because that means that an entire blog can be built around it. However, for those who don’t want to spend any money there are still other ways to set up an eBay affiliate store by using eBay’s own RSS feeds, which can be aggregated with Wordpress. It’s more work to get it set up, but this method is free.
Welcome to Cracker Marketer
Posted on December 12, 2007
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Hello Internet. I am going to conquer you now.
But yeah, hello. This is my very first post on Cracker Marketer, woohoo. I wasted countless hours browsing Wordpress themes until I finally gave up and said “screw it” and just picked this one, so this is what the site will look like for a while until I find time during my infinitely busy schedule to build my own (or get it made for me). Or until I get unlazy enough to make one.
Anyway, about my Internet marketing career. I’ve been reading a lot for the past few months, mostly on Digital Point, Warrior Forum, and Wicked Fire. Just within the past couple weeks I’ve started “getting serious” about it and began doing stuff. I joined Squidoo and have made about 25 lenses so far, so we’ll see how that goes. One of them has already reached a rank of 5,319, which is pretty good for only being up this long. I know a few people making some decent money from Squidoo, so I think it’s a good place to start.
Anyways, that’s my first post. Thanks for stopping by.
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