Ebay phpbay site ranking front page of google was a fluke, boo.
Google 1 - Cheep Baseball Tickets 0
Ahh, how nice it was for those fleeting moments to find out that the phpbay ebay site we built was already ranking #3 overall in google for our targeted phrase of cheap baseball tickets, but as I expected it didn’t last.
Those sweet rankings didn’t even last the entire day! I screen grabbed the google results because I had a feeling it was some random shuffle up to the front and then quickly weed it back down.
As I was writing this, I just checked and found us at the bottom of page two so, it looks like we are establishing a baseline and see who are real competitors are for the front page rankings. It will be fun to see if we can compete in a 6 month time frame to be on the front page of google and by next baseball season be ready to really rock and roll.
Indeed there are some big sites above me like ticketsnow, cheap tickets and the powerhouse of my niche seems to be cheapmlbtickets.com dominating the first listing. It should be fun seeing if we can move up in the rankings.
Google has been sending almost all of the traffic so far but now we are down to the bottom of page two for ‘cheap baseball’ tickets. Better than nothing but #3 overall would have been nice. Time to get to work!
Stats and updates on our first phpbay ebay site
It’s been just about a month now since we first launched CheepBaseballtickets.com, which is a wordpress site using a plugin called phpbay to integrate ebay listings professionally on your website. It makes affiliating for ebay through their ebay partner network very simple and even novice users can quickly eand easily become an ebay affiliate and have professional looking ebay listings displayed on your site.
Ebay Phpbay Stats
Stats so far are nothing crazy impressive, although this morning I just checked to see how well we were ranking for one of our major keywords and I was welcomed to a nice result, to say the least. Check out this Screenshot of google results 7/15 for cheap baseball tickets broad keyword search in the google. I’m hoping that this gives us a nice boost in organic traffic on the ole stat counte as according to google keyword data (new) there was around 4400 searches per month r. Traffic has barely peaked over 50 unique visitors per day so far, so hopefully this new ranking will help us out.
This months phpbay site earnings.
While we won’t normally share all of our earnings results, this project is different and full disclosure because we believe that even the newest of internet marketing can follow some basic steps and create sites that can drive targeted traffic to ebay listings and give you real insight into realistic earnings potential, in the short term by creating a wordpress phpbay site.
Ebay partner network stats
We’ve been lucky so far and converted one ACRU for a $25 bonus and we had one large ticket purchase with over a third of our commission earned. One cool thing about working with the ebay affiliate network is that you can get someone to click on something as simple as a cheap NY yankee tickets listing but they end up buying a $5000 freezer. You earn a commission on the freezer even if they didn’t happen to click on the freezer link from your page. Cool, huh?
Sure the overall earnings aren’t anything that means we can stop working tomorrow, but we created a nice little income stream that adds to the overall bottom line, it’s paying for itself as well as our cell phone bills this month. If we scale this out and create 10 of these sites, or even 100 of these sites then the earnings potential goes up.
We’ll add more details as we see the results from the new rankings from google and see how long the search results lasts. Knowing google, we will be back down on deeper pages come tomorrow or maybe even later today, but hey… #3 out of 1.5 million results in less than a month isn’t bad and we’ll ride it for what it’s worth and see how long we can maintain those rankings.
Setup Ebay Niche Site with phpBay Pro & Wordpress
How To Set Up A Wordpress Ebay Niche Site Using phpBay Pro
If you want to create niche sites, one of the easiest and most effective ways to monetize them is by adding ebay listings to your site. If you already have a wordpress site you can quickly and easily add dynamic ebay listings to your site with a plugin that integrates directly into the ebay affiliate program and displays listings beautifully within your site. If anyone clicks your links and wins an auction at ebay then you earn a %. If the visitor is new you can even earn a one time $25 payment for bringing a new client to ebay.
This plugin is called phpBay Pro. It is does have a cost of $49 $79,(price went up on 8/2/08) but it is easily worth that and after you read this page you might want to grab it at this price before it goes up again. What phpBay pro does is it allows you to integrating current ebay listings on your wordpress site super easy and very professional looking. All you have to do is in html view, click the ‘phpbay’ button and it inserts a line of code in. You modify the keywords results and it can be as simple as that. Those keyword listings on ebay will now appear where that line of code is. It can be as simple as pushing a button and typing in your keywords, although it is way more flexible than that! You can really lazer target down to very specific search results to give the most relevant listings to your traffic which in theory will increase your clicks and conversions.
What phpbay pro really does though is open up the entire marketplace of ebay to you. If people are buying it on ebay, then you have a potential niche market to profit from. Even more useful is if you already have a hobby wordpress site or blog you can monetize it with ebay listings. Let’s say you love etch-a-sketch doodles and have a wordpress site showing off your best doodles ever. You could with the push of a button add etch-a-sketches for sale on ebay to your site and make money if someone wins an auction after clicking your link.
This page documents the step-by-step process of how to set up phpBay Pro software on a Wordpress site. phpBay Pro costs $79 but if you are serious about trying this out it is well worth it and you can use it on multiple sites.
We are always looking for new and innovative ways to attack niche websites, and when we saw the eureka diary’s tutorial from the boys at wickedfire, and rgordon’s phpbay tips site, we knew that we had to give this phpbay site a shot. If you’re looking for a great way to make more (or any) money online, then phpbay pro lets you create niche websites on anything that you can buy on ebay.com.
Tools used to setup a phpBay Pro Wordpress niche website:
- domain name - we use GoDaddy but there are plenty
- hosting - we use DownTownHost Reseller Account ($14.95/month) but there are plenty.
- Wordpress (free) - use our Wordpress Setup Guide which covers the down and dirty process for getting wordpress set up, if you want a really robust wordpress kit you can check out wordpress goldmine which really goes in detail through exactly how to maximize wordpress and even the newest of newbies can use it.
- eBay Partner Network
- FTP Client - we use Ipswitch ws_ftp ($0.00) but also recommend Filezilla (free).
- Image editing software - Fireworks, Photoshop, MS Paint, etc.
These tools are the bare essentials you’ll need to set up a phpbay niche site on wordpress. This list doesn’t cover all of the tools, such as wordtracker and keyworddiscovery, which we use for extensive keyword research to help gauge niche potential. If you’re looking for a niche to pursue, here is a good video for using wordtracker to find keywords for competitive niches and there are some excellent free keyword research tools available at SEOBook. We also wrote a down and dirty guide to using wordtracker for keyword research.
If you already have a niche in mind or just want to get going, then proceed…
How to set up phpBay Pro on Wordpress:
- Purchase your domain, setup your hosting, setup your ftp client, then set up your Wordpress site. Use our Wordpress setup guide if you need help with this step.
- Get your copy of phpBay Pro ($49 one time fee with this link). Your copy of phpBay Pro allows you to make unlimited money making websites.
- Log in to your phpBay Pro members account.
- Click the download link then unzip contents of the phpBay Pro download to your computer.
- Open phpBayProManual.pdf and follow “Installation - Steps 1 and 2″.
- Login to your Wordpress admin and activate the phpBay plugin.
- Go back to phpBayProManual.pdf and follow “Setting up phpBay Pro in Wordpress - Steps 1-5″.
- Copy entire ——LICENSE FILE DATA—— text, including the top line i’ve typed in here, and paste it into a new notepad doc. Save it as license.key and upload to the /wp-content/plugins/phpBay folder.This step was removed in the latest upgrade, all you have to do now is put in your license key in the Wordpress Settings once you activate the plugin.
- Log into your ebay network and enter your campaign ID and a Custom ID #. (log in, click Campaigns, click Create Campaign if you don’t have one already).
- Select your phpBaypro settings. Use the manual you get w/ phpbay pro for figuring out which settings to select and this demo video they provide that goes over the basic settings. Here is what I clicked: Use SEO URL’s, Display Items with Images Onlye, Use mod_rewrite, Search Titles AND Desc, Display Sort Options, Display a Hover, Display Listings in Columns, and “2″ for # of columns, Use paging and set the max at 10, I removed the phpbay link for the time being.
- Edit your .htaccess code with what they provide you. (just pull down your .htaccess code and paste that information above anything else… you don’t have to paste the lines that start with the #.
- phpBay pro is now ready to pull and display ebay results with your affiliate code automatically added in. Use the manual to see how to fine tune your results to match exactly what you want. One of the most important thing is only searching in specific categories. You can get a numerical list of ebay’s categories here:
Once phpBay is set up, you are good to go. Go to your page and or post within wordpress and you will see the phpBay tag, where you can click it to start pulling in ebay results and if your users click and purchase on ebay, then you earn a commission. If we skimmed over some of the basics is because there are different processes for each different step. We do provide a more detailed guide to setting up wordpress on a site but the shortest answer is find a host who has a program called ‘Fantastico’ and ‘cpanel’ and setting up wordpress seriously will take just a few minutes. For each and every step to get themes loaded to trouble shooting, to the best seo optimization tips you can read through a great ebook called wordpress goldmine.
Our first phpBay Pro WP website:
Visit our first phpBay Wordpress site to see how a little work, mixed with some great online tools can reap great rewards. This Cheep Baseball Tickets site made money after being active for less than a week. Are your planning on going to a baseball game? If so, I know where you can find cheap baseball tickets!
Click the image to check it out for yourself.
Some other examples of phpBay websites:
Of course you want to see one the phpbay sites we created eh? Check out the best place on the web to find Cheap Baseball Tickets. There you have it, that took about 4-5 hours and it was the first one we set up. To maximize the site we probably have another 10 to 15 hours of work (depending on when you are reading this) to do for some marketing on the back end for better marketing and SEO reasons.
We were inspired to try phpbay by seeing some other examples, so I’m going to give them a shamless plug right here, as these are pretty quality phpbay sites. There are some pretty good examples of quality looking sites out there that integrate the phpbay plugin into their site to make affiliate money online. First site I saw that I really liked was this site that that lets you buy golfballs at a discount and this one that has a totally different look to sell blues fender amps. Both sites that utilize phpbay pro to monetize their sites.
Next up we will share the first months earnings results and some ideas on what we are doing to market the site and see about even more monetization.