We all know that Google's AdSense program is a simple and effective way to monetize content-rich websites and blogs, especially those that focus on a specific, narrow niche that a lot of advertisers target. But even high-earning AdSense sites can benefit from fresh, relevant content, and one of the easiest ways to do so is by adding eBay mini-stores to the sites to make money with eBay's affiliate program. An automatically updated niche eBay store gives your visitors, including the search engines, another reason to revisit your site on a regular basis. And by basing those stores on eBay's huge list of product categories you're assured that only listings that fit with your niche ever get shown on your site.
Grabbing eBay Data
Now, if you're a programmer you could use eBay web services to add a mini-store to your site, but that requires a lot of work. An easier way to do it is via eBay's RSS feed generator, which lets you create custom searches whose results are returned as an RSS feed, which you can then transform into HTML for inclusion on your site.
That's pretty powerful stuff, but not everyone's a programmer. And even programmers don't necessarily want to spend their time wrestling with feeds in order to get the right eBay data into the right format and onto the right pages of their site. That's what makes Build A Niche Store so exciting.
Automatic eBay Listings
Build A Niche Store is a script you install on your web server. Don't worry, installation is dead easy and you don't need to know anything about PHP (the programming language used to develop the script) to use it on your site. (You don't even need to know anything about eBay to use it.) Most websites and blogs today support PHP, including the popular WordPress blogging software, so Build A Niche Store (BANS) will work almost anywhere. (Complete installation instructions are provided in the manual that comes with the script.)
After you install BANS, you activate your niche eBay store by loading the setup page into your web browser and filling in a few simple details, including the name of your store and the number of the eBay category you want your listings to come from. For example, if you wanted to feature electric guitar listings on your site you would set the store name to something like "Cool Guitars" and category number 33034. Plug in your eBay affiliate ID and a few other details and you're done.
Once activated, the script continually grabs the latest listings for that category from eBay and formats them for display on the page as a niche store. Visitors can click the listings in your mini-store to see the full details on eBay's site. Meanwhile, you have a page whose content changes frequently and is always extremely relevant to the niche you've chosen.
Build A Niche Store is very customizable. You can modify the look and feel of your store by changing the predefined store template. This makes it easy to integrate the niche store right into your existing site or blog. You can even link to custom keyword-driven listing pages from the other parts of your site, so if you had an article that mentioned a Fender electric guitar you could easily insert a link in the article that displayed all the Fender guitars currently available on eBay.
Oh, and you can have more than one store on the same site. And you can use Build A Niche Store across all your sites without paying anything extra.
Money, Money, Money
But the eBay listings aren't just there for search engine optimization purposes, or to create content that draws visitors back to your site -- although those are great benefits in and of themselves. They're also there to earn you money, just like the AdSense ads.
You see, by directing traffic to eBay's site, eBay will pay you part of the money they get from any winning bid you referred to them via your eBay store. And they'll pay you for referring new customers, too. It can be quite lucrative, especially in hot and high-priced product categories.
Even better, you can even integrate AdSense ads directly into the eBay product listings. Those ads will be super-targeted because of all the relevant content that surrounds them, giving you yet another way to make money from your eBay store. The positions and formats of the AdSense ads are completely customizable, of course.
Think Narrow, But Think Big
It's hard to compete against the big companies that dominate the Web, but you don't need a large site to make money with eBay and AdSense. All you need is super-focused content that attracts very targeted traffic, and a way to monetize that traffic. Build A Niche Store and AdSense are both great (and complementary) ways to do this.
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