By now, you have heard that eBay skipped out on Commission Junction and setup their own affiliate network called eBay Partner Network.  Have you found a way to make money with eBay’s affiliate program?  I found a neat way to create a clone of BANS (build a niche store) and it costs me nothing!

Nullamatix’s Poor Mans BANS is perfect for anyone that wants to try out an eBay affiliate store, but doesn’t want to fork out the $97 for BANS just yet.  To make it simple, BANS, or any type of Poor Mans BANS, takes listings from eBay and posts them in an easy to navigate store type layout.  BANS is pretty popular and is making people money all over the place.  Clone types are popping up just as fast. 

You make money when someone clicks on a product link, is sent to eBay and wins any auction within 7 days.  EBay will then pay you a % of the fees that are paid in that auction.  More or less, you are a middleman or pusher for eBay.  Get users to eBay as fast and as targeted as you can and you will make money no doubt.  With little promotion you can be making $$$ every week or even day with a BANS store.

I have NOT purchased the BANS script yet.  First, I am going to give one of the free clones a try first.  I figured that if I could make that same amount of money, but with no investment, that would be better.  One thing I should mention quickly is that if you purchase the BANS script it’s good for any number of websites.

Once I found a domain, I setup a couple of blog style sites.  I used WordPress.org as my blog backend and needed a couple of plugins to get the ball rolling.  Feedpress, XML SItemap, All-in-one SEO pack, Auto Delete posts and Random posts, just to get me started.  The next thing that I did was setup a gmail account, feedburner account and flew straight to eBay to get my first feed.

The Poor Mans Bans works off the eBay rss feed that you can generate at the bottom of any page throughout the eBay site.  Once I searched for my topic or category, I used Dog Supplies for RunJumpFetch.com, I was able to get an RSS feed.  With that feed I went to Feedburner to burn it and make it much, much shorter.  I usually named the feed whatever the eBay search term was (dogbeds for “dog beds”).

Now I can take that feed URL and input it into my feedpress admin area.  With a couple of tweaks, assign it to a category (matching my feed name) and having it update every 1440 mins. (each day), that was one category all set to go.  That only took about 10-12 minutes to setup up from blog install to first category, of course you have to know what you are dealing with or it might take a bit longer.  Once you get the process down pat, jam onto the next category and add as many as you like to your new eBay niche store!

Now all you have to do is submit your site to a couple of related directories, submit to all the many social networking sites and you will soon see the traffic rolling in and out to eBay.com.  Throw a couple of affiliate links on the site for good measure and now you can make money with just about every clickthru from your site.  SEO is important and you want to make sure your sites are updating everyday, just to keep the content fresh for search engines.

Now that you have one site setup, you can do the whole same process over again on another and another.  100 sites that make $1/day are better than 1 site that makes $100/day.  As long as you remember that, you should be able to make some money online!

I have 5 sites setup like this and right now I am looking at just about $30 in commissions from eBay.  Each week I take a look at them and make sure they are updating and working normally.  I will work SEO on them, add content or update categories too just to keep them fresh.  If you want to see my sites, they are listed below.

Dog Supplies- RunJumpFetch.com
Custom Car Parts- ProjectCarCentral.com
Adsense Auctions- AdsenseTopTen.com
Buy Music Online- MusicRawks.com
Buy Board Games- BoardGameBasement.com

I am hoping these sites can get me $100 per month each as my first goal.  I will post more about them as they get older and revenue numbers start coming in.  If you’d like to keep track with me, just subscribe to my email updates so you won’t miss any posts regarding this topic.