eBay Now Managing Affiliate Program In-House

eBay recently announced that their affiliate program will no longer be managed by Commission Junction. Effective April 1, eBay will manage the affiliate program in-house.

What does this mean if you are already an eBay affiliate with Commission Junction and have active Build a Niche Stores? Nothing major to worry about, but you will need to do some updating. The first you will need to do is re-register to be an eBay affiliate. April 1 is the date set for the changeover, however, I just registered and was approved immediately. Here’s the link to eBay Partners where you can register. Don’t for get to fill out your payment and tax info. If you are new to BANS not yet an eBay affiliate, you can register at the same link.

On April 1, Kevin and Adam will send out an update for our BANS sites to work with eBay. Watch for the update in your email or check the Build a Niche Store Forum on April 1.

Tags: bans, Build a Niche Store, ebay affiliate

Finding a Niche

When it comes to niche marketing, finding a niche seems to be the step people find to be the most nerve wracking. Building a BANS website is easy and fun, but before you can get to that point, you have to do a little work to make sure the website will be successful.

To get you started, here are a few of the places I use to get niche ideas:

Shopping.com – Consumer Demand Index lists the top 100 items people are searching for under each category.
eBay Pulse lists the most popular items in each category.
Terapeak searches eBay for the item you select and returns the number listed, number sold in the last 7 or 30 days, and the average sale price.

Once you have a niche in mind, you need to do some research to find out how many searches are being done for that niche and how much competition you have for that niche. More than likely, the niche words you start out researching will have a lot of searches and a lot of competition. That doesn’t mean you should give up on the niche. It does mean that you need to do deeper keyword and keyword phrase research to come up with terms that are used for searches, but have less competition. Those are the words and phrases you want to target on your niche website site to get ranked in the top 10 searches with the major search engines.

There are free programs online where you can do keyword research and that’s the way I started. I used Wordtracker FreeKeywords and SEOBook Free Keyword Tools. These tools will give you a list of the top 100 searches for any given term, but their other research functions are limited.

If you’re serious about niche marketing and want to make sure you’re using the keywords that will give you the most profit in return, you will probably want to invest in a keyword research program such as Wordtracker. I recently bought a one year membership and have found that I have more targeted keywords, it’s not so intimidating to select a niche, and it saves me a ton of time. They have weekly, monthly and yearly memberships, and you can try the full version before you buy with Wordtracker Free Trial.

Tags: bans, BANS for Beginners Series, Build a Niche Store, niche